The 9th of September?

"United 93" has just come out here in Norway, and the Bergen paper reviewed it today. There was a picture from the film and a big notice on the front page above the fold about this "excellent film about September 9th." To give them credit, they did get the date right on the actual story in the entertainment section, which, they said, broke Hollywood´s "September 11th taboo."
That they could have gotten the date wrong says a lot about the way in which Europe experienced the attacks of September 11th, as opposed to the visceral way Americans experienced them. I don´t mean to imply that the sympathy we got from Europe after the attacks wasn´t genuine, but Europe has a history of terrorist attacks going back for years: Basques, the IRA, Baader-Meinhof, etc., etc. The difference between blowing up a pub in Belfast and the Twin Towers, as Andor noted over dinner tonight, is only one of scale. For us (Oklahoma City notwithstanding) it was something wholly unexpected, a sucker punch to the solar plexus. We caught our collective breath and then hit back. Europe, not directly affected and with more than its fair share of firsthand experience of war, was instinctually reluctant to resort to the use of force. As soon as we began rooting out bin Ladin´s Taliban patrons in Afghanistan, September 11th (or was it the 9th?) started to fade from European memory and the French started leading the opposition against us.
Afghanistan was in many ways the ideal response to September 11th; we achieved our objectives in short order with minimal casualties on both sides and got the people set up with a new government that did not look back fondly on the year 800 as the "good old days." What problems exist there now, with the Taliban resurgent in some areas, would not have happened if we had stood by our commitment to the Afghan people and not let ourselves be distracted by the current misadventure in Iraq.
The war in Iraq I opposed from the start, despite a desperate hope at the time that someone, somewhere would stand up to enforce UN resolutions if they were to mean anything at all. On principle I will always prefer a secular government to a theocracy -- which Iran is now trying to push on Iraq -- on the grounds that theocracies (i.e. nations that use a book, any book, as the absolute and unquestionable authority on all questions of foreign and domestic policy) tend to be batshit insane. Sure, Saddam was a miserable tyrant, but I understood his motivations, and as it turned out, he wasn´t in any position to use WMDs on us or anyone else. How we could have foreseen this, given that he gave the UN inspectors the run-around for years and had deployed gas weapons in the field in Gulf War I and used them against his own people, I don´t know, but I prefer an enemy whose actions discernably follow some rational line of thought. The Wall Street Journal ran an article recently suggesting that some sort of voodoo Koran prophecy might have Iran´s President Ahmadinejad planning some sort of apocalyptic event for August 22nd. That sort of thing -- people working furiously to acquire nukes while looking to holy books for doomsday scenarios -- scares the hell out of me a lot more than a tinpot tyrant coveting Kuwaiti oil.
Sorry. Off the soapbox now. I don´t want this blog to be a political thing, and I´m not interested in starting lots of discussion back and forth about world events. I just couldn´t frickin´ believe I saw "September 9th" on the front page of the paper this morning, and I had to get this off my chest.