Smelling Blood

In a few days, America will be marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11. The observances will be muted here, because it's too sad: we lost the war, not only in the narrow military sense (the Taliban are back in power in Kabul, etc), but in the broader defeat represented by the post-Motoon surrender on free speech, the nightly invasions by Muslim men of English and Continental ports, the ugly security procedures that now attend the bollard-encircled ancient German Christmas markets, and ultimately the reorientation of the generally useless post-9/11 surveillance state as a tool of domestic control. As I wrote on Sunday:

An al-Qaeda guy has been installed with American approval as strongman of Syria; the Christian community in Iraq was extinguished on America's watch; the Libyan intervention delivered the North African ports closest to Europe into the hands of Isis, with direct consequences for Continental demographics; and - just to confirm the 'war on terror' was utterly lost and always misconceived - a Shia Twelver from Uganda who believes in everything the guys we're droning in Tehran believe is Giuliani's successor as Mayor of New York City and the new kingmaker of the Democrat Party. If the United States Government had been working for the other side all along, what exactly would it have done differently?

In the media, the month before 9/11 was a weird, accelerating accumulation of trivial preoccupations, culminating in the ludicrous western prostrations before an international racism conference. Indeed, August 2001 seems far more relevant to where we are now than September 11th does. As a scene-setter for the days ahead, here's a piece from my book on the first year of the new war, The Face of the Tiger. I would not use the word "Islamism" now, because it quickly became clear that it was not a useful distinction (the term was popularised by Christopher Hitchens, although in its original nineteenth-century usage an "Islamist" was synonymous with a Muslim), but I leave it here as originally deployed. My late colleague Robert Fisk's cheering on of the Muslim mob beating the crap out of him can stand for our entire civilisation's suicidal stupidity:

THE LAST THING I wrote before September 11th was a column for the preceding weekend's Sunday Telegraph. It was about shark attacks, which had exercised the Eastern Seaboard's fevered imagination all summer, ever since eight-year old Jessie Arbogast had his arm torn off just off the Florida coast. The boy's uncle wrestled the shark back to the beach, killed him, and retrieved Jessie's severed limb from his mouth.