HUGH HEWITT: Now speaking of blown sky high – "9/11" tomorrow. I asked Jeb Bush about this in the first hour. And the question was, fourteen years later, the first seven years of that were run by your brother and then the second seven years were run by President Obama. Are we safer today than we were on 9/12, 2001. What do you Mark Steyn – Jeb Bush's answer is posted over at HughHewitt.com.
MARK STEYN: I think the problem is that we defined what we were up against in the fall of 2001, 2002 too narrowly - and I think you can see that actually at the time of the first anniversary in 2002. We are in an ideological struggle... And we've seen that that ideology is very seductive to people who hold the passports of Western nations. We are a hole, we are a vacuum - and something fills the vacuum, which is what we see in Europe and to a lesser extent over here. And you can't fight this war even with the most brilliant military in the world because it's as I said in America Alone all those years ago - it's not my line, it's from Basil Liddell Hart, the great military strategist – it's not about blowing up their tanks and it's not about shooting their planes out of the sky – and nobody can beat Western militaries for doing that - but if you don't understand that you're up against this ideology and you don't target that ideology, then you can never win. And that's why I find this anniversary about as dispiriting as any of the fourteen since that Tuesday morning all those years ago.
Here are some excerpts of what Mark wrote one year after 9-11:
After September 11th, a friend in London said to me she couldn't stand all the America-needs-to-ask-itself stuff because she used to work at a rape crisis centre and she'd heard this blame-the-victim routine a thousand times before. America was asking for it: like those Norwegian women, it was being "provocative". Even so, it comes as a surprise to realize the multiculti apologists do exactly the same to actual rape victims. After the OJ verdict, it was noted by some feminists that "race trumped gender". What we've seen since September 11th is that multiculturalism trumps everything. Its grip on the imagination of the western elites is unshakeable...Read more here.
I believe western culture – rule of law, universal suffrage, etc – is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation. Without it, like a Hindu widow, the west is slowly climbing on the funeral pyre of its lost empires. You see it in European foreign policy already: they're scared of their mysterious, swelling, unstoppable Muslim populations... The Islamists are militarily weak but ideologically secure. A year on, the west is just the opposite. There's more than one way to lose a war.
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