Why, no. That’s not it, at all.

Bruce Bawer: Twelve years later

He writes well and intelligently, and is often right.

But human-like, he is not always right.

9/11 was a moment of utter moral clarity that has been succeeded by twelve years of moral chaos.

Twelve years of duplicity, flim-flam, double-dealing, humbug.

Twelve years of timorousness, incompetence, impotence.

Thousands of lives have been sacrificed in vain; inconceivable amounts of money have gone to waste.

America’s financial security and its international standing have been imperiled.

And all for one simple reason: because, from the very beginning, the powers that be, in both political parties, chose to lie about the nature of the enemy we were up against.

That “moral clarity” stuff is not in my line, but otherwise his litany of failures is spot on, down to but not including his last sentence.

Very nearly everybody was perfectly right from the first day in identifying “the enemy” – that is, the folks who had actually attacked us – as al-Qaeda.

And nobody who reached that opinion ever abandoned it.

What went wrong?

Our entire response was wildly out of proportion.

The manhunt for the Boston Bombers was a perfect example of this same mad disproportion, in miniature, as Pat Buchanan, almost alone, pointed out at the time.

The proper response would have been a simple, quick, and limited punitive attack on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and, in lesser degree, on the military facilities of the Taliban in that country.

No fantastic airport security measures undertaken against everyone.

No disproportionate spying on communications.

No regime change in Afghanistan.

No regime change in Iraq.

No 12 years of war against al-Qaeda everywhere along with other Islamic militias, guerrillas, or terrorists.

Their delusional ambitions to conquer the world for Allah just don’t matter.

No more than the sad aspiration of that silly American terrorist who thought he was going to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch supplied him by the FBI.

And way, way less than Khrushchev pounding the podium at the UN and yelling absurdly and so very, very untruly, “We will bury you!”

Certainly, it would be best if their ideological kindred – by which I mean all tribes of Muslim fanatics devoted to imposition of Islam and Islamic law, the destruction of Israel, and the conquest of the world for Allah – did not succeed in taking over any states, anywhere.

But not everything that would be best is worth much cost, if any, to the United States, anyway.

And the chaos we have brought to that part of the world in the last 12 years looks to have been rather a waste, as far as that goes, anyway.

Bawer’s comparison of Bush talking about the 9/11 perpetrators to Churchill talking about the Nazis is perfectly symptomatic of this same wild disproportion.

Though of course that service at the National Cathedral was ludicrous, considering the popularity of the 9/11 attacks everywhere in the Muslim world and the motives of the perpetrators.

And he is quite right about PC-driven willful blindness to just who it is that poses a threat of terroristic violence.

The following, however, is flat untrue, and reflects the refusal of many on the right to accept that the neocons’ ill-considered Wilsonian devotion to democracy – admittedly seconded by idiotic Democrats – has from the day after 9/11 helped empower Islamists all over the Maghreb and elsewhere.

Nay, from the day the Shah fled Iran!

But they prefer to blame everything on Obama, so far as they can.

When the “Arab Spring” came along, only the systematically enforced ignorance about Islam made it possible for so many Americans to respond enthusiastically to the overthrow by religious fanatics of relatively secular, America-friendly regimes.