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Among the reasons I like Christopher Hitchens...

...is that he's a left-learning atheist who is honest. Others of that combo (see anything posted by the Kossacks) aren't. It's one of the reasons I admire Paul Greengrass, who made the remarkable United 93; his politics are suppressed to create an amazing drama. His art is, for wont of a better word, pure.

And so I feel the same when I read...

One must have a blunt answer to the banal chat-show and op-ed question: What have we learned? (The answer ought not to be that we have learned how to bully and harass citizens who try to take shampoo on flights on which they have lawfully booked passage. Yet incompetent collective punishment of the innocent, and absurd color-coding of the "threat level," is the way in which most Americans actually experience the "war on terror.") 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 first duty, therefore, is one of solidarity with bin-Ladenism's other victims and targets, from India to Kurdistan.

I celebrate when Iraqis vote. I celebrate their courage in the face of death, something I've only faced from a distance. I agree whole-heartedly with Hitchens re the others in the world who, before and since 9/11/2001, have suffered at the hands of fanatics. It's not a mystery to me why eastern European countries tend to side with us in our war against Islamic terrorism; they've too recently had a taste of fanatical dictators.

These are the lessons of 9/11/2001. Always have been, always will be. There is an implacable foe of liberty lose on the world, and "bin-Ladenism" is an excellent term for it. The free world should wake up and destroy it before it wakes up and finds it's far, far too late.

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