Like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, the assault on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was a complete surprise. Politicians, pundits and quasi-historians have tried to find similarities in the two events, but there are few other real parallels.
Everyone older than 20 remembers whom he was with, what he was doing and how he learned we were at war that beautiful Tuesday morning a decade ago. Most of us recall a gorgeous late-summer morning with blue skies - “shirt-sleeve weather” - and then the horror: two of the world’s tallest buildings collapsing into piles of rubble, the west wall of the Pentagon in flames and a fire-bathed crater in the soil of Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
Thanks to young Americans wearing helmets, flak jackets, flight suits and combat boots, Saddam Hussein – the Butcher of Baghdad – is no more and Osama bin Laden is dead. Al Qaeda, the vicious radical Islamist movement bin Laden spawned, is fractured and badly damaged but still alive in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Chechnya and seeks to take advantage of uncertainty in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. The Ayatollahs in Iran are guiding violence in Syria and threatening stability in Iraq.
The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance,....well, said Colonel North!
God Bless and Keep our brave men and women, some who have made immeasurable sacrifices,....sometimes giving the last full measure, in the fight against evil forces who are seeking the destruction of the United States simply because we are the bastion of Christianity and the lighthouse of freedom for the world.
