Rod Dreher
National Review
March 4, 2003 9:00 a.m.
Letter to a European Friend
Explaining this war.
Dear Harry,
Thanks so much for your recent letter. You Dutch are
great about remembering birthdays. I hardly noticed
that I even had a birthday this year, inasmuch as the
day came at the end of an exhausting week.. The whole
country had been under high terror alert that week.
Anti-aircraft missiles had been parked around
Washington, and here in New York, police commandos
were on the streets carrying assault rifles. Julie and
I decided not to bother going out to celebrate, to
instead stay home with Matthew and be grateful that
nothing bad happened.
I've been meaning to write to answer your concerns
about the war, and to address your remarks about the
"increasing anti-Americanism in the air" in Europe. I
finally have the time, given that Julie and Matthew
have gone to Texas to stay with her folks for a few
weeks. It might sound paranoid to you, but I feel a
lot better with them down there for the time being.
I'm hearing that more and more New Yorkers are doing
this, quietly. Maybe this is overreacting, but if a
dirty bomb should go off, we have no car, and no way
of getting out of town. Until they left, every moment
of every day I'd sit at my desk in Manhattan,
wondering how I would get home to them across the
river in Brooklyn if there were another catastrophic
terrorist attack. I hate having my family split up
like this, however temporary, but I can't bear the
thought of something terrible happening to them when
and if the war starts, and me not having gotten them
to someplace safer when I had the chance. We lived
through September 11, and are not eager to go through
anything like that again, if we can help it.
I must tell you that beyond particular arguments over
the usefulness of this or that aspect of the Iraq
standoff, I believe that experience is at the root of
the American public's willingness to go to war with
Iraq, versus Europe's overwhelming rejection of same.
We know what these terrorists can do, and will do; for
Europeans, it was all a story on television. Most
Americans understand the lesson of 9/11; most
Europeans, in my view, do not.
Because you are my friend, I don't want to bore you by
going through the kinds of policy arguments I would
use in a public debate, which you may have read in the
newspapers and magazines anyway. I want to tell you
what 9/11 was like for us, and why it matters to the
way we, and lots of Americans, feel about this war.
That morning began with a phone call from my father,
who had been watching TV. "Look out your front door,
the World Trade Center is on fire," he said. It was a
warm, clear, beautiful September day. And there was
one of the towers, billowing smoke and paper, which
was being carried by the wind right over our house in
Brooklyn. While I was downstairs gathering my notepad
so I could run across the bridge to cover the fire, I
heard the explosion of the second plane hitting. It
shook our building. I opened the door, saw the second
tower burning, kissed Julie goodbye, and told her,
"I'm going to get as close as I can."
There was an exodus of workers crossing the bridge out
of Manhattan. I stopped to talk to some of them. They
were gasping and sobbing, talking about having seen
people jumping to their deaths from the upper floors.
I have never seen that kind of trauma in anyone. They
were very nearly in shock. I am fortunate that I
stopped to talk to them, because I had plenty of time
to have made it to the south tower. As it was, I was
standing on the bridge watching the fire, about to
begin my descent into Manhattan, when the south tower
collapsed. My knees nearly buckled. I was sure I had
just seen tens of thousands of people die. I turned
back toward home, because there was no getting into
Manhattan now.
My mobile phone wasn't working, so I had no way of
letting Julie know I hadn't been killed. All she knew
was that my last words were, "I'm going to get as
close as I can." It took me almost an hour to get home
that morning. When she saw me coming, she ran down the
street holding Matthew, sobbing. She had to live for
nearly an hour anticipating that the Islamic
terrorists had killed me too.
We were lucky: We really didn't know anyone who died
in the Towers, though eight people from our church
perished. People in our parish who had grown up in
Beirut told us that the slightly sweet smell that hung
in the air in our neighborhood was burning flesh. I
hadn't counted on ever knowing what that smelled like.
We went and stood by the harbor with hundreds of our
neighbors, watching the smoke rise from the 16-acre
crematorium, praying and wondering what had happened
to our city and our country.
Six days later, they reopened the Financial District,
and I went there to report on what I saw. Harry, I
hope you never have to see anything like this in
Amsterdam. The immensity of the violence done to New
York and America on that day became clear to me in a
way that seeing it on television could not make it. I
remember stopping to talk to a sobbing woman, crouched
down in the corner of an ash-covered coffee shop,
holding a sign with a picture of her firefighter
brother, asking anybody who stopped if they'd seen
him. There were so many broken people, clinging to any
scrap of hope they could. As we know now, there was no
hope for them. There never was.
And then there were the funerals. As a reporter, I had
to cover a couple of funerals for firefighters. These
men were strangers to me, but I cried for them as if
they were my own brothers. I was not alone, either.
Everybody did. We pulled together out of pride in and
gratitude for those brave men, who died trying to save
people they didn't even know. A priest I know gave
some of them absolution before they ran into the
burning towers. He says you could see in their eyes
that they knew they were going to die. But in they
went, because that's what men do. That's what New
Yorkers do. That's what Americans do. We don't run
away.
In New York, when they bury firemen, they play the
bagpipes and march behind the funeral bier. There is
nothing sadder than bagpipes in the cold rain. There
was a lot of that in the autumn of 2001. But there was
also a lot of strength, of compassion, of love of
country. Men and women came here from all over America
to help out in the relief effort at Ground Zero. It
was an awe-inspiring thing to see how Americans will
pull together in moments of crisis. Despite all the
pain and destruction we had to live through, I have
never felt more love of my country, or had more faith
that we would do what we must to make sure this would
never happen again.
That's what this war is about, Harry. Of that I am
convinced. We Americans have seen what terrorists and
terrorist states can and will do to us. Most of us
believe that our survival depends on eliminating
regimes that support terrorism and build biological
and chemical weapons, and endeavor to build nuclear
weapons. You wrote of Bush's "sometimes provocative
attitude," but really, given what has happened to us,
is it really fair to accuse Americans of provocation?
Is it wrong to demand that Saddam Hussein disarm,
which is what the United Nations has ordered him to do
as a condition of ending the Gulf War? What
alternative does our president have? Must we lose not
just the Twin Towers, but all of New York City before
we are permitted to act to end tyrannical, belligerent
regimes, and to change the despotic political culture
of the Middle East, which helps produce terrorism?
>From our side, Europe looks all too eager to appease
Iraq, to turn its face from the danger that exists, in
vain hope that everything might turn out alright, if
only the West sits quietly and waits. I remember
talking to Marnix in his garden last spring, when I
was visiting, and he said he didn't understand why
Europe had to involve itself in America's war. It
would be bad for business, he said. I told him that
the Islamists had attacked us yesterday, and they
would attack Europe tomorrow. This has been borne out
with the discovery of numerous Islamic terrorist cells
all over Europe--including in Eindhoven, just down the
road from you. Sooner or later, they're going to
succeed in doing a 9/11 in a European capital. And
then what will you all do?
Will you be like the Dutch cities which, when faced
with harassment at public swimming pools by the
Islamic youth gangs, shut down the pools rather than
confront these barbarians? Pim Fortuyn told you all
what you were dealing with, and said the time for
blindness and accommodation with fanaticism was over.
He's gone now, but the threat he warned about is not.
Americans know that. We've lived it. We're living it
now. And we're going to take care of it.
You know, Europeans love to make fun of Bush as a
cowboy, as they did Reagan before him. But when the
outlaws are making it impossible to walk peaceably in
the streets, everybody wants a cowboy to shoot the bad
guys and restore moral order. The world could do a lot
worse than an American cowboy right now. It is my hope
that you will come to see that. It is my great fear
that the Islamists will force you to, at God knows
what price.
Your friend,
Rod
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John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tonight I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq:
Your enemy is not surrounding your country � your enemy is ruling your
country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be
the day of your liberation." -George W. Bush 1/29/03
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