Seven years on

It's the seventh anniversary of the Jihadist attacks of 2001. Memorials will be held in Washington, New York, and at the crash site of United flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It's still a shock to consider how effective those attacks were, and how much damage they did, not only on the day of the attacks themselves, but also in the long-lasting repercussions we're still dealing with.

The BBC reports:

Four minutes of silence are being held to mark the times when four hijacked passenger planes hit the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are attending a ceremony at Ground Zero in New York.

At the Pentagon, President George W Bush will dedicate a new memorial.

The memorial in Washington was built at a cost of $22m (£12.6m) on a 1.9-acre (0.77-hectare) parcel of land within view of the crash site.

In a typical result of bureaucratic mismanagement, the New York memorial is still totally wrapped in red tape, with no definite completion date on the horizon.

Mark Steyn, apparently back from hiatus, on what we should be calling the post-9/11 era:

It was launched in the days after 9/11 as a "war on terror," an artful evasion deemed necessary on the grounds that a war on any enemy beginning with "Islamist," "Islamo-," or "Islamic" might give the impression we had some, ah, issues with Islam itself and only complicate things further with various "friends" like Mubarak and the Saudis. Then, a couple of years back, the Administration rechristened (oops) the whole messy business "the Long War." And Newt Gingrich started describing it as World War III, on the grounds that it's a war on a global scale, and that's how we designate such conflicts, and as the last one so designated was Number Two, this must be Three.

Norman Podhoretz, in a famous essay, argued that it is, in fact, World War IV, Number Three being the Cold War. The author has now expanded his thesis into a short and characteristically trenchant book in which he argues vigorously in support of the "Bush Doctrine" — more vigorously, indeed, than most of the Administration or even the President would be prepared to argue these days.[1] Unlike Newt, Mr. Podhoretz is not one of nature's salesmen, but he recognizes that this product needs to be pitched. The Naming of Wars is not some semantic diversion for bored viziers on rainy afternoons, but a critical element in framing your strategic goals and — in a plump and prosperous democracy — bringing the citizenry along with you. As students of Harry Potter's sworn enemy — He Who Must Not Be Named — well know, the inability even to identify the foe speaks at the very minimum to a kind of psychological faintheartedness.

From the outset the "war on terror" was mocked by cynics as absurdly genteel — as if earlier generations of sensitive warmongers anxious not to give offense had proclaimed, in December of 1941, a war on dive-bombers.