I don't want to clutter the previous post with updates and links, so I'll simply refer you to my thoughts from this morning, if you'd like to read them. There are, however, a host of other good writers expressing their thoughts today, and if you're looking for something more, check them out.
Christopher Hitchens, in the Wall Street Journal:
Anyone who lost their "innocence" on September 11 was too naïve by far, or too stupid to begin with. On that day, we learned what we ought to have known already, which is that clerical fanaticism means to fight a war which can only have one victor. Afghans, Kurds, Kashmiris, Timorese and many others could have told us this from experience, and for nothing (and did warn us, especially in the person of Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance). Does anyone suppose that an ideology that slaughters and enslaves them will ever be amenable to "us"? ...
The second point makes me queasy, but cannot be ducked. "We"--and our allies--simply have to become more ruthless and more experienced. An unspoken advantage of the current awful strife in Iraq and Afghanistan is that it is training tens of thousands of our young officers and soldiers to fight on the worst imaginable terrain, and gradually to learn how to confront, infiltrate, "turn," isolate and kill the worst imaginable enemy. These are faculties that we shall be needing in the future. It is a shame that we have to expend our talent in this way, but it was far worse five years and one day ago, when the enemy knew that there was a war in progress, and was giggling at how easy the attacks would be, and "we" did not even know that hostilities had commenced. Come to think of it, perhaps we were a bit "innocent" after all.
There are a host of links to entries marking the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attack at Pajamas Media.
Lorie Byrd provides an overstuffed link library at Wizbang. Also at Wizbang, Jay Tea takes an idea I had toyed with and executes it, posting each event on that day in sequence, and with photos. You're best off going to the main page, scroll down until you find the 8:46 AM post, then scroll up. A similar presentation with different photos is at Mudville Gazette. Scroll down until you find the first post in the series, then up.
Clifford May at National Review Online writes that five years later we're just getting serious, using similar words to mine this morning.
Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, few people were paying attention, and those who did misunderstood what they heard. Five years later, it would be useful if Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, Americans and Europeans, could spend less energy fighting one another and more defending their common civilization from its mortal enemies. If anyone has a better plan than the “updated” Strategy that Bush has offered, now would be a good time to reveal it.
John O'Sullivan, also at National Review Online:
And if dissent can be patriotic, it is not invariably so. After all, treason is the highest form of dissent. When “critics of the war” describe the terrorists as the equivalent of Minutemen in the Revolutionary War, or argue that the abuses at Abu Graib make Bush and Rumsfeld the equivalent of Saddam Hussein, they are crossing the boundary that separates even very strong dissent from a diseased partisanship that would prefer America to be defeated by terrorists rather than prevail under the wrong party. That partisanship is hardly distinguishable from hatred of country and gradually mutates into it.
CNN.com Pipeline and Fox News are both rebroadcasting their coverage from 5 years ago in real time, if you can stomach it.
The 2996 Blog Project, in which I was unable to participate, has links to tributes to each person lost on 9/11 - one blogger for each person. As I post this the blog is down, due to excess traffic.
Finally, here's my post from last year, the first time I'd had a chance to write one.
