I sigh because I am loved

And I sigh again because I am misunderstood. My lefty friend has responded to my column with these words, among others:

It hurts my sensitive Democratic heart to hear a friend so brainwashed by the Exurbian Psychosis gripping this nation. It angers me when references to 9/11 justify failed political policies that have to date killed and maimed more Americans that the original heinous act. The death toll is rapidly approaching 9/11 totals. Any doctor, psychologist, or spiritual mentor will tell you that there comes a time to end the grieving, a time to begin healing. America needs that right now.

It seems Tannish -- like so many others -- thinks we can sit down and lull ourselves to sleep once more, right now.

T, you've missed the point. This isn't about grieving. It's about survival.

The mentality which drove those men to hijack planes on 9/11/01 was not new in 2001. It was not born during Bush's term, nor in Clinton's term, nor in Reagan's, nor even in the most-inept Mister Carter's day, when he (among other things) mishandled the Shah, Arafat, and pretty much the entire Mideast. Their hatred has existed for centuries, in one form or another. It has simply metastasized, these past decades, gained focus and gained capability.

Think of both attacks on the WTC, etc., as boils rising to the surface and rupturing. They are not singular events. There is a deeper infection, a dark cancer. The President has acted as surgeon, cutting out one grossly infected tissue -- Saddam Hussein, who financed terrorism, had strong links to those who murdered Americans in acts of overt war, and who had been at war with the US since 1991. Troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan are the next phase, the chemotherapy, the antibiotics, the truly difficult part of the cure.

If you think that the healing process can be forwarded before the disease has been stopped, check with your local oncologist. Islamic terrorism and its effects are not a little boo-boo to be band-aided over and then we go back to our bike ride in the park. If you think that by simply sitting down and saying, "sorry for existing," we're going to prevent another attack on our soil, check on that fairy godmother again.

Until the disease is brought under control -- and it is slowly, gradually happening, by the most recent accounts -- the infection still has a chance to rise again. If it is allowed to regrow, like most diseases, it will be stronger, more resistant to known cures.


Update: Victor Davis Hanson has some thoughtful words toward the attitudes held by my heart-wounded friend and his single-minded leftist buddies. for example:

We also forget that Iraq, contrary to popular slander, was not “cooked up” in Texas or at a Washington, D.C., neocon think tank. Rather, it was a reaction to two events: a decade of appeasement of Middle East tyrants and terrorists, and the disaster of September 11. If one were to go back and read the most popular accounts of the first Gulf War, The Generals’ War by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor of Cobra II fame, or Rick Atkinson’s Crusade, or research the bi-partisan arguments that raged across the opinion pages in the 1990s following the defeat and survival of Saddam Hussein, certain themes reappear constantly that surely help to explain our current presence inside Iraq.

Please, read it all.