5 Feet of Fury

Mark Steyn: ‘I find these anniversaries more dispiriting with each passing year’

I think the problem is that we defined what we were up against in the fall of 2001, 2002 too narrowly – and I think you can see that actually at the time of the first anniversary in 2002. We are in an ideological struggle… And we’ve seen that that ideology is very seductive to people who hold the passports of Western nations. We are a hole, we are a vacuum – and something fills the vacuum, which is what we see in Europe and to a lesser extent over here. And you can’t fight this war even with the most brilliant military in the world because it’s as I said in America Alone all those years ago – it’s not my line, it’s from Basil Liddell Hart, the great military strategist – it’s not about blowing up their tanks and it’s not about shooting their planes out of the sky – and nobody can beat Western militaries for doing that – but if you don’t understand that you’re up against this ideology and you don’t target that ideology, then you can never win. And that’s why I find this anniversary about as dispiriting as any of the fourteen since that Tuesday morning all those years ago.