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9/11: A Remembrance of War

by COLONEL KENNETH ALLARD (US ARMY, RET.) September 10, 2010
Fair warning: my track record about the significance of 911 is flawed. When that sparkling September morning turned into tragedy, I was a military analyst for NBC News, racing to our Washington studios and glimpsing smoke billowing from the Pentagon. On-air, I confidently predicted that Americans were now re-living Pearl Harbor, that we would shortly be summoned to the colors. Like many confident predictions, that one was dead wrong. Instead we were summoned to the shopping malls rather than the enlistment centers. Silly me, for having imagined that the example of The Greatest Generation would outweigh the instinctive indulgences of the Me First Generation.
 
My reservations over the current debate about building a mosque at Ground Zero might be just as mistaken. Some people think that a mosque desecrates the memory of those killed at the World Trade Center. They might have a point were it not for the routine desecration that occurs on the southern tip of Manhattan – where adult book stores and tawdry commercialism constantly jockey for position hard by a site that should be sacred. Would a mosque or a burlesque theater be the greater disservice to those memories?
 
Our Civil War battlefields have often faced similar pressures – usually from outlet malls or housing developments. At Gettysburg, Lincoln poignantly noted that the soldiers who struggled there had already consecrated that battlefield, “far above our poor power to add or detract.” But their descendents have agonized over what memories to keep sacred for the future. Sometimes we get it right – as at Pearl Harbor’s Arizona Memorial or the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc above the Normandy beaches. There we have consciously decided that some history is worth remembering. In such places, we embrace a deliberate setting-aside that compels future generations of Americans to pause and ponder that shared sacrifice is part of being a nation.
 
 
The Twin Towers were also a battlefield, native soil where we lost more Americans than at Pearl Harbor. Most were victims of chance rather than choice, ordinary people doing ordinary jobs but thrust unexpectedly into extraordinary and deadly peril. The policemen, firemen and first responders who raced to their rescue and died alongside them chose duty rather than safety, self-sacrifice above self-interest. At the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and on Flight 93, civilian heroism equaled our highest military traditions. Such nation-defining ideals are vitally important to remember on the sacred ground where those sacrifices actually took place. To borrow the title of Herman Wouk’s classic novel of World War II, everything within eye-shot of Ground Zero should reflect War And Remembrance.
 
So what about the propriety of building a mosque within those confines?  President Obama missed the point with his ringing endorsement of the obvious – that Moslems enjoy the same religious liberties as other Americans. But so do those who now threaten to burn the Koran and refuse to acknowledge the civil war raging within Islam. This is precisely the right moment to re-emphasize that the conflict which began on 911 is a war against the jihad, against Islamist extremism much closer to Nazism than to any conceivable form of religion. And that the decisive high ground in that conflict is the human spirit, with its hopes, dreams and that search for the God-shaped hole in each of us.
 
As long as mankind has searched for a creator, religions have sometimes become synonymous with war and cruelty. Just ask Christians about the Crusades, the Inquisition or the Thirty Years War; Jews about the Philistines/Palestinians; or the Serbs about almost anything. In each of our collective histories, there have been bitter moments when Christians or Jews would have had difficulty answering the same question now pointedly addressed to Moslems: Do you really represent a religion of peace? Being brutally honest: we sometimes ignore what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” – or what all three faiths teach about loving God and our neighbor.
 
The good news is that, far from being victimized by a reflexively Islamophobic culture, many American Moslems today embody the American dream, assimilating and enjoying opportunities unimaginable elsewhere. This is where the search for common ground should compel us. Want to defeat the jihad? Then make faith your ally and don’t simultaneously betray both faith and common sense by burning the Koran. Anwar Sadat used to say that we are People of the Book, which is exactly the right place to begin. If we are truly religions of peace, then surely Christians, Jews and Moslems should lose no opportunity to prove it, at Ground Zero or anywhere else.
 
 
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Col. Ken Allard (U.S Army, Ret.) rose from draftee to Dean of the National War College. A prolific writer and a former NBC News military analyst, he continues to seve in San Antonio Texas. He is the author of WARHEADS. Email: WARHEADS6@aol.com.
 

Colonel Ken Allard is a widely known commentator on foreign policy and security issues. For more than a decade, he was a featured military analyst on NBC News, MSNBC and CNBC. That experience provided the backdrop for his most recent book, Warheads: Cable News and the Fog of War. A dynamic speaker, Colonel Allard appears before business and trade groups around the country, speaking on themes ranging from the war on terror to leadership and corporate governance. In 2006, he became an adopted Texan and San Antonian, joining the faculty of UTSA as an executive-in-residence and senior lecturer in management. His other books include Business As War, a hard-hitting look at 21st century business leadership, Somalia Operations: Lessons Learned, and Command, Control and the Common Defense, winner of the 1991 National Security Book Award. His military career included overseas service as an intelligence officer as well as tours of duty as an assistant professor at West Point, special assistant to the Army Chief of Staff, and Dean of Students at the National War College. He holds a Ph.D. in International Security from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy and an MPA from Harvard University. In 1999 his alma mater, Lycoming College, recognized his record of public service with its Outstanding Achievement Award.

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