sarah masen

addicted to 9/11

by David on Thu Oct 14 10:16:52 +0000 2004 in The Arsenal

Addicted to 9/11
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

 

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I hear the president and vice
president slamming John Kerry for saying that he hopes America can eventually
get back to a place where “terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but
they’re a nuisance.” The idea that President Bush and Mr. Cheney would declare
such a statement to be proof that Mr. Kerry is unfit to lead actually says more
about them than Mr. Kerry. Excuse me, I don’t know about you, but I dream of
going back to the days when terrorism was just a nuisance in our lives.

If I have a choice, I prefer not to live the rest of my life with the difference
between a good day and bad day being whether Homeland Security tells me it is
“code red” or “code orange” outside. To get inside the Washington office of the
International Monetary Fund the other day, I had to show my ID, wait for an
escort and fill out a one-page form about myself and my visit. I told my host:
“Look, I don’t want a loan. I just want an interview.” Somewhere along the way
we’ve gone over the top and lost our balance.

That’s why Mr. Kerry was actually touching something many Americans are worried
about – that this war on terrorism is transforming us and our society, when it
was supposed to be about uprooting the terrorists and transforming their
societies.

The Bush team’s responses to Mr. Kerry’s musings are revealing because they go
to the very heart of how much this administration has become addicted to 9/11.
The president has exploited the terrorism issue for political ends – trying to
make it into another wedge issue like abortion, guns or gay rights – to rally
the Republican base and push his own political agenda. But it is precisely this
exploitation of 9/11 that has gotten him and the country off-track, because it
has not only created a wedge between Republicans and Democrats, it’s also
created a wedge between America and the rest of the world, between America and
its own historical identity, and between the president and common sense.

By exploiting the emotions around 9/11, Mr. Bush took a far-right agenda on
taxes, the environment and social issues – for which he had no electoral mandate
- and drove it into a 9/12 world. In doing so, Mr. Bush made himself the most
divisive and polarizing president in modern history.

By using 9/11 to justify launching a war in Iraq without U.N. support, Mr. Bush
also created a huge wedge between America and the rest of the world. I
sympathize with the president when he says he would never have gotten a U.N.
consensus for a strategy of trying to get at the roots of terrorism by reshaping
the Arab-Muslim regimes that foster it – starting with Iraq.

But in politicizing 9/11, Mr. Bush drove a wedge between himself and common
sense when it came to implementing his Iraq strategy. After failing to find any
W.M.D. in Iraq, he became so dependent on justifying the Iraq war as the
response to 9/11 – a campaign to bring freedom and democracy to the Arab-Muslim
world – that he refused to see reality in Iraq. The president seemed to be
saying to himself, “Something so good and right as getting rid of Saddam can’t
possibly be going so wrong.” Long after it was obvious to anyone who visited
Iraq that we never had enough troops there to establish order, Mr. Bush simply
ignored reality. When pressed on Iraq, he sought cover behind 9/11 and how it
required “tough decisions” – as if the tough decision to go to war in Iraq, in
the name of 9/11, should make him immune to criticism over how he conducted the
war.

Lastly, politicizing 9/11 put a wedge between us and our history. The Bush team
has turned this country into “The United States of Fighting Terrorism.” “Bush
only seems able to express our anger, not our hopes,” said the Mideast expert
Stephen P. Cohen. “His whole focus is on an America whose role in the world is
to negate the negation of the terrorists. But America has always been about the
affirmation of something positive. That is missing today. Beyond Afghanistan,
they’ve been much better at destruction than construction.”

I wish Mr. Kerry were better able to articulate how America is going to get its
groove back. But the point he was raising about wanting to put terrorism back
into perspective is correct. I want a president who can one day restore Sept.
11th to its rightful place on the calendar: as the day after Sept. 10th and
before Sept. 12th. I do not want it to become a day that defines us. Because
ultimately Sept. 11th is about them – the bad guys – not about us. We’re about
the Fourth of July.
 

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