By Count Friedrich von Olsen
Fourteen years ago today, 19 people who were welcomed into this great country engaged in one of the most overtly destructive acts ever perpetrated against it. I have some thoughts on this, because I too, was welcomed into this country. In the end, my own thoughts confound me, because try as I might, I can’t understand why those 19 did what they did…
They used four planes, completing their missions with three of them. One, because of the heroics of several of those on board, dived into a field in Pennsylvania, killing all aboard but sparing the lives of many others, most likely in our nation’s capital. All told, the attacks claimed the lives of 2,977 victims, and the 19 hijackers. Of those killed, 343 were firefighters and 72 were policemen…
Responsibility for the attack has been placed with al-Qaeda. That in itself is troubling for me. Al-Qaeda originated as a movement in resistance to the Soviet Union when it invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day in 1979. That was a sneaky thing for the Soviets to do. They chose perhaps the one day in the entire year when people in the West are least prepared to make a reaction to such a deed…
My heart was with the Afghan resistance. More than my heart really. There were things I did in conjunction with some others that made that resistance effective. I won’t get into that now. Suffice it to say that before it was over there were a whole bunch of Soviet aircraft that were on the ground in a gazillion pieces. That was a simpler time. The Soviets and all they stood for could be clearly demarked as antithetical to the values I and others I know, love and respect hold dear. We were in league with Osama bin-Laden and his cohorts. We weren’t on the ground with them. We didn’t bleed when they bled, but we provided them with the means to make the Soviets bleed, and by God, the Soviets bled. They bled so much that after seven years, they backed out of Afghanistan…
Afghanistan was a victory we had in common with al-Qaeda and bin-Laden. We were comrades. What went wrong? How did our allies become our enemies?
At school, when teachers are providing students with lessons, the underlying orientation of those being taught can change what is being learned…
Here in the West, we come out of the Christian tradition. For us, Christmas is a special day. It has meaning and emotional import. What the Soviets did in violating the peace and sanctity of December 25 redounds differently, I now recognize, to us Westerners than it does to a non-Westerner. I must have missed that at the time…
Our erstwhile Afghan and al-Qaeda allies saw exactly what we saw, although they experienced it a little more closely than we did, when those paratroopers dropped into Kabul, soon to be followed by tanks and troop carriers. But they drew a different lesson than we did. They saw us caught flatfooted, out of position, distracted, unable to react. Christmas had no emotional or cultural significance to them. Its only significance was that it illustrated that at certain times, some more than others, we are very vulnerable…
Who knows why they chose the date of September 11. Maybe why they did does not matter. September 11 is not Christmas, December 25. It was just ten days before the end of summer. All that mattered was we were unprepared, unprepared to react to such a deed by 19 people we had welcomed into our country…