Five years ago, this country was brutally attacked. 3,000 innocent lives were snuffed out without mercy. The inhuman and monstrous acts that were wrought by those 19 animals and the tyrants who funded, trained, and supported them shocked the world.

And yet it seems now that the world has forgotten.

We must remember the events of September 11, 2001. We must not only remember what was done to us — all of us — but who did it and why. The ideology that spawned this brutality is an ideology of hatred, an ideology of intolerance, and ideology that demands nothing less than our complete and utter submission. If we fail to recognize this ideology for what it is, the events of September 11, 2001 will have been just a prelude.

We have been fortunate. There has not been an attack on our home soil like the one that happened five years ago. Others have not been so fortunate. Bali, Moscow, London, Madrid, Beslan, Baghdad, all of them have seen their own horrors.

Our enemy is clear. Their will, five years later, remains strong.

Our will must be stronger.

We owe it to future generations to end this scourge. Now and forever. We cannot let the generations that will follow us live with the specter of terrorist attack. We cannot leave them with a world in which such monsters live. The ideology which we fight is not an ideology that can be negotiated with, appeased, or bought off. They divide the world into the House of Submission and the House of War. Their goal is to convert or kill, and we no longer have the luxury of believing that they cannot make good on their threats.

This is the fight of our time, and it is not yet over. We did not start this fight, but we must finish it.

Sadly, some have learned nothing from September 11.

Captain’s Quarters links to a piece on the shameful treatment of the FDNY and NYPD by the September 11 Commission:

The former police and fire chiefs who were lionized after the World Trade Center attack came under harsh criticism Tuesday from the Sept. 11 commission, with one member saying the departments’ lack of cooperation was scandalous and “not worthy of the Boy Scouts.” Commission members, in New York for an emotional two-day hearing, focused on how leaders of the two departments failed to share information effectively in the early frantic moments after two hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center.

Former fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen and former police chief Bernard Kerik shot back with infuriated responses to commissioner John Lehman’s questions, the strongest of a series of pointed statements from the panel.

“I couldn’t disagree with you more strongly,” Von Essen replied. “I think it’s outrageous that you make a statement like that.” Outside the hearing, he called the questioning “despicable.”

Indeed that’s a good description of the idiotic grandstanding by members of the September 11 Commission. Rather than try to uncover potential lessons that can prevent another terrorist attack, the Commission is more interested in preening for the cameras. It’s a shameful display of naked partisanship and cheap armchair quarterbacking that has prevented the Commission from doing anything useful. The idea of public hearings was a mistake – anytime one combines politicians and cameras – especially in an election year – any chance of useful work is slim to none.

While visiting New York, I managed to take a look at the designs for the World Trade Center memorial displayed at the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center. I was attracted to this design, which is now the finalist in the competition.

The design is both evocative and strangely haunting. It reminded me of the simplicity of the Vietnam Memorial in DC, both simple yet someone deeply poignant. Some of the other designs submitted were intriguing, but many were either unfeasible or maudlin. This design seems to strike the right balance to me, not trying to oversell the human tragedy of the event but serving as a space for reflection and remembrance.

Each September 11, I try to post this piece I wrote for a reflection of the first anniversary of the attacks. I think it’s a good way of remembering those lives lost on that day – but moreover, it’s a way of ending the remembrance of this terrible day on a note of hopefulness. Just 90 minutes after the terrorists started their attack, they lost their first battle to a group of Americans armed with little else than their courage. This is their story.

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To bring this day of remembrance to a close, I would like to tell a story not about grief and loss, but about the triumph of the human spirit over evil. It’s a story I intend to tell every September 11, for no other reason that it gives me hope on such a dark day. It is my wish that it brings some hope to anyone else who care to hear.

While the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were burning, the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 were making frantic phone calls to their loved ones. Their plane, like the others that had crashed into the World Trade Center had been hijacked. Unlike those on the other flights, the people on board Flight 93 knew what fate would befall them.

No one can ever truly know what went through the minds of those people at the moment. Some wept, some prayed, and some called out to those they love to remind them how much they meant. Yet in the end, the passengers of Flight 93 did not surrender to despair.

In doing what they did, they may have saved thousands of lives in our nation’s capital.

The Bible teaches us that no greater love hath a man than to lay down his life for his brother. Truly, no greater love and no greater heroism could be found than in the actions of those who stared into the face of evil and fought back.

The murderers on that black Tuesday in September wanted to divide us, they wanted to make us cower in fear. When the firemen and police officers rushed to the scene of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and when those brave souls on that flight acted, they ensured that the terrorists lost. The terrorists showed us the worst of human nature – we responded with the best of it.

There will be many things said about this day, but the most eloquent statement of defiance and humanity is only two words long:

"Let’s Roll"

Those on board Flight 93 did not know what they would face when they boarded that plane. But if they could face down such great evil with such courage, compassion, dignity, courage, and love – then perhaps so can we.

Let’s Roll

Just two years after the atrocities of September 11, it seems as though all too many of us have forgotten what we’re fighting about and why. As painful as images such as this are, they are also necessary. We cannot afford to forget that two years ago today, this nation endured a great human tragedy. Over 3,000 people were killed. Innocent lives snuffed out by a hatred that still festers in the Middle East.

I have little patience for those who are already calling this war a "quagmire" and demanding that we pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan and simply let the bloody status quo alone. In this war, we’ve lost many lives. However, in one hour in New York we lost many more.

