Slouching Towards 9/11

By Frank Rich
New York Times

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There are eight million 9/11 stories in the Naked City. Be grateful that I will spare you mine.

The avalanche about to descend is heavy enough as it is: more than 150 books, a landfill of commemorative magazines and newspapers, 90 hours of special television programming replaying the greatest hits from America's most lethal hit. "We're going to be reliving it in such a way that newspapers can sell newspapers and networks can get ratings," said Madeleine Smithberg, the executive producer of Jon Stewart's "Daily Show." "The overall effect is that you become numb to something you should never become numb to."

Though "The Daily Show" will be mum on the 11th, nearly every other market niche will be patriotically served, each according to its demographic. The Food Network will replace its morning programs with what one executive calls "tasteful, mellow instrumental music." ESPN has a documentary on sports in Afghanistan after the Taliban. My own favorite channel, Turner Classic Movies, will offer the camp take on an attack on the Manhattan skyline: a rerun of "King Kong" (mercifully not the World Trade Center-relocated Jessica Lange remake).

Fox has titled its 9/11 special "The Day America Changed," and those looking for an alternative can surf to "The Day That Changed America" on CBS. But here is one way America has not changed. Our history still repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, but most of all as entertainment, with a full line of merchandise and an undertow of nostalgia. Only the time frame has been compressed. In merely a year, "Let's Roll!" has gone from being a hero's brave cry to a Neil Young song to the Florida State football team's official slogan to a T-shirt to No. 1 on next week's Times best-seller list. This is all reassuring. If the terrorists' aim was in part to wreck America's premier export -- our culture -- we can say with confidence that they have not won.

Even so, there have been some changes over the past year, starting with the strange disappearance of the Democratic Party. In foreign-policy debates on TV these days "the left" is now represented by the G.O.P. gargoyle Lawrence Eagleburger. On the right, political correctness has also turned inside out. Those who once deplored the suppression of free speech on campus are now calling for it if the subject under discussion is the Koran.

But we remain a resilient nation, and much is just as it was a year ago. Old Normal: Gary Condit, Lizzie Grubman. New Normal: Michael Skakel, Lizzie Grubman. Last Labor Day's Time magazine cover story, "Where Have You Gone, Colin Powell?" -- depicting the secretary of state as the Bush administration's odd man out -- is as timely as ever. Afghanistan has again dropped off most Americans' radar screens. We are still encouraged to guzzle gas without feeling guilty about our slavish dependence on allies like the one that spawned 15 of the 19 hijackers. Union Square once more is innocent of fliers with the legend "MISSING."

Of course we still remember the missing, and mourn them, and not even a maudlin, self-aggrandizing media orgy a year later could so deaden our senses that we would forget. But a certain national numbness, or perhaps amnesia, is settling in. If we remember the dead of Sept. 11 vividly, we are gradually losing sight of those who carried out their slaughter. Wasn't our mission to track down Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, dead or alive, before they struck again? We are now gearing up to fight another war that has been grandfathered into the war on terrorism. While it too targets an unambiguous evildoer, it is a different mission that is already obscuring the first and may yet defeat it.

Each week brings new evidence that our original task has largely been left unfulfilled in the wake of our early and successful routing of the Taliban. The Los Angeles Times has reported that the nearly 600 prisoners from 43 countries being held in U.S. military custody at Guantánamo Bay have yielded no senior Qaeda leaders whatsoever. On Wednesday The Washington Post found that two of the most important of those missing leaders are operating at full tilt out of Iran, where they are "directly involved in planning Al Qaeda terrorist operations," despite the Pentagon's announcement that one of them had been killed in Afghanistan in January.

The fact that this unhappy news arrives late and muted can be attributed in part to one other post-9/11 change. The Bush administration, never open to begin with, has now turned secrecy into a crusade so extreme that it is even fighting in court to protect the confidentiality of Bill Clinton's sleazy dealings with Marc Rich. (Why? Perhaps the executive privilege at stake would help hide its Energy Task Force's sleazy dealings with Enron.) There's a legitimate debate whether the defeat of terrorism justifies constitutional shortcuts -- and that argument is playing out in court, where there have now been four judgments against the government this year, including a unanimous appellate decision this week. But more and more the argument is academic. The administration's blanket secrecy has less to do with the legitimate good of protecting our security than with the political goal of burying its own failures.

By keeping the names and court proceedings of his detainees under wraps, John Ashcroft could for months cover up his law enforcement minions' inability to apprehend a single terrorist connected to 9/11. The same stunt has been pulled by designating prisoners "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo. Jose Padilla, the "dirty bomber," whose arrest was trumpeted by the attorney general as the breakup of a major terrorist plot, turns out to be a nonentity who may not be charged with anything. But as long as Mr. Padilla is locked away in a legal deep freeze, that embarrassment can be kept on the q.t. In the same spirit, the F.B.I. is now investigating 17 members of the Senate Intelligence Committee for leaks to the press; revealingly, the leaks that angered Dick Cheney and prompted this investigation were not leaks about intelligence per se but leaks about how our government bungled intelligence on this administration's watch just before 9/11.

Now "America's New War," as CNN once branded it, is about to give way to "America's Newer War," and you have to wonder what if anything we have learned. George W. Bush is in a box, and one of his own making. If he does not attack Iraq now, after months of swagger, he will destroy his own credibility and hurt the country's. But if he does, he is in another bind. Even though the administration maintains that it needs neither allies nor Congressional approval, the president still needs the support of the American people unless he wants to mimic another hubristic Texan president who took a backdoor route into pre-emptive warfare.

"An all-out attack on Iraq will entail a level of risk and sacrifice that the U.S. has not assumed since Vietnam," wrote the author of "Black Hawk Down," the combat journalist Mark Bowden, this week. As this reality sinks in, support for war with Iraq is falling -- from 70 percent last fall to 51 percent now, according to the new Time/CNN poll. A Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that only 40 percent would approve if there are ground troops and significant American casualties.

But let's posit that the Iraq drumbeating is not a cynical effort to distract the country from the stalled war against Al Qaeda or the stalled economy. Let's posit that the administration rationale, set out by Mr. Cheney when he emerged from the Halliburton witness protection program this week, is solid. If indeed "there is no doubt" that Saddam Hussein already "has weapons of mass destruction" to use against us and "time is not on our side," then why these months of dithering that allow our enemy to lay his traps? Why doesn't a president with a high approval rating rally the country at once and count on it to follow? Is it that Mr. Bush doesn't trust the evidence against Saddam, or is it that he doesn't trust us -- or is it that he still thinks terrorists can be fought on a schedule we dictate? The logic of Mr. Cheney's urgent arguments, William F. Buckley observed this week, would suggest that "the American people should now be told that we are at war against Saddam Hussein."

We should also be told, in the words of James Baker, that it "cannot be done on the cheap." Does a president who since 9/11 has asked us for no larger sacrifice than longer waits at the airport have the guts to tell us this? If not, we are back where we came in one long year ago.

August 31, 2002  Bulatlat.com

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