Salon.com: "What We Lost" (Hubris After 9/11)

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/09/09/loss/

What we lost

Almost 3,000 Americans died on Sept. 11, 2001. But our losses are still mounting -- in Iraq and at home -- thanks to the bullying, