Commemorate 9/11 By Stopping Iran

On this tenth anniversary of Islamist terrorists striking America, there will be many tributes to the victims and heroes of Sept. 11, including Sunday’s ceremonies in lower Manhattan. But the best way to honor America’s dead is not solely to remember them. It is to win the war against the enemies who killed them.

In that spirit, one of the best commemorations  — perhaps the most appropriate of all — can be found in Times Square, where a patriotic nonprofit called United Against Nuclear Iran, or UANI, has put up a billboard about Sept. 11. It reads: “AS WE REMEMBER 9/11 TEN YEARS LATER, AL QAEDA’S SILENT PARTNER IS COMING TO NEW YORK.” Under that caption is today’s most prominent face of the Tehran regime, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — who will be arriving in New York later this month to deliver his seventh speech since 2005 at the annual opening of the United Nations General Assembly.

What does Iran have to do with Al Qaeda? Plenty, as the U.S. Treasury detailed in July. UANI, a bipartisan outfit headed by a former U.S. envoy to the UN, Ambassador Mark Wallace, provides a much fuller account, in a report on its web site, “Alliance Against America: Al Qaeda and Iran.” Most immediately, UANI is calling on New York hotels to refuse lodging to Ahmadinejad and his entourage. The broader message here is that Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, now pursuing nuclear weapons, has been acting in cahoots with Al Qaeda since the early 1990s. This alliance poses a “formidable and menacing threat” to America. This is part of the same war that brought – to borrow an Iranian slogan — “death to America,” out of blue skies, on Sept. 11.

When the Greatest Generation rallied around the slogan “Remember Pearl Harbor!” the aim was not solely to remember the dead of that horrific surprise attack, but to win World War II. So it needs to be in the remembrances this September. Mourn the dead, honor the victims and the heroes — and cast an eye at that billboard in Times Square. Here it is again. The best way, the only way, to keep faith with those dead is to win this war.