So having endured the memorials, the tributes and the solemn remembrances at the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we now brace for the memorials, tributes and solemn remembrances marking the fifth anniversary of 9-11. Remembering well is hard work, especially when you're forced to do it collectively, on a national or global scale.
On September 11, 2006, as we have done with Katrina, we will honor the dead and curse the randomness of their deaths. We will recall the cloudless, untroubled blue skies that dawned in the eastern United States that second Tuesday in September five years ago. We will acknowledge the grief of their survivors and condemn the fanatical crazies who were able to cause so much death, including their own.
We may even concede that, like Katrina, 9-11 produced some seismic shifts in our thinking about of ourselves and our sense of vulnerability. We will mourn; we will pray; we will celebrate our resilience, our ability to take a punch and punch back.
What we will not do, for the most part, is consider how this act of monumental barbarism was transformed into political opportunism and eventually into an international catastrophe on a grand scale.
One very crude analysis of our central response to the 9-11 attacks is that the war in Iraq has already cost us almost most as many American lives, 2,641, as the number of people killed on September 11, 2001, 2,997. If you count the 115 British troops killed so far, the 32 Italians, 18 Ukrainians, four Salvadorans, three Slovakians, two Dutch and one Kazakh, you're talking about a difference of 126 deaths between those killed on 9-11 and those killed in the war to avenge it.
But throw in the more than 300 killed in Afghanistan and the 19,000 wounded, and the whole adventure begins to look completely foolhardy. How do you even begin to factor in the cost of more than 50,000 civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan into the cost-benefit analysis about the rightness of the war?
If you listen to the White House, though, to worry about these issues or to focus too much on those numbers is to be defeatist, to be an appeaser of the terrorists: Stay the course is the only acceptable approach.
"Iraq is the central front in this war on terror," President Bush declared in Utah Thursday. "If we leave the streets of Baghdad before the job is done, we will have to face the terrorists in our own cities. We will stay the course, we will help this young Iraqi democracy succeed, and victory in Iraq will be a major ideological triumph in the struggle of the 21st century." Maybe so, maybe not.
But we do know that about two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the president's handling of Iraq, and only about one-third think that war has made us safer from terrorism. The White House, though, is pushing ahead, casting those who disagree as somehow constitutionally deficient.
"The security of the civilized world depends on victory in the war on terror, and that depends on victory in Iraq," the commander-in-chief told an American Legion audience in Salt Lake City. And, of course, he suggested that Democrats are the ones who want to take us down the rabbit hole.
The Washington Post reported this week that White House was launching an offensive to shore up support for the war and discredit its opponents: "Bush Team Cast Foes as Defeatist," screamed a headline Thursday.
The Utah speech was the first salvo in that onslaught. "Some politicians look at our efforts in Iraq and see a diversion from the war on terror," Bush said, "That would come as news to Osama bin Laden, who proclaimed that the 'third world war is raging' in Iraq."
Note the sly shift, from an analysis of the war's effectiveness to the inflammatory rhetoric about a diabolical terrorist, to rationalize the need for a war that's been called into question. The war in Iraq could be both a diversion from the war on terror and the beginning of the third World War. It is not, but the desperate need to fuse Iraq with 9-11 continues apace.
There, in just a few sentences, splashed like a Pollock painting on a continental-sized billboard, is the Bush administration's major sin on the Iraq War thrown into sharp relief: a constant and cynical rationalization of a series of disastrous decisions that have yielded disastrous consequences.
The polls say this is a hard sell for the president, but rest assured that between the 9-11 anniversary and Election Day, Iraq will emerge in the president's rhetoric as a stirring example of the good war, well fought. And Katrina, well, she is the Queen of Albania.
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C.
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