QUOTE OF THE DAY, THUS FAR - AT 8:51 A.M. ET:   If I had to name the top five commentators in this country since the 9-11 attacks, I would certainly include Fouad Ajami, who has constantly reminded us of the true nature of those we are opposing, and of our own need to oppose them, and oppose them intelligently.  Here, in the Wall Street Journal, Ajami reflects on 9-11 and its legacy:

Eight years ago, we were visited by the furies of Arab lands. We were rudely awakened from a decade whose gurus and pundits had announced the end of ideology, of politics itself, and the triumph of the world-wide Web and the "electronic herd." We had discovered that on the other side of the world masterminds of terror, and preachers, and their foot-soldiers were telling of America the most sordid of tales. We had become, without knowing it, a party to a civil war in the Arab-Islamic world between the autocrats and their disaffected children, between those who wanted to live a normal life and warriors of the faith bent on imposing their will on that troubled arc of geography.

Our country answered that call, not always brilliantly, for we are fated to be strangers in that world and thus fated to improvise and make our way through unfamiliar alleyways. We met chameleons and hustlers of every shade and had to learn, in a hurry, incomprehensible atavisms and pathologies. We fared best when we trusted our sense of things. We certainly haven't been kept safe by the crowds in Paris and Berlin, or by those in Ankara and Cairo who feign desire for our friendship while they yearn for our undoing.

COMMENT:  Every journalist in America should have that quote posted above his or her desk - especially the part about our not being kept safe by the crowds in Paris and Berlin. 

One of the great myths about 9-11 is that we were flooded with sympathy after the attacks, sympathy that George Bush then trashed.  Wrong.  Whatever sympathy there was lasted a day or two.  Some 48 hours after the attacks, the BBC went on the air with vicious anti-American programming. 

I believe that the anti-Americanism that followed 9-11 stemmed not from George Bush and his policies, but from the fact that we were successfully attacked.  The world loves a winner and despises a loser.  If you're successfully attacked, you get ten minutes of sympathy and ten years of contempt.  Look at our attitude toward the French and how it was formed by their failure to defend themselves successfully against the Nazis in 1940.

We know what keeps us safe.  But a president who chokes on the word "victory" can't tell us.

September 11, 2009