There's no shortage of fifth-anniversary articles about the 9/11 attacks. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a series like many papers have. All the ones I'm referencing in this post are from the Chronicle of 09/10/06.
The lead editiorial is Five years into a new world. This sentence in the middle at the end of a paragraph jumped out at me:
Many intelligence experts predict that during the next decade, Britain, with its homegrown terrorists, will be a greater source of trouble for the United States than the Middle East.
Maybe that pathetic Tony Blair didn't do us such a great favor by submissively following Bush into the Iraq War. The editorial also says:
Our goal should be to develop a strategy that allows us to combat terrorism while remaining an effective democracy ourselves.
This, unfortunately, requires us to confront some harsh realities. The first is that no strategy for defeating terrorism has proven as effective as the practice of infiltrating terrorist groups and working, sometimes over the course of decades, to defeat them from the inside. It's fine to have our law enforcement strategy of terrorism - find the bad guys, send out the squad, bust in the door, kill them - but it's even better to have strategies for law enforcement and counterterrorism and diplomacy and public health and nation-building, and yes, propaganda. Otherwise, we're just creating grief for ourselves and losing allies in the very places we need to deter terrorists. ...
The second reality is that we need a better international-relations strategy. We have to stop being so myopic - probably the most valuable thing in Bush's new strategy is the National Security Language Initiative, on the very last page. This initiative strives to expand American foreign language instruction, beginning in early childhood. The fact that the FBI has only a few agents capable of speaking Arabic fluently goes a long way toward explaining that agency's many failures, but it also goes a long way toward explaining why America is failing to grasp the nature of our enemy. One of the reasons we don't understand why they hate us so is because we're not listening. If we're going to be serious about terrorism, we'll have to get serious about our own actions, too - the real costs of our unilateralism, our addiction to oil, our support for repressive governments in the Middle East and our lack of will when it comes to the dirty work of nation-building. (my emphasis)
But why is our "press corps" so fascinated by the phantom of bipartisanship, which under the Cheney-Bush administration normally just means Democrats supporting what Cheney and Bush want on a particular subject? They write: "Many Americans are tiring of the partisan wars and our lack of direction in Iraq." The problem with the Iraq War in particular was not that there was too much partisanship, but rather that the Democrats failed to function as effectively as they should have as an opposition party.
Vicki Haddock writes that Almost all our assumptions about how 9/11 would alter our lives forever turned out to be wrong. This article pretty much falls into the category of something written to give people who don't have anything coherent to say a way to talk about this without actually having to know anything. For instance:
It would be wrong not to give the United States some credit for successfully evading further attacks to date. A Congressional Budget Office analysis noted the federal government would spend nearly $50 billion on homeland security last year, almost triple the amount spent prior to the 2001 attacks. The Bush administration consolidated several agencies into a new Department of Homeland Security. Airport security has been strengthened, cockpit doors bolted, and air marshals patrol the skies.
Sufficient smallpox vaccine has been produced, emergency-response systems revised, bureaucratic barriers between intelligence agencies dismantled.
But then she contines with, oh, yeah, we're still wetting our pants over terrorist water bottles and terrorist baby-food and terrorist fingernail polish at the airports. Oh, and some people kind of thing the following shows a gap in emergency preparedness:
But to many Americans, the most startling revelation of our woeful inadequacy to respond to a large terrorist assault came last summer, when Hurricane Katrina walloped the Gulf Coast and turned New Orleans into a living hell.
Gee, how would anyone have thought that?
I hope Mark Sandalow is right about this: Fear's Political Capital Shrinks. He writes:
When the Pew Foundation asked 1,506 adults in August which single issue they would most want to hear a candidate talk about, only 1 in 50 responded "terror."
Analysts attribute the terror issue's diminished intensity to several factors, including President Bush's struggles in Iraq and with Hurricane Katrina, which have shattered his popularity and raised doubts about his ability to lead the fight on terrorism. Emboldened Democrats believe they have neutralized the GOP's advantage on the issue by overcoming their post-Sept 11 hesitation and aggressively challenging Bush on national security.
And perhaps most important, as the immediacy of the attacks fades, Americans are less scared than they used to be.
Part of what he points out, in a somewhat obscure way, is that the Democrats are now challenging the Republicans' failures, lies and demagoguery about terrorism in a way that they have been afraid to do before. Sandalow concludes:
Bush's recent series of speeches and the five-year remembrances of Sept. 11 may stir emotions. Yet the evolution of the fight against terrorism from crisis into just one of many issues in the larger political mix is a sign that many Americans have moved on.
If his reading of the public mood is right, I don't think it reflects a feeling that people "have moved on". But it reflects that fact that people understand a lot more about the issues and see glaring problems like the Iraq War and the Katrina disaster and see that what's happening doesn't square with the Cheney-Bush rhetoric about how effectively they're fighting the GWOT (global war on terrorism).
Bob Egelko writes that Bush Continues to Wield Power. Not much of a headline, but there's more content to the article:
But the predominant force shaping the law in the past five years has been President Bush's assertion of supreme legal as well as political authority as commander-in-chief in the war on terror.
Bush has ordered the National Security Agency to intercept phone calls between Americans and suspected foreign terrorists without the court warrants required by Congress in 1978. He has ordered foreigners and at least two U.S. citizens detained as "enemy combatants'' and argued that courts have no power to review their imprisonment or interrogation.
He has dramatically increased the use of the state-secrets defense against lawsuits challenging his actions, arguing that some government operations, including National Security Agency surveillance, are too sensitive to be judged in court. And in presidential signing statements he has claimed the power to reinterpret or disregard hundreds of laws passed by Congress, frequently saying they would interfere with his constitutional authority over foreign policy.
Somehow, though, he manages to see John Yoo as a credible Constitutional authority instead of the rightwing ideologue and enabler of criminal torture that he is. And he doesn't seem to think all this stuff about the President claiming the right to ignore the laws and the Constitution on his own discretion with no outside review is any big deal.
Lord forbid that a newspaper columnist would be some "partisan" as to defend the law and the Constitution in print. Gee, some Republican might get their feelings hurt.
Ruth Ciesinger of Der Tagesspiegel writes in World Views of Attack Varied:
It is very hard not to cry when you read the transcripts of the last words people trapped in the World Trade Center spoke to phone operators while facing their death. Their fate was horrible, the attack monstrous, and five years later sympathy for the victims has not diminished in Germany. But the attitude toward the American government has changed. In the days after 9/11, hundred of thousands of Germans marched silently in the streets, attended church services in memory of the dead and brought flowers to the American embassy.There was an overwhelming sense among Germans that they had been attacked as well, especially when it became clear the assassins had plotted most of the attacks while some of them were living untroubled by police or any other authorities in Hamburg.
Seventeen months later, more than 1 million Germans marched through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin again. This time not in silence but shouting slogans like "U.S. out of Iraq" and "No blood for oil."
... While German air-force soldiers went into combat in 1999 in Kosovo for the first time since World War II, there was never any notion, not even among conservative politicians, of Germany's joining the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq. (my emphasis)
The bolded sentence in that last quote shows another place where our Potemkin press corps let down the public badly the last five years. They cheerfully played the White House spin that the naughty German Social Democrats were opposed and the delustional idea (which the Bush team actually seemed to believe) that the cosnervative Christian Democrats would have been more supportive. As a consequence of reporting like this, the average newspaper reader wouldn't get a good idea of how strongly many of the Cheney-Bush policies are opposed by the public in European democracies.
James Sterngold writes about Lessons From Libya Strategy:
In December 2003, Libya agreed to abandon a clandestine nuclear weapons program and its sponsorship of global terrorism in return for a package of economic incentives and emergence from pariah status.
The agreement signified more than shutting down a major source of terrorism, most notoriously the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people. The deal suggested alternative strategies for confronting terrorism, because it was achieved with far different means from those the Bush administration has generally employed since Sept. 11, 2001.
Libya was persuaded to abandon terrorism through diplomacy and sanctions, not preemptive military force. It was done on a multilateral basis - Britain played the leading role - not with a largely unilateral thrust. It followed the interception of a cargo ship filled with irrefutable evidence, not suspicions, that Libya had a nuclear program.
And, it left a dictator in power, with no provocative talk of regime change or spreading democracy. Experts disagree on how the Libya model might be applied, but at the least it suggests the discussion of strategy should go beyond "stay the course" or "cut and run."
"Libya's about the only success we've had from a strategic perspective that I see out there," said Eugene Habiger, a retired Air Force general and former head of the U.S. Strategic Command, which operates the nation's nuclear forces. "That same model or something like it might have worked in Iraq. At least it's a good starting point for a real debate that we need to have." (my emphasis)
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