Aftermath of terror

The Boston bombs were a week-and-a-half ago as I write this, and the 9/11 attack was over a decade ago. The residual effects of these events are long-lasting. I expect the Boston bombing will go into the history books alongside the Oklahoma City bombing. 9/11 has already become the 21st Century equivalent of Pearl Harbor, creating as it did a war we’re still involved in.

A couple of weeks after 9/11 my wife and I were visiting our friends in Berkeley, California. As we walked by a newspaper box I did a double-take at the headline:

 

I have not included the whole article because all of the pertinent stuff is in what I am showing.

I have kept that paper. I thought the writer was way off base in his assessment of the anti-war Bay Area residents, even in the still heated aftermath of the worst terror attack on U.S. soil. I didn’t blame him for being emotional, not at that moment, but considering what two wars fought in the name of 9/11 have cost us Americans in total, I wonder what he thinks now of the peaceniks who question our government when it chooses war as an answer.

The short answer to the writer is no matter the provocation our citizens are allowed to question our leaders, are allowed to question the efficacy and need for war. Unless someone like those folks in the Bay Area do stand up and question our leaders then we are not a democracy but a dictatorship.

The editorial cartoons from that newspaper are below. Of the three, the Deering vision of the Taliban is how I felt about the Taliban even before 9/11. At the time there were many stories about their religious intolerance and treatment of women. If attacking Afghanistan achieved anything it was putting the Taliban on the run, and providing opportunities for women. I’m not certain what will happen when the last U.S. troops pull out. Maybe the Taliban will just march back into Kabul and go back to their old nasty way of enforcing their religion on others. Whatever happens I want the United States to stay out of it, to consider their job in that country is finished.