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excerpted because of the Tribune Media Services

also posted here: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTEyY2JiMDczOGFjZjJiMmRlN2M3ODc3NjZlNzg1NDQ=

Victor Davis Hanson Ping !

Let me know if you want in or out.

Links:    FR Index of his articles: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson
                His website: http://victorhanson.com/
                NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
               Pajamasmedia:   http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/

Victor Davis Hanson:

...In short, six years of quiet at home since 9/11 have fooled some into thinking that terrorists pose little danger here - or that we may be doing far too much rather than too little to stop such killers. No matter that this past week a jihadist plot to destroy U.S. facilities in Germany was thwarted.
Others make the mistake of endlessly re-fighting the past six years - who let al-Qaida grow?; who "lost" Osama bin Laden?; who fouled up postwar Iraq? - instead of concentrating on the storm ahead.
Before 2001, the excuse for American complacence and in-fighting was naïveté. But what will be the reason for the next successful strike against us by the jihadists?
More naïveté - or is it simple hubris?

http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/2007/09/01/health_and_the_general_welfare.php

September 10th mentality in the post-9/11 world
This weekend I watched ads for new Hollywood movies detailing American evil, not jihadist killing. On C-Span there was a panel in Las Vegas for a libertarian conference; the speakers proudly praised isolationism and the “trumped” up war against jihadism. It was followed by a performance by a Glenn Greenwald at the Cato Institution, assuring us that we are all suffering the loss of our civil liberties (no examples how we are now unfree in our daily lives), due to a fake war against on terror.
I could go on. But I remember instead all the foiled plots since 9/11, the single-individual killings and attacks by radicals in Seattle, San Francisco, North Carolina, LAX airport and so on, and the number of al Qaeda kingpins who were trained or schooled or were living here. Or have we forgotten the careers of José Padilla (aka Abdullah al-Muhajir), Silicon Valley Al Qaeda recruiter Khalid Abu-al-Dahab, “Sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman, Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Rahman Yasin, and loudmouth Adam Gadahn?
Add in Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the Egyptian-American and U.S. army veteran Ali Mohamed, or the “20th-hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui attended flight school in Oklahoma.
So here we have the ingredients for the looming other side of the present eye of the storm: we are doing too little to stop the jihadists among us while being accused for doing far too much. That’s a prescription for disaster. Perhaps the best example is Guantanamo where, despite Korans, Mediterranean food, and clean conditions, we are told it is a Nazi/Stalinist like Stalig/Gulag. The only mystery will be when we get hit big again—and what will these critics of the present war say?
......
Al Qaeda
Teaching a short class at Hillsdale on post 9/11 terrorism, and just did a Fox interview for an upcoming documentary to be aired on the network. In reviewing the leaders, it is amazing how many of the pre- 9/11 kingpins are either arrested, dead, or in hiding. Almost every single one. (Almost as interesting is the enormous number, as said above, who were visitors or students in the United States, or indeed citizens—and how that paradox is not discussed). A good start is to collate all the names in Peter Bergen’s The Osama Bin Laden I Know, and then ask ‘where are they now?’.

As a footnote, watching the articulant and learned Peter Hitchens in an old pre-Bush adminstraton clip from 2000 explaining the phenomenon of anti-Americanism to Brian Lamb—all this before George Bush or the 2000 elections. My memory of the pre-9/11 Britain was one of deep anti-Americanism on issues like Ireland, Israel, and the Middle East in general. Polly Toynbee’s hysterical hatred of the U.S. in the days after 9/11 seemed to me to be expected. An odd complaint from Hitchens in his interview of 7 years ago was worry about growing US isolationism and withdrawal after the Cold War.

Off topic of VDH but....

Six years after 9/11 and the border is still open...

Six years after 9/11 and we still have Kabuki theater in place of real airport security...

Six years after 9/11 and ICE and the Department of Homeland Security are unwieldy, unresponsive bureaucratic colossi...

Six years after 9/11 and we have a Congress still fighting the Administration on conduct of the war, both militarily and wrt intelligence gathering (with the help of a hyper-active judiciary)....

Six years after 9/11 and we still have politicians and activists fighting for the rights of homicidal terrorists....

Six years after 9/11 and CAIR and ISNA and other muslim terrorist front-groups still spew theri propoganda daily....

I could go on, but you get the idea!