The American Spectator

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Streetcar Line

(Page 3 of 3)

How, then, can something that is self-evident be not at all evident to so many?

The answer is that the quality of being self-evident is intrinsic to itself, not dependent on the recognition of the observer. If the observer is willfully blind, no amount of evidence will be perceivable to him. Furthermore, even those who are not willfully blind can, by their inattention, allow blinders to be put on them by those whose blindness is more willful.

Forgive the metaphysics here, but this is important: The challenge before us as Americans is to make sure we give each other the ability to remove the blinders from each other's eyes and the eyes of everybody of good will. Our own strength, decency, and diplomatic morality as Americans should not be in doubt.

The United States is fighting against terrorists because the terrorists attacked us, repeatedly, both on and long before 9/11, not because of any fault of our own but because of their own twisted, hate-filled ideology. The United States is promoting democracy not because we want to "impose" our beliefs and forms of government on anyone else but because we want other peoples to have the chance to choose their own forms themselves -- and only a system of representative government can provide that opportunity.

The United States asserts its sovereignty against United Nations infringement thereof not because we are bullies but because the United Nations is not a world government but only a world forum; and because we, as a legitimate republic that does have a state formed through the consent of the governed, have no obligation to be dictated to by member nations at the UN that do not recognize the rights and freedoms of their own people much less ours.

The United States entered Iraq not for purposes of conquest but in self-defense and in defense of time-tested principles of freedom and human rights. We entered Iraq because Saddam Hussein demonstrably possessed weapons of mass destruction and refused to account for their destruction or dissolution, and had used them in the past. We entered because he clearly planned to secure more such weapons. We entered Iraq because Saddam repeatedly fired on our pilots, because he harbored and sponsored international terrorists, because he offered money to the families of terrorist suicide-bombers as an inducement for more terrorism, because he brutalized his own people, because he had invaded two neighbors and remained a constant threat to do so again, because he tried to assassinate a former U.S. president, and because he was, in sum, a mass murderer who promised more of the same.

The United States always rushes to the aid of any nation in the world that suffers a natural disaster. The United States frequently rushes to the aid of nations threatened or attacked by international thugs and totalitarians. The United States has shed more blood and spent more treasure on behalf of the freedom of others, or to secure their human rights or to save them from brutality and murder, than any nation in the history of mankind.

We are not aggressors, but defenders of freedom and justice.

Those who will not recognize those realities are willfully blind, or self-loathing. We should not be swayed by their blindness.

Six years after 9/11, all of us Americans must recapture the feelings that were so near-universally felt six years ago today, the feelings and convictions that were expressed not just in the Mobile Register editorial but in ordinary conversations and almost everywhere in public discourse in the days following those horrendous airplane bombings.

About the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson explained, quite accurately, that it sprang not from his own genius and that he was not "aiming at originality of principle or sentiment," but rather that the Declaration "was intended to be an expression of the American mind." The Register editorial of 9/12/01, and so many other similar editorials and public and private commentaries immediately after the attacks, were likewise expressions of the American mind.

We must work to ensure that the American mind continues to express itself in like manner today, and that we act in accordance with it, tomorrow, and forever.

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Business, Islam, Law, Military, Iraq, United Nations