Today - 9/11 - we remember Islamic radicals highjacking four airliners and flying three of them into buildings in New York City and Washington, DC. Thousands of people going peaceably about their business died in those crashes.
Presumably the highjackers’intent was to get our attention and in that they succeeded admirably. Since that day we have been on the hunt for their leaders and have managed to kill quite a few of them. New ones keep popping up and we keep knocking them down. And we’ve probably killed thousands of their followers in our various activities in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Africa, with the help of allies as varied as Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Philippines, France, the U.K., and Eritrea.
We remember the brave activities of our first responders who rushed in to save who they could, at sometimes fatal costs to themselves. And we remember the brave passengers on the fourth plane who rushed the cockpit and kept it from demolishing either the Capitol or the White House, again at the cost of their own lives.
Militant Islam is still out there, still unwilling to share the planet with us. The Long War is merely simmering at the moment, but will flare up again when our opponents get (or make) the opportunity to commit mass murder. And our guys who do this for a living keep hunting their leaders, there’s no bag limit, and keep training local government anti-insurgency forces wherever the need arises.
These opponents aren’t even our worst foes out there, only one of several malignant forces against which we must stay on guard. But they’re the ones we focus on today, on this anniversary of the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks.
