The Disgrace of Ground Zero

By Alan Caruba

9/11/2009 took a large psychic toll on Americans.

I am no exception. By early evening, I found myself profoundly angry watching the Mayor of New York explain why Ground Zero is still essentially a hole in the ground eight years after the destruction of the Twin Towers.

This nation fought and won World War Two in four years’ time and in two separate theatres of war in the Pacific and in Europe. By the time it was over, the major cities of Germany and Japan were rubble and both armies and civilians were among the dead because the only way to convince an enemy to stop waging war is to destroy their will to continue.

History tells us this over and over again. It is the reason the Romans laid siege to Masada.

We have been in Afghanistan since 2001 and in Iraq since 2003. What we’ve been doing there is more a police action than a war.

That’s why the Korean War is officially called a United Nations police action, not a war. We settled for a stalemate.

When there were riots in Los Angeles and Newark that was a police action using the military. What we are asking our troops to do these days in far off, dangerous places is not a war.

We have reached a point where the present administration will not even call it a war. It doesn’t get more pathetic than that.

So, as I looked at that hole in the ground in lower Manhattan, I wondered why, if the owner of that vast property, the developer, had been able to completely rebuild other structures and rent them out, why the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had been unable or unwilling to rebuild the Twin Towers?

They have the blueprints!

What better way to tell America’s enemies, the fanatical al Qaeda—the spear point of the Islamic Jihad—that they could not and would not defeat us?

In World War Two we knew who the enemy was. We named them and we created a great war machine to utterly destroy them.

More than a half century later, our government will not say “terrorists”, cannot say “Islamists,” and all the while, the center of the Islamic Revolution, Iran, relentlessly works to acquire its own nuclear weapons.

There is a proper place for several “ground zeros” and they are the known sites where Iran is refining the fissionable material for nuclear weapons and building missiles.

Meanwhile, why must I watch interviews in front of a hole in the ground that is eight years old?

Ground Zero is an American disgrace.