"There are honorable ways to lose a war. This was not one of them. We have dishonored the dead of 9/11 and insulted their sacrifice."
. . . "We shall not resume our anniversary observances today. The war is lost, at home and abroad. On the domestic front, we doubled the rate of Muslim immigration to the west and began assimilating ourselves with Islam's strictures on freedom of expression and the like. The decade-and-a-half since the Danish Mohammed cartoons has been one long remorseless surrender on core western liberties. When a school teacher gets beheaded in the street, there is no outrage at the act, just a mild regret that he should have been foolish enough to provoke his own fate. Even the milder jests from the immediate post-9/11 era - the cartoon of the woman trying on new burqas in the changing room and wondering, "Does my bomb look big in this?" - would not be published today:
"In the broader society, our rulers quickly determined that it was easier to punish us than our enemies. The post-9/11 security state surely helped soften up western populations for the Chi-Com-19 lockdowns, in which entire nations have been reduced to TSA-administered airports.
"As for the war overseas, it ended with a military that can do everything except win handing the keys to Afghanistan back to the guys who pulled off 9/11 - and apologizing for the two-decade inconvenience by gifting the mullahs with some of the most expensive infrastructure on the planet plus an air force, approximately five assault rifles for every Taliban fighter, and express check-in for the forty-seven per cent of the Afghan population that apparently served as US translators.
"The position of the United States is far weaker than it was twenty years ago. Around the planet, the assumption of friends and enemies alike is that the American moment is over and the future belongs elsewhere. They are making their dispositions accordingly. It is not a question of wishing "the post-American world", but of accepting the known facts.". . .
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