In a year or two, and for decades afterward, historians will feel entirely free to second-guess what went so wrong both before and after Sept. 11.
Why did US intelligence fail? How could we have so foolishly put our oil connection with the Saudis above our national safety? Did we respond adequately to the economic effects of the crisis? Did the bombing of Afghanistan cause fragile allied governments to unravel? In our efforts to enhance security, did we sacrifice too many civil liberties or too few?
Why was our public health system allowed to deteriorate? And was George W. Bush up to the job?
For now, most of these questions still await answers, and it feels almost unseemly to be debating them. In a war, it's normal to rally round the flag and the president. Add the real national outrage at the incineration of the heart of our greatest city and you appreciate the lack of appetite for second-guessing.
Yet the questions are real and urgent. And in this war there is very little room for mistakes.
If the bombing does more harm to our relations with the larger Muslim world than to the Taliban, historians will judge the policy a disastrous miscalculation. If we fail to take the threat of biological warfare seriously enough, there could be mass civilian casualties. If we take it too seriously, we will needlessly sow mass panic. If we mistakenly blame Iraq, we fracture the alliance and widen the war. If we mistakenly exonerate Iraq, we are sitting ducks.
Despite necessary self-censorship regarding strictly military operations, our free press has admirably engaged these issues. Now many of the nation's political leaders are beginning to draw the important distinction between the need to support President Bush as commander in chief of US forces and the need to debate the details of his policies.
Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, has lambasted American policy for allowing the Saudi regime to tolerate financing of Osama bin Laden. It's a case of oil politics calling the tune, and no US administration has had tighter links to the petroleum industry than this one.
An antiterrorism bill has sailed through Congress, sacrificing rights of due process and privacy unrelated to the real security issues. Just one senator, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, and a few dozen House members were brave enough to vote no.
The so-called stimulus package, at least, is being widely challenged. The House Republican leadership rammed through a tax giveaway to corporations and upper-bracket individuals.
Corporations were promised last year that if they loyally supported Bush's $2 trillion general tax cut and did not load it up with Christmas tree special-interest breaks, they would be rewarded next time around.
That was before Sept. 11, but it did not stop the lobbying frenzy for the strangest form of wartime sacrifice ever. The bill retroactively provides rebates of $25 billion in corporate taxes that have already been paid. Worse, the House Republicans want the government to go even deeper into debt by selling war bonds. The idea is that ordinary citizens would patriotically take less than a normal rate of return on the bonds to finance tax cuts for the rich.
As the bill goes to the Senate, the Democrats have a somewhat better approach, which includes more money for unemployment compensation, health benefits for the unemployed, and tax breaks on the payroll tax so that lower-income workers can get some relief, too.
Even so, most Democrats have been too timid to offer the scale of spending the economy needs or to challenge frontally their president's tax cut. Two notable exceptions are Senator Ted Kennedy and Representative Barney Frank, both of Massachusetts.
Kennedy, in an important speech last Thursday, proposed a much larger stimulus bill with money for hard pressed states and cities that are now having to cut social service programs because their tax revenues are falling. Frank called for repeal of much of the Bush tax cut scheduled to take effect after 2004 so we can have money now for antirecession relief and the shoring up of Social Security. Some of this made it into the alternative Democratic bill.
In his widely praised address to the joint session of Congress, President Bush closed by contrasting our society with the autocratic fundamentalism of our adversaries. They hate us, he said, because of our freedom to disagree with each other.
Well said. And while we can agree that the terrorists must be hunted down, there is plenty that this administration proposes that begs for strenuous disagreement.
