| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_025018)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_025018" |
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| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| 22 |
| The masters and preachers of terror had told their foot soldiers, and |
| the great mass on the fence, that the Americans would make a run for |
| it— as they had in Lebanon and Somalia, that they didn't have the |
| stomach for a fight. The Arabs barely took notice when America |
| struck the Taliban in Kabul. What was Afghanistan to them? It was a |
| blighted and miserable land at a safe distance. |
| But the American war, and the sense of righteous violation, soon hit |
| the Arab world itself. Saddam Hussein may not have been the Arab |
| idol he was a decade earlier, but he was still a favored son of that |
| Arab nation, its self-appointed defender. The toppling of his regime, |
| some 18 months or so after 9/11, had brought the war closer to the |
| Arabs. The spectacle of the Iraqi despot flushed out of his spider hole |
| by American soldiers was a lesson to the Arabs as to the falseness and |
| futility of radicalism. |
| It is said that "the east" is a land given to long memory, that there the |
| past is never forgotten. But a decade on, the Arab world has little to |
| say about 9/11—at least not directly. In the course of that Arab |
| Spring, young people in Tunisia and Egypt brought down the dreaded |
| dictators. And in Libya, there is the thrill of liberty, delivered, in part, |
| by Western powers. In the slaughter-grounds of Syria, the rage is not |
| directed against foreign demons, but against the cruel rulers who |
| have robbed that population of a chance at a decent life. |
| America held the line in the aftermath of 9/11. It wasn't brilliant at |
| everything it attempted in Arab lands. But a chance was given the |
| Arabs to come face to face, and truly for the first time, with the |
| harvest of their own history. Now their world is what they make of it. |
| Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover |
| Institution and co-chair of the Working Group on Islamism and the |
| International Order. |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_025018 |
|
|
