Wednesday, November 24, 2004
By BRETT McGURK
KNIGHT RIDDER/TRIBUNE
WASHINGTON -- Thanksgiving is a good time to reflect on the state of the world and how far we have come since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And it's also an opportunity to steel our resolve for the challenges ahead.
Many Americans recall the days before 9/11 as an era of tranquility and peace. I, too, remember that beautiful Washington morning, with its blue sky and a hint of chill to welcome a changing season. We seemed to be living in unprecedented times, defined by progress and a lasting peace.
That peace, however, was an illusion. In the shadows of fundamentalist Islam, ruthless terrorists were plotting not simply to destroy buildings, but to rip asunder the very fabric of Western civilization. They plotted in places that were closed to the rest of the world, where children learned only fanatical doctrines of death and murder.
Ours was not to be an age of peace; but an age of unprecedented danger.
Indeed, for 30 years the threat of Mideastern terror had grown year by year, spread by one group after another, with increasingly deadly attacks. In the 1970s, it was Black September killing Olympic athletes in Munich and airline passengers in Athens.
In the 1980s, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah killed 242 U.S. Marines in Beirut. Similar groups slaughtered civilians in the sky over Scotland and in the restaurants and cafes of France, Germany, Algeria, Egypt and Pakistan.
The pace of the trend merely picked up in the 1990s: Six dead and more than 1,000 wounded in the 1993 garage bombing attack on the World Trade Center; 250 dead and 4,000 wounded in attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa; 17 servicemen killed aboard the USS Cole in Yemen.
Not until 9/11 had occurred did we respond strongly to this wave of violence. Rejected at last was the idea that terrorism was a sort of cops-and-robbers game. The threat required a systemic response: shutting the sources of weapons of mass destruction and ending the repression that had been breeding the acceptance of murder as a political tool.
Today more than 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan are discarding the lies of their former tormentors. Black-market nuclear weapons programs in Libya and Pakistan no longer exist. Saddam Hussein can no longer reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction program -- as the Duelfer Report concludes he was poised to do when the world looked away.
Terrorist creeds
Most important, the region that bred mass murder for a generation now sees men and women of all ages lining up to vote, a powerful antidote to the purveyors of terrorist creeds. True empowerment comes through the ballot box, not the suicide belt.
I saw many of these changes personally in Iraq recently over a nine-month period. There, the emergence of peaceful expression is remarkably strong. Compromises are being forged across generations and between groups that outside observers said could never get along.
Those outside observers are wrong. In the middle of a very long night this past February, for example, I saw Iraqis deadlock over various provisions in an interim constitution. A Sunni leader took the floor with an impassioned appeal to the assembly. "We have been fighting with one another for all our lives," he said. "We have all bled for different reasons and for different causes. But we are all brothers. We are all Iraqis. And we all must work together so that our children can live together in peace."
With that, the assembly cheered. Compromises were brokered and the interim agreement was adopted. Four months later the Iraqis were fully in charge of their own affairs. And soon they will elect a new leadership to create the permanent framework for a new Iraq.
At every step the Iraqis have proved the outsiders wrong, and they will continue to do so -- much like millions of Afghans have surprised the cynical with nationwide elections and a dwindling level of violence.
In sum, we are in a fight that cannot be won in days or months. It will be a long struggle with a focus on long-term trends. What is vital is that more people are free today than ever before. And free people with hopes, dignity and dreams rarely become terrorists.
Someday 54 million Iraqis and Afghans will be sitting down for their own Thanksgiving dinner. And thanking us.
X McGurk is a former legal adviser to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, Washington, D.C. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune.