Most adults remember where they were and what they were doing 15 years ago today, when 19 terrorists used four hijacked passenger planes as missiles in their Islamist war against the United States. Their attack struck at the soul of the country on Sept. 11, 2001.
Perhaps every generation in the modern communications age will have its “where were you when?” moment — an event so significant that news of it reaches every corner of the country, and the world, almost instantly, and is seared into the public’s memory. The JFK assassination and the Challenger explosion were like that. But 9/11 changed the country in more profound ways. For one thing, those earlier catastrophes were caused by a lone madman and a faulty O-ring respectively, whereas 9/11 was the evil work of a vast terrorist enterprise bent on destroying western civilization. Undefeated and undaunted, it still pursues that goal today.
The immediate damage of that day, 3,000 dead and 6,000 injured, was only the beginning. In the years that have followed, millions of American soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen have gone war in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Thousands have been killed, and many thousands more have come home severely injured.
More than 8,000 U.S. troops are even now in Afghanistan fighting the insurgent Taliban, which is trying to retake the power from which it was ousted by CIA special forces in the first year of the new millennium. By one count, 2015 was the deadliest year for Islamic violence in the U.S. since 2001. A recent study found that Islamist murder has risen 800 percent in the past six years.
The public feels more threatened today than it has in years. A survey of 2,000 people by the Chicago Council found that 42 percent feel the country is less safe than it was before 9/11. Two years ago, the number was 27 percent.
Despite disingenuous memes that show more people die from such trivial accidents as falling out of a car than from terrorism, it’s not difficult to understand why there is mounting alarm about jihadis within U.S. borders. Terrorist mass murders in San Bernardino, Calif., and Orlando, Fla., make it plain that the terrible war in which the nation is engaged is not confined to battlefields in far away countries about which we know little. It is here and now.
No country is immune from Islamist predations. For every San Bernardino, there’s Nice and Baga; for every Orlando, there’s Paris and Garissa. According to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, some 30,000 people globally have died every year since 2010 at the hands of terrorists.
Terrorism is thus central to our political discourse. At the presidential defense forum with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton last week, terrorism was mentioned more than 20 times. Many issues lawmakers grapple with today — the growing surveillance state, the disaster of the Veterans Administration, the drug epidemic, a growing mental health crisis, immigration and refugee policy — were created or made worse by 9/11.
Yet, for all that, many people want to play down the terror threat and some treat it as either camouflage for racism or a distraction from their urgent desire to spend yet more on social programs. The Washington Examiner‘s Obama Legacy series began yesterday with an essay about how President Obama’s determination to focus on his left-liberal agenda at home led him to abandon Middle Eastern battlefields and allow them to become seedbeds for the Islamic State.
In the Chicago Council survey, 89 percent said terrorism was at least somewhat likely to be part of their lives. America should not live in fear, and its citizens and government must reclaim the realization that this nation has the ability, if it has the will, to defeat terrorism and once again live with peace of mind. Undertaking and sticking to that task all the way through to victory is the only proper tribute to the 3,000 people murdered by our enemies on this day 15 years ago.
