Présentation de l'éditeur
In his acclaimed collection An Autumn of War, the scholar and military historian Victor Davis Hanson expressed powerful and provocative views of September 11 and the ensuing war in Afghanistan. Now, in these challenging new essays, he examines the world’s ongoing war on terrorism, from America to Iraq, from Europe to Israel, and beyond.
In direct language, Hanson portrays an America making progress against Islamic fundamentalism but hampered by the self-hatred of elite academics at home and the cynical self-interest of allies abroad. He sees a new and urgent struggle of evil against good, one that can fail only if “we convince ourselves that our enemies fight because of something we, rather than they, did.”
Whether it’s a clear-cut defense of Israel as a secular democracy, a denunciation of how the U.N. undermines the U.S., a plea to drastically alter our alliance with Saudi Arabia, or a perception that postwar Iraq is reaching a dangerous tipping point, Hanson’s arguments have the shock of candor and the fire of conviction.
Extrait
The Wages of September 11
THERE IS NO GOING BACK
September 11 changed our world. Those who deny such a watershed event take a superficially short-term view and seem to think all is as before simply because the sun still rises and sets.
This is a colossal misjudgment. The collapse of the towers, the crashing into the Pentagon, and the murder of three thousand Americans--all seen live in real time by millions the world over--tore off a scab and exposed deep wounds, which, if and when they heal, will leave ugly scars for decades. The killers dealt in icons--the choice of 9/11 as the date of death, targeting the manifest symbols of global capitalism and American military power, and centering their destruction on the largest Jewish city in the world. Yes, they got their symbols in spades, but they have no idea that their killing has instead become emblematic of changes that they could scarcely imagine.
Islamic fundamentalism has proved not ascendant but static, morally repugnant--and the worst plague upon the Arab world since the Crusades. By lurking in the shadows and killing incrementally through stealth, the vampirish terrorists garnered bribes and subsidies through threats and bombs; but, pale and wrinkled in the daylight after 9/11, they prove only ghoulish, not fearsome.
The more the world knows of al Qaeda and bin Laden, the more it has found them both vile and yet banal--and so is confident and eager to eradicate them and all they stand for. It is one thing to kill innocents, quite another to take on the armed might of an aroused United States. Easily dodging a solo cruise missile in the vastness of Afghanistan may make good theater and bring about braggadocio; dealing with grim American and British commandos who have come seven thousand miles for your head prompts abject flight and an occasional cheap infomercial on the run. And the ultimate consequence of the attacks of September 11 will not merely be the destruction of al Qaeda but also the complete repudiation of the Taliban, the Iranian mullocracy, the plague of the Pakistani madrasahs, and any other would-be fundamentalist paradise on earth.
Foreign relations will not be the same in our generation. Our coalition with Europe, we learn, was not a partnership but more mere alphabetic nomenclature and the mutual back-scratching of Euro-American globe-trotters--a paper alliance without a mission nearly fifteen years after the end of the Cold War. The truth is that Europe, out of noble purposes, for a decade has insidiously eroded its collective national sovereignty in order to craft an antidemocratic EU, an 80,000-person fuzzy bureaucracy whose executive power is as militarily weak as it is morally ambiguous in its reliance on often dubious international accords. This sad realization September 11 brutally exposed, and we all should cry for the beloved continent that has for the moment completely lost its mor
