[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Addicted to 9/11

Thu Oct 14 11:34:52 PDT 2004

The article below from NYTimes.com 
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Addicted to 9/11

October 14, 2004
 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. 

Maureen Dowd will appear on Friday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/opinion/14friedman.html?ex=1098778892&ei=1&en=d328c9aec1dafedc

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