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Jewish World Review July 14, 2005 / 7 Taamuz, 5765 A moment of clarity By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Two months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, I was in England, at Oxford, northwest of London. I was there as part of the British-American Project, a binational leadership program that pairs up about 20 young Americans with British counterparts.
The agendas for the gatherings are set by the host country and done far in advance. Even in light of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, our program made scant mention of terrorism.
My American colleagues and I took that as an insult, and some of us didn't hesitate to say so to our British hosts. Besides the issue of one group's insensitivity to another during a difficult time, how could anyone prepare for any sort of leadership role in the 21st century without addressing one of the century's great challenges: confronting and defeating international terrorism?
When our British counterparts did broach the subject in private conversations, it was with a sense of emotional detachment. You'd hear things such as "Well, that's your problem" or — with the memories of terrorist attacks by the Irish Republican Army in the 1970s and '80s still fresh in their minds — "Well, now you understand."
You could even get into an argument over whether Tony Blair and the British government had been right to send British troops to fight in the U.S.-led war to root out terrorists in Afghanistan.
All week long, the message, at least from these young intellectuals, was clear — that the Americans had somehow brought the Sept. 11 attacks upon themselves by meddling in the affairs of other countries, and that the British need not be concerned about something similar happening to them.
Now that bombs have ripped through three underground trains and a double-decker bus in London during a morning rush hour, killing at least 52 and wounding more than 700, the British elites have learned differently.
Of course, there will be those on the far-left fringe who insist that all this is the Americans' fault and that Great Britain is paying an enormous price for allying itself with the United States. The al Qaeda-affiliated group that claimed responsibility for the bombings has said they were in retaliation for British involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.
That could be. But I would hope that most of the British people now realize that — regardless of how they got here — what matters now is that they are here. And they need to figure out where they go from here. The British have no choice but to take the fight to the enemy now that the enemy has taken the fight home to them.
There has always been some portion of British society who identified with the United States and saw the need to come to Americans' aid after Sept. 11.
But that's the point. Before last week, the more common view among the British chattering classes was that this is America's fight and that all the British needed to do was decide whether to lend a hand.
In one sense, the British are trying to figure what they're up against. They don't know whether the attack was the result of faulty border security or the work of some in-house "sleeper cell" — or both. British investigators say that the blasts came from "military quality" explosives that may have been put together by an expert bomb-maker who came to London to lend a hand to a local terrorist cell.
But in another sense, our friends should also be experiencing — during this national tragedy — a moment of great clarity and purpose. Too many people on both sides of the Atlantic wasted too much time arguing about whether our leaders rushed us into a war in Iraq on bad evidence and false premises. The Bush critics and the Blair critics will never be convinced that the war was anything but an abysmal failure of leadership, and that it's been a distraction from the war on terrorism. They are wrong about that. But now is not the time to argue.
The issue here is simple: There are people out there who wish to destroy us. Regardless of who is in the White House or at 10 Downing Street, we have no choice but to find and destroy them first.
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Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
