I was at home, asleep in my bed. Suddenly my father sticks his head in the room and says 'Wake up. We've been attacked.' At first, I'm a bit confused. Did World War III just start? If so, he sounds awfully calm about it...
I turned on the TV in my room. I saw a local news report from a station using the call letters WCBS-TV. I found that to be rather confusing since that's a local station in New York City and I live in New Orleans. What's even more strange is that I left my TV tuned to VH-1 the night before when I turned it off. (Back then, VH-1 played music instead of reality TV garbage.)
After a few seconds (or minutes, I don't remember which now), the camera switched from scenes of panic, pandemonium and sheer chaos on the street to a helicopter or a camera on a rooftop somewhere. I see one of the two towers of the World Trade Center on fire. The news man talking on the TV says a plane hit. From the damage and the fire burning, I could tell it wasn't just a Cessna or some other small aircraft. A small palne did hit the Empire State Building a few years before so, planes hitting buildings wasn't exactly a complete surprise.
Then, I see the second plane hit the second tower. That was sure as hell no accident. I could see what Dad meant. It wasn't World War III (yet) but, we were definitely now at war. And I already knew the name of the enemy...
"Bin Laden, you miserable Son of a Bitch! Right as I was beginning to develop some respect for the Arabs for the contributions y'all made to world history and you just HAD to go and fuck that up!" My 19 year-old self said.
I spent the rest of the day in my living room, watching New York go straight to a place worse than Hell on a 60" TV. As my anger grew (not to mention concern for people I knew who lived in or often visited New York), I remembered a quote from the ancient Roman historian Tacitus that seemed quite appropriate to the situation...
"Valor is of no service, chance rules all, and the bravest often fall by the hands of cowards."
It's now 13 years later. Bin Laden is dead, thanks to SEAL Team Six. His terror group, Al-Qaeda, is a disorganized mess. We've been at war ever since that dreadful Tuesday morning and we still will be for the foreseeable future. The world is probably more of a socio-political mess now than it has been in generations. And all of this happened because of some rich religious nut named Osama Bin Laden getting angry at the Saudi Royal family.
Binny Boy was pissed that the Saudi King begged the United States to put boots on the ground in his kingdom to protect it from another mad Arab named Saddam Hussein. After that monster invaded the nearby kingdom of Kuwait, almost everyone in the Middle East banded together into mutual defense pacts and asked America for help.
So why was Binny so angry at the King for these actions? Apparently, that ugly bastard Bin Laden was a religious fanatic and didn't like foreign armies being in Muslim holy lands. Never mind the fact that his government invited us. Not to mention the fact that those armies we sent protected those 'holy' lands from a brutal dictator bent on conquest. Oh no! That didn't matter to this rich, religious fanatic asshole. He also seemed to conveniently forget that when one of his sons needed medical treatment in the 1980's (or was it the 1970's?), they traveled to America so they could have the best quality care.
Binny got to be so much of a problem that the Saudi Royal family actually exiled him, seized his lands and froze his financial assets. Quite a fall from grace for the son of the contractor who built the royal palaces and new modern mosque in Mecca. By that point though, it was too late. He had already learned how to fight a guerrilla war and run a terrorist group by fighting with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan during their war against the Soviet Union in the 1980's. He had also founded Al-Qaeda and was getting his finances from other sources.
The Saudi royal family did try to warn us but, it fell on deaf ears. The Clinton Administration was not all that great at dealing with foreign policy issues. Clinton even had 11 different chances to whack the son of a whore but, never did. It would always be canceled at the last moment because of some unforeseen concern.
Truth be told though, I doubt it matters now. War between Radical Islam and the rest of the world was inevitable. The rest of the world is rapidly moving to the future. Radical Islam is terrified of any kind of social change and wants to drag us all back to the 12th Century, where their society had stopped progressing and stopped advancing their technology.
The war between these radical nut-jobs and the rest of Humanity will drag on for years to come but, they have already lost. Their own people are turning on them now. Could you have imagined women in their society publicly criticizing a group like ISIS back in 2001, let alone shitting and menstruating on the ISIS flag as a protest? Well, it happened here in 2014. That NSFW link was pretty disgusting but, it was also quite brave. Those chicks have a serious set of metaphorical balls.
Anyway, the rest of Humankind will continue to move towards that next great social leap; becoming a Type-1 Civilization on the Kardashev scale. The terrorists will continue to act like animals and barbarians, proving to everyone that they are definitely the wrong side to take. If you have to film yourself cutting off a journalist's head with a dull knife then, you have already lost the moral high ground. Coldblooded murder doesn't make you look like a Freedom Fighter or a Saint, Dumbass.
Nowadays, I've become cynical about the whole thing and I'm just waiting for one of these desert rats to get nuked by pissing off the wrong country. I can see Putin's Russia or Red China doing that one day. I think the only reason America hasn't done it yet is because we value Human life and don't purposely harm civilians. It would also probably be morally wrong and illegal under the international Laws of War, including the Geneva Conventions, to use that much excess force. You don't necessarily have to vaporize an entire civilization to eliminate them as a threat.
Still, as sad as this day was, is and forever shall be, I see it as the last act of truly frightened, desperate and ultimately tiny little men. Hopefully, one day the Arab world will grow up and learn to live in the 21st Century world with the rest of us. The alternative is the wholesale slaughter of their entire region of the world by pissing off the wrong group of people. For their sake (not to mention wanting to avoid seeing a shitload of nuclear radiation and fallout floating across the world in the jet stream), I sincerely hope they see reason and just quit acting like a bunch of tiny dicks.
- Lord Publius
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