The truth is, if we had not acted, September 11 would only be the first of many. There is little doubt that al-Qaeda would have paused their campaign of terror. Moreover, the people of Iraq and Afghanistan would still be under the bootheel of tyranny and oppression. Saddam Hussein and his bloodthirsty sons would still be raping and pillaging their own country. The Taliban would continue to oppress women, and execute them in the middle of the soccer field in Kabul.

Our war is at a turning point. Those who say that we should have waited for the international community ignore the reality that not all members of the international community have the will to fight. Those who do, like the Czech Republic and Poland are the ones who know all too well what true tyranny is like. Others have enjoyed the largesse of NATO military protection and no longer understand the conflict we face. Given the choice of placating them or finishing the job, it is clear that we must do the latter. Some will remain neutral even in the face of evil. That is their perogative. Our mission is to stand and fight.

We cannot afford to lose our nerve now. If we forget what happened to us and what we must do, we stand the chance of losing this war. In the end, our own doubt and division can be just as destructive as a dozen bombings. We have to realize what we’re fighting for – not just our security, but the security of millions in the Middle East that live under the shadow of great tyranny.

There are those who think that it is "simplistic" to view the world in black and white. Looking at images like this, if one cannot condemn these actions as evil without resorting to that cowardly word "but" then one’s moral compass is hopelessly off-kilter. The person who is jumping to his death in this horrible picture wasn’t in Chile in 1973. He didn’t have anything to do with our policy towards Israel. He had nothing to do with any of the litany of supposed sins that the United States committed. Can anyone say with any degree of morality that this man deserved to die for things that he had nothing to do with?

The truth is, there are those who would say exactly that. There are those who have lost the nerve and sinew that is necessary to preserve the very fabric of civilization. There are those who cannot see the enemy out there because they have been told that we are the enemy.

The President has declared September 11 as Patriot Day, a name that I first thought to be less solemn than it should. However, I’ve realized that it is an appropriate name for today. This is a day when American showed its true face to the world. An entire nation wept, then wiped away the tears and took care of each other. We found that the flag has a new meaning for us now, and images that should never be forgotten have been burned into our collective memory.

That is the meaning of patriotism, and that what it means to be an American, despite the small rhetoric of those who are motivated by little more than jelousy and resentment.

We must never forget what happened to us this day. We must also never forget the obligation we have to our children and theirs never to allow this to happen again.

Never forget.

Never again.

Though mild clear weather
Smile again on the shire of your esteem
And its colors come back, the storm has changed you:
You will not forget, ever,
The darkness blotting out hope, the gale
Prophesying your downfall.

You must live with your knowledge.
Way back, beyond, outside of you are others,
In moonless absences you never heard of,
Who have certainly heard of you,
Beings of unknown number and gender:
And they do not like you.

What have you done to them?
Nothing? Nothing is not an answer;
You will come to believe – how can you help it? –
That you did, you did do something;
You will find yourself wishing you could make them laugh,
You will long for their friendship.

There will be no peace.
Fight back, then, with such courage as you have
And every unchivalrous dodge you know of,
Clear in your conscience on this:
Their cause, if they had one, is nothing to them now;
They hate for hate’s sake.

– by W. H. Auden, 1956

Another of America’s most gifted writers, James Lileks, has a touching and sobering piece on the aftermath of September 11.

Two years later I take a certain grim comfort in some people’s disinterest in the war; if you’d told me two years ago that people would be piling on the President and bitching about slow progress in Iraq, I would have known in a second that the nation hadn’t suffered another attack. When the precise location of Madonna’s tongue is big news, you can bet the hospitals aren’t full of smallpox victims. Of course some people are impatient with those who still recall the shock of 9/11; the same people were crowding the message boards of internet sites on the afternoon of the attacks, eager to blame everyone but the hijackers. They hate this nation. In their hearts, they hate humanity. They would rather cheer the perfect devils than come to the aid of a compromised angel. They can talk for hours about how wrong it was to kill babies, busboys, businessmen, receptionists, janitors, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers – and then they lean towards you, eyes wide, and they say the fatal word:

But.

And then you realize that the eulogy is just a preface. All that concern for the dead is nothing more than the knuckle-cracking of an organist who’s going to play an E minor chord until we all agree we had it coming.

I’ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world’s good will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out. Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that’s lashing out. Imagine the President in the National Cathedral castigating Islam instead of sitting next to an Imam who’s giving a homily. Mosques burned, oil fields occupied, smart bombs slamming into Syrian palaces. We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn’t. And we won’t.

Which is why this war will be long.

Victor Davis Hanson, one of the most astute students of history alive today has some very cogent reflections on the aftermath of September 11. Indeed, his closing thoughts match my own, but in greater eloquence:

In our current feeding hysteria that diminishes astounding success to quagmire or worse, what disinterested observer would ever believe that in just 24 months we have liberated 50 million people, destroyed the odious Taliban and Saddam Hussein, and routed 60% of the al Qaeda leadership — all at the cost of less than 300 American dead? It is almost as if the more amazing our accomplishments, the more we must deprecate them.

It will require an economist, politician, historian, philosopher, and artist to make sense of the world turned upside down after September 11, which unlike Y2K really did prove to be the abyss between the millennia.

Until then, we would do better to think simply of the dead, and to pledge both that we shall never forget them and in our lifetimes and, according to our efforts and station, we shall not allow it to happen again to any others on these shores — so help us, God.