Why I Blog.

I am told that there are now millions of blogs. According to Lance Tracey there were over 50 million, worldwide in mid-2005.

That’s just a guesstimate because no one is keeping track.

Since I have seen just a few blogs – and only those that interest me – I will accept on faith the claim that most blogs are intensely personal. Most blogs – I am told are about our trips, about ourselves, about our family, as a way of keeping in touch. They are often personal diaries, left open for strangers to read.

I blog for a different reason. It’s partly for my acquaintances, sharing with them – via links to interesting articles – my interest in history and politics. But it’s partly for myself. It’s a place where I gather those things that are true and current so that, as the spinners and the snake-oil-salesmen try to rewrite history – to airbrush the past – I have a way of checking in with reality.

I am reminded of this by the current controversy over the movie that’s going to be aired by ABC on Sunday: “The Path to 9/11” as well as the recent report from the Senate Intelligence committee.

Regarding the lead-up to 9/11, I have yet to hear anyone make a credible statement anticipating this attack, and I include myself. I recall my brother-in-law making a comment about Bin laden late in the 1990s. I scoffed. What can a bearded camel herder hiding out in some God-forsaken hellhole in Africa or Asia do to us, I asked.

On 9/11 I found out.

And I changed my views. I also realized that people who were capable of killing thousands of people even while dying themselves were very dangerous in a world where technology allows one man to destroy a city. I also realized that threats and deterrence does not work against people who are willing, even anxious, to die. And I realized that there was a religion that was creating these people literally by the millions.

That religion rules the Middle East, and much of Africa and Asia. It was not an isolated band named Al Qaeda, headed by a solitary figure named Bin Laden. It was an entire culture, a religious movement and a mindset. And thanks to technology and the economic interdependence of the world, no nation, especially America, can withdraw behind its borders and oceans, pull up the welcome mat, and go back to the way it was.

And I also realized that the treat could not be stopped within our country because the enemy is too ruthless, too willing to die, to motivated. And the enemy had allies who ruled counties that had used WMDs and were perfectly capable of making more. The only thing we could do is take the fight to the enemy. So we opened one theater of that fight in Afghanistan and another in Iraq. But those will not be the end because this is a truly a global war; perhaps even more global than the last one because this time America will be a battleground.

So we live in perilous times, made more perilous by the fact that many people, for reasons of politics or for psychological reasons, don’t see this. And as a result, the West may lose this war. And the loss may be so gradual that we won’t even notice.

But I do not despair because I believe that there are enough good people in the West that we will prevail, but the fight will be bloody – both physically and spiritually.

In the meantime, this blog is a record, think of it as a newspaper archive, easily searched. That consists of contemporary records of what was said and done, so that the spinners and the lairs will have harder time of it.

It’s a little thing, but it’s mine.