OPINION:
Friday marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that took nearly 3,000 American lives. It is a day to mourn, not celebrate.
For those who have forgotten, 19 members of the Islamist terrorist network al Qaeda hijacked four airliners, crashing two into the World Trade Center towers in New York and a third into the Pentagon. A fourth — which may have been aimed at the White House or the Capitol — crashed in a field in Pennsylvania thanks to the heroism of its passengers.
The two World Trade Center towers collapsed, the Pentagon was badly damaged, and the Pennsylvania field was strewn with dead bodies and wreckage.
There was a huge surge of patriotism after the attacks. People flew American flags on car windows and outside their homes. President George W. Bush said that those who had committed these atrocities would hear from us soon, and they did.
It would be wise for us to remember a few of the villains and heroes of 9/11. The principal villain was Osama bin Laden, who eluded U.S. justice for about a decade. SEAL Team 6 caught up with him on May 2, 2011, in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and that ended his terrorist career.
Another alleged terrorist, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was apprehended on March 1, 2003, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in a joint CIA-Pakistani intelligence operation. He has been held since then and has not yet been tried — though a trial date of June 2028 has been set — because much of the evidence obtained against him was obtained through waterboarding and other forms of coercion. (It is not a coincidence that both bin Laden and Mohammed were caught or killed in Pakistan.)
A great number of other al Qaeda members have been captured or killed in what Mr. Bush called a “global war on terror.”
We seem to have forgotten that war and several of its great heroes. Rick Rescorla, for example, began his career as a British soldier. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1963 and joined the Army. He fought as a second lieutenant in Vietnam and became an American citizen in 1967.
When the 9/11 attacks occurred, Rescorla was vice president for security in the south tower offices of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, a financial services firm. He led the company’s evacuation, seeing some 2,700 employees to safety.
According to the 9/11 Memorial website, “He was last seen climbing up the stairs to make a final sweep for other employees minutes before the building toppled. His actions that day are credited with saving hundreds of lives. Rescorla epitomized the soldier’s code: leave no man behind.” His body was never recovered.
Another hero — among the passengers on Flight 93 headed to Washington — was Todd Beamer. He, along with Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett, Jeremy Glick and several other passengers, tried to regain control of the airliner and died in the attempt when the aircraft crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Beamer is remembered for his words “Let’s roll” — overheard on an open phone line — when the attempt to retake the aircraft was launched.
Rescorla, Beamer, Bingham, Burnett and Glick tried to save lives. Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rushed outside to the Pentagon crash site to help rescue the wounded before returning inside to direct the military response.
They are all heroes, as are the men and women who tried to save people from the devastation caused by the terrorists who toppled the Twin Towers and crashed aircraft into the Pentagon and the field near Shanksville.
Some 343 New York firefighters, 60 police officers (including 23 from the New York Police Department and 37 Port Authority police officers), eight emergency medical technicians and 184 people at the Pentagon died in the attacks.
We should mourn them all.
There is a meme floating around Facebook that we learned everything we need to know about Islam on 9/11. That is untrue. We are still learning.
The ideology of Islam requires these terrorist atrocities, and we have never fought an ideological war. Mr. Bush never understood it, nor did his CIA director, George Tenet. Only then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair understood.
I learned from Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the importance of fighting the ideological war. As Gen. Pace said, the heart of the war is an ideological one.
Unless and until we fight the ideological war, we cannot win the fight against Islamic terrorism.
It is apparently beyond us to fight the ideological war. As long as the Democrats’ “big tent” accommodates people such as Hasan Piker (who declared that we “deserved” the 9/11 attacks) and as long as Republicans such as Vice President J.D. Vance tolerate Tucker Carlson (who is antisemitic and has declared certain Israeli officials “enemies of civilization”), we cannot win the ideological war.
• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and a contributing editor for The American Spectator.
Follow the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.