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September 15, 2001

Bush, in the rubble, rises to the occasion

By Christie Blatchford National Post

NEW YORK - To the malevolent and still smouldering heart of the very city that in other days has mocked him most cruelly as Dubya, the clown president both curiously privileged and unaccomplished, George Bush arrived yesterday afternoon.

He wore one of those little beige windbreakers that American dads have always donned on weekends to signify that now they are at home, with the family.

Again and again, he flashed a thumbs-up, that dated gesture most often seen on this country's playing fields, to a huddled mass of firefighters.

He kept a constant arm around a tremulous fireman who was at his side, and when Mr. Bush was moving through the throng of rescuers, he shook about 400 hands and patted hundreds more of strong and unbent backs, as though he simply could not bear to go long without the warmth of human touch.

The President clambered onto a great mound of debris -- more than 10,400 tons of this grim rubble already has been removed from the World Trade Center crime scene -- grabbed a bullhorn and began to speak to the men with the lousiest job in the world, those sifting through buckets in which are both the remains of a nation's innocents and the shards of her innocence.

These men began to raise their fists and chant, that chorus heard on Olympic podiums and that so often has irritated even America's friends, "USA! USA! USA!"

"I can hear you!" President Bush said into his bullhorn.

The crowd of rescue workers, fire, police and volunteers, wretched and wet under rubber coats and hard hats, roared.

"The rest of the world hears you," he said, to more cheers and hoots.

"And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"

It was another president, Abraham Lincoln, who said, of moments when the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present, "The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise to the occasion."

It seems this 55-year-old man who looked so small, wounded and stricken may be doing just that.

http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary/columnists/story.html?f=/stories/20010915/689549.html

What I Saw at the Devastation A mother's worries, the media's heroism--and a city at its best.

Thursday, September 13, 2001 12:01 a.m.

This, for me, is the unforgettable image of the day: the fine gray ash that covered everything downtown, all the people and buildings and cars; the ash that flew into the air in the explosions and the burning and that settled over half the city. It was just like Pompeii, which also was taken by surprise and also was left covered top to bottom with ash, fine gray ash.

This is what everyone in New York says, sooner or later, when they talk about what happened: "It was such a beautiful day. It was the most beautiful day of the year." It was. Clear stunning cloudless skies, warm but not hot, a breeze. It was so clear that everyone in town and Jersey and the outer boroughs--everyone could see the huge, thick plumes and clouds of black and gray smoke. Everyone could see what happened.

And when it began, everyone was doing something innocent. It was morning in New York in the fall and workers were getting coffee and parents were taking their children to school.

And yet: For all the horror we are lucky. If you are reading these words you are among the beneficiaries of great good fortune. Those of us who were not in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon or nearby, those of us who were not among the terrified victims on the planes, those were not heroic firemen and tough cops---on a local TV show last night the reporter Dick Oliver was asked how it was that so many firemen died, couldn't they have escaped, and he said, with a rough voice that had love in it, "Firemen don't run out of buildings. Firemen run into buildings"--are blessed indeed.

And not only because we are alive. We are lucky because for some reason--for some reason, and we don't even know what it was--the terrorists didn't use a small nuclear weapon floated into New York on a barge in the East River. We are lucky that this didn't turn nuclear, chemical or biological. It could have, and I thought the next time the bad guys hit it would have. Instead they used more "conventional" weapons, fuel-heavy airliners and suicide bombers. And so the number of dead will be in the thousands or tens of thousands and not millions or tens of millions.

We have been spared. And now, chastened and shaken, we are given another chance, maybe the last chance, to commit ourselves seriously and at some cost to protecting our country.

People were saying "This is like Pearl Harbor," but it wasn't Pearl Harbor. Our fleet wasn't taken out; we weren't attacked by a nation whose planes had clear markings; we lost 10,000 or 20,000 people, and they were civilians. If it has to be a movie, yesterday really to most of us in New York was "Titanic." It was the end of a world, the drowning of illusions as brave men and women held hands and jumped; it was, I hope, the end of the assumptions that ease and plenty will continue forever, that we rich and powerful folk will be kept safe by our status, wealth and luck; it was the end of a culture of indifference to our nation's safety. Those Twin Towers, those hard and steely symbols of the towering city: they were the ship that God himself couldn't sink.

http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/

Bush's war 

Chris Matthews Thursday, September 13, 2001 ©2001 San Francisco Chronicle

 Washington -- LUCKY THOUGH he was, Bill Clinton never had his shot at greatness. He could lower the jobless rate, balance the budget, console us after the Oklahoma City bombing.

But he never got the opportunity George W. Bush was given this Tuesday: the historic chance to lead. Our American spirit, power and enterprise now stand ready for orders. Only the president can give them.

Only the man in the White House can tell us whom to strike and with what weapon.

Bush's first challenge is to size up the enemy for us. Americans need to know what we're up against.

Most important, we need to know that we face an adversary who is ruthless in exploiting our distinctive strengths and character and using both against us.

Think of the hijackers. They volunteered for a mission that required them to kill American women flight attendants by their own hand and to fly planes loaded with screaming, pleading passengers to their certain deaths.

They set out cold-bloodedly to kill Americans face to face, then to plunge into the face of death themselves.

At each step, they exploited Americans and American assets to destroy American assets and Americans.

-- Freedom: Anyone can cross the border from Canada into the United States. Anybody can get on an American airplane. All you need is some phony driver's license.

-- Courage: The hijackers were said to have lured our pilots from their cockpits by killing one female flight attendant after another.

They exploited a pilot's gutsy concern for his crew to gain control of his plane.

-- Technology: The plotters knew how to fly our big commercial jets, even when loaded down with fuel. They knew the flight maps to Manhattan and the Pentagon. From a previous bombing, they knew the structural weaknesses of the World Trade Center towers. They combined this knowledge with the cold ease of a chemist.

If Bush is smart, he will tell the American people exactly what we're dealing with here: a smart, state-of-the-art, ruthless enemy whose route to eternal glory is over our dead bodies.

If Bush is smart, he knows that the hijackers have anticipated -- and discounted -- his own next steps as well. He will share that fact as well with the American people.

After all, we have all been this way before.

-- 1986: A bomb detonates in a West Berlin nightclub killing two American servicemen. Ten days later, U.S. planes attack the camp of Libya's Moammar Khadafy. Fifteen years later, three Germans, a Palestinian and a Libyan are on trial in Berlin for staging the nightclub bombing.

-- 1988: Pan Am Flight 103 explodes over Scotland. One man gets life imprisonment in a Dutch court. His co-defendant is acquitted.

-- 1993: When the World Trade Center is bombed, an FBI probe leads to the arrest and conviction of six Islamic extremists loyal to Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman.

-- 1998: After Bin Laden bombs U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Clinton bombs a factory in Sudan, a camp in Afghanistan. Later, four men are found guilty of the embassy bombings. Today, 13 others remain at large.

-- 2000: When a suicide bomber strikes the U.S. destroyer Cole, Clinton makes defiant remarks. Eight people are arrested in Yemen but the investigation continues.

Which route does President Bush take this time?

He vowed in his TV address to bring the hijackers "to justice." Does that mean a long, painstaking probe that takes the matter to some distant courtroom?

Bush also said he will target those who "harbor" the hijackers as well as the plotters themselves. Does that mean a wider attack on a country such as Afghanistan, the current home of Bin Laden?

One danger is that, like the pilots on those doomed airliners, President Bush will do what the hijackers expect him to. He will launch a retaliatory raid against some defenseless people thereby creating blood enemies of the United States. This is a step that even Israel, despite every provocation, has been wise to avoid.

Another danger is that President Bush will appear to be doing nothing at all, that he will lack the fire for this task.

The goal here is not to get mad but to get even. That said, getting mad is not a bad place to start.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/09/13/ED118566.DTL

CARL HIAASEN

It's a nightmare

This is the nightmare that comes true, the nightmare from which we cannot awake. The nightmare that leaves us numb and hollow-eyed and fumbling when our children ask why anyone would do such a horrible thing.

To make a political statement -- that's the answer, isn't it? That's what they say is going on here.

Somebody wanted to make a point, somebody who didn't like the United States very much. So their solution was to arrange a nightmare.

Fanatics hijack planes full of innocent people and crash them into buildings packed with more innocent people. Thousands die, while thousands more are terribly injured.

And in some distant land, there's dancing in the streets.

It's a difficult thing to explain to our kids, especially because we don't actually understand it ourselves.

Oh, we can talk about ancient feuds and holy wars, but it all boils down to slaughter -- wanton, cowardly, gleeful slaughter. No reasonable explanation exists, and that's probably what we ought to tell our children -- the awful truth. Level with them.

Kids, don't waste your time trying to understand such lunacy. The lesson here is brutally simple: No place is safe. No one is out of reach.

This is the world they're inheriting, God help them.

For now we're left with feelings beyond despair and helplessness -- a vacant, bleary addiction that glues us to the television, where we watch the smoking rubble and the body bags and the replays that always end the same way. . . . The plane hits the building, the building falls down. It's like a scene out of a disaster movie, except it really happened. It's happening still.

All we can do is shake our heads and be thankful that none of our loved ones was on any of those airliners, or in any of those buildings. And we can weep for those who were lost and those they left behind.

Before long we'll know exactly how many people perished yesterday morning, and who they were. We'll hear stories of astonishing valor and of crushing sorrow.

Slowly, America will get back to business. The stock markets and airports will reopen, and the branches of government will reconvene. Then the cold consuming task of investigation will commence, producing mountains of evidence. Eventually we'll learn not only who staged the attack on New York and Washington, D.C., but precisely how it was executed.

We'll know the names and code names of the suicide hijackers, how they selected their flights, how they thwarted airport security and perhaps even how they gained control of the planes.

In this way the nightmare will be exhaustively annotated, but it won't go away.

Perhaps every modern generation of Americans is doomed to have an unthinkable tragedy imbedded in its psyche. For my parents' generation, it was Pearl Harbor; for mine, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King.

Like yesterday's terrorist attack, those events seemed inconceivable at the time. The images have never lost their impact and never stopped haunting -- the USS Arizona, billowing black smoke into the Hawaiian sky; the Zapruder film, freezing the instant that President Kennedy's head was blown apart in Dallas.

And now the towers of the World Trade Center, crumbling in an inferno.

Even if a day comes when we know all there is to know about this crime, it will still defy comprehension.

History is full of such horrors and bloodbaths, unleashed on a whim -- somebody wanting to make a political statement, somebody wanting to make a point.

As our children grow older, they'll realize the futility of searching for logic in heartless evil. They'll stop asking why, for the same reasons we stopped asking. The answer is soul-deadening, the stuff of nightmares.

http://www.miami.com/herald/content/opinion/columnists/hiaasen/digdocs/077597.htm

Bush Is No Giuliani; He Shouldn't Even Try

What should Bush do? Not listen to the New York Times. The Times editorial page urges Bush to "earn the country's confidence ... by appearing frequently in public, and by not being afraid to answer questions." In other words, Bush should be more like Giuliani. It's hard to believe this advice is offered in good faith--if Bush's staff trusted him to answer questions he would have made a practice of answering them long ago. Bush isn't Giuliani and won't become Giuliani. If it's important that the nation be effectively and constantly reassured, then we shouldn't pin our hopes on the slim possibility of presidential "growth in office."

A safer course would be for Bush to implicitly accept his limitations and abandon the traditional FDR model (adopted by Giuliani) in which the chief executive himself is also the chief public confidence-inspirer. True, there's a certain value in the public being able to see first hand that the man in charge is in fact in charge. But this is no time to hold out for the ideal. Bush has assembled a competent Cabinet capable, with varying degrees of success, of communicating that competence. Let them do the talking, while Bush visits hospitals and is photographed chairing National Security Council meetings.

P.S.: In echoing the media criticism of Bush, I'm under no illusion that a President Gore would have inspired more confidence. Nor do I especially wish Bill Clinton were back in office. Clintonian levels of empathy are not what the current situation calls for. (This isn't a natural disaster.) And Clinton's reaction to the last major bout of terrorism--his bombing of the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan--does not at this point look like one of his finer moments in office.

http://slate.msn.com/code/kausfiles/kausfiles.asp?Show=9/13/2001&idMessage=8285

The day evil came home

Unprecedented test. All politics may be local, but this is personal. For years, we Americans enjoyed a carefree, self-indulgent disconnect from the rest of the world. For years, we happily pursued our private aims and private wealth. We were plenty rich and plenty strong. If we were inclined to involve ourselves in the world beyond our borders, fine. If not, so be it. Dealer's choice. Then we were attacked at home, suddenly unified by an external enemy–even a nameless, stateless one. Overnight, once untethered baby boomers, who envied the resolve and spirit of World War II's "greatest generation," were facing an unprecedented test of their own. As former Clinton adviser Bill Galston put it, Sept. 11, 2001, is the day the '90s truly ended.

No more is politics just about the dipping Dow or some abstract argument over the dangers of touching the Social Security surplus. (How long ago does that seem?) Now it's damn the lockbox; the president is pledging to "use all our resources to conquer this enemy." There's no debate. Not in the midst of this new Manichaean epic, a "monumental struggle of good versus evil," as the president put it. "But good will prevail." On that we can all agree.

This is not to say that politics will vaporize, of course. It won't. In fact, Americans will demand more from their politics, not less, because now it matters. The president, for one, will be watched to see if he becomes the leader he needs to be. His country is panicked. Americans want war; more than two thirds are calling for retaliation, even if it means killing innocent people. "We may have to take time to build up forces of such significance," McCain says, "that the next group will have to think twice." But how much time? Certainly not the six months that Bush the Elder had before the Gulf War. Counseling patience will not be easy.

Bill Clinton opined that great presidents are created by circumstance; Bush will test that theory. The challenge is great: putting together a commensurately strong response that is also carefully targeted, requiring both diplomatic finesse and massive force. Unless the struggle is internationalized, it will be ineffective. Not easy for an administration that has been more unilateralist than global. But there is a simple message: You're either with us or against us. Take your pick–friend or target. No equivocating or negotiating. We want help. Fumigating all the cockroach holes is not something that can be done with a bunch of cruise missiles.

Sure, this sad episode will inspire some finger-pointing and second-guessing. This is America, after all. Congress will rightly bemoan the obvious failure of our intelligence, particularly our on-the-ground spying. Some will call for spending more money on antiterrorism activities than on missile defense. Fair enough. But anyone who tries to practice politics-as-usual does so at his own peril. The world has changed–and families are paying attention.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/010924/misc/24gloria.htm

To War, Not to Court

By Charles Krauthammer

Wednesday, September 12, 2001; Page A29

This is not crime. This is war. One of the reasons there are terrorists out there capable and audacious enough to carry out the deadliest attack on the United States in its history is that, while they have declared war on us, we have in the past responded (with the exception of a few useless cruise missile attacks on empty tents in the desert) by issuing subpoenas.

Secretary of State Colin Powell's first reaction to the day of infamy was to pledge to "bring those responsible to justice." This is exactly wrong. Franklin Roosevelt did not respond to Pearl Harbor by pledging to bring the commander of Japanese naval aviation to justice. He pledged to bring Japan to its knees.

You bring criminals to justice; you rain destruction on combatants. This is a fundamental distinction that can no longer be avoided. The bombings of Sept. 11, 2001, must mark a turning point. War was long ago declared on us. Until we declare war in return, we will have thousands of more innocent victims.

We no longer have to search for a name for the post-Cold War era. It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism. Organized terror has shown what it can do: execute the single greatest massacre in American history, shut down the greatest power on the globe and send its leaders into underground shelters. All this, without even resorting to chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

This is a formidable enemy. To dismiss it as a bunch of cowards perpetrating senseless acts of violence is complacent nonsense. People willing to kill thousands of innocents while they kill themselves are not cowards. They are deadly, vicious warriors and need to be treated as such. Nor are their acts of violence senseless. They have a very specific aim: to avenge alleged historical wrongs and to bring the great American satan to its knees.

Nor is the enemy faceless or mysterious. We do not know for sure who gave the final order but we know what movement it comes from. The enemy has identified itself in public and openly. Our delicate sensibilities have prevented us from pronouncing its name.

Its name is radical Islam. Not Islam as practiced peacefully by millions of the faithful around the world. But a specific fringe political movement, dedicated to imposing its fanatical ideology on its own societies and destroying the society of its enemies, the greatest of which is the United States.

Israel, too, is an affront to radical Islam, and thus of course must be eradicated. But it is the smallest of fish. The heart of the beast -- with its military in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey and the Persian Gulf; with a culture that "corrupts" Islamic youth; with an economy and technology that dominate the world -- is the United States. That is why we were struck so savagely.

How do we know? Who else trains cadres of fanatical suicide murderers who go to their deaths joyfully? And the average terrorist does not coordinate four hijackings within one hour. Nor fly a plane into the tiny silhouette of a single building. For that you need skilled pilots seeking martyrdom. That is not a large pool to draw from.

These are the shock troops of the enemy. And the enemy has many branches. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Israel, the Osama bin Laden organization headquartered in Afghanistan, and various Arab "liberation fronts" based in Damascus. And then there are the governments: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya among them. Which one was responsible? We will find out soon enough.

But when we do, there should be no talk of bringing these people to "swift justice," as Karen Hughes dismayingly promised mid-afternoon yesterday. An open act of war demands a military response, not a judicial one.

Military response against whom? It is absurd to make war on the individuals who send these people. The terrorists cannot exist in a vacuum. They need a territorial base of sovereign protection. For 30 years we have avoided this truth. If bin Laden was behind this, then Afghanistan is our enemy. Any country that harbors and protects him is our enemy. We must carry their war to them.

We should seriously consider a congressional declaration of war. That convention seems quaint, unused since World War II. But there are two virtues to declaring war: It announces our seriousness both to our people and to the enemy, and it gives us certain rights as belligerents (of blockade, for example).

The "long peace" is over. We sought this war no more than we sought war with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan or Cold War with the Soviet Union. But when war was pressed upon the greatest generation, it rose to the challenge. The question is: Will we?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14320-2001Sep11.html