By Earl McElfresh
Olean, NY – It's intriguing to listen to all of th the media and political talk that's swirling around the new "revelations" that a failure of the part of the FBI and CIA and the White House to "connect the dots" either led to or could have prevented the terrible events of September 11th.
Whether or not this is true - whether anyone in authority is culpable or not - is in purely practical terms completely irrelevant. If the dots had all been connected...if Mohammed Atta and his accomplices had been prevented from carrying out their attack, the general public in the United States wouldn't even have breathed a collective sigh of relief. The foiled plot wouldn't have been the top story on September 11th's nightly news. There wouldn't have been a parade of commentators or politicians lining up to congratulate our security apparatus. Is it too cynical to suggest that the same people who today are accusing our security services of laxness and stupidity would have been DEEPLY concerned that an Arab immigrant should have the same right as anybody else to take flying lessons?
My point is that September 11th was going to happen and any successes that prevented the actual September 11 attack were simply going to ratchet the stakes even higher.
The ominous and deadly attacks on the USS Cole and the US embassies in east Africa elicited no intense and certainly no consistent concern on the part of the American general public.
In the months leading up to September 11th, a staple of the nightly news was "the airport story." News commentators tut-tutted with sympathetic concern as disgruntled passengers bemoaned the fact that their flight was half an hour late. THAT WAS CONSIDERED IMPORTANT NEWS and the passenger's minor inconvenience s were played up as if this were an absolutely intolerable situation and that something would have to be done.
Imagine the ridicule that would have been directed at any measures put in place then that brought armed National Guard personnel into the airports. Or required people to take off their shoes while the heels were examined. Or subjected a significant proportion of passengers to a thorough personal search. Or shut down airports for hours because of a malfunctioning baggage check.
Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Peter Jennings would have been reporting from the airports with tears streaming down their faces at the inconveniences being suffered by the traveling public.
September 11 was going to happen for two reasons. The first reason is that it is th nature of the American public to only care about and mind their own business until something like the unbelievable American morning of September 11 stirs them to the depths of their souls. The essential greatness of America is the simple fact that we're all too busy the hate people and if there's an off chance to sell them something, hate just isn't economical. America wasn't sleeping on September 11th, America was busy working. This preoccupation with our own business explains our standard of living, our democracy our unprecedented cultural domination of the world. It explains our immense political, economic and military power. It explains our pre-eminence in the world in a way that has no parallel in its scope or its essential decency. And it explains September 11th.
The second reason for September 11th is the nature of the terrorist threat. This enemy, whose hatred most American find completely inexplicable, have show a relentless determination to wreak gratuitous violence. Even Hitler was distracted form his insane obsessions by the day to day responsibilities of running Germany. There is nothing that distracts the international terrorists from dreaming up, planning and executing endless acts of more and more imaginative mayhem. In the same way that a monkey spending an eternity at a typewriter would eventually write Hamlet, a terrorist constantly probing the security apparatus of a free country like the United States will eventually slip through.
It happened on September 11. If not September 11th: maybe March 10th, maybe New Years 2004, maybe July 4th 2005. But September 11th was going to happen. There was nothing that was going to ignite America's resolve to end terrorism until terrorism completely got our attention. Once this nation saw and understood the depraved face of terrorism first hand -, as did the passengers on Flight 93 over Pennsylvania - it acted. It took terrorism itself, not the threat of terrorism or reports of terrorism to effect this resolve.
Hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20. To distract, criticize and accuse those who are, as we speak, down in the foxholes fighting terrorism and to criticize them for not immediately understanding the unfathomable and not immediately believing the unbelievable, is not merely unfair. It's irrelevant and it's dangerous. We have elected officials who are deliberately putting their own interests above the interests of this nation and its people. A sense of fairness and common decency should cause them to stop.
Earl McElfresh runs the McElfresh Map Company in Olean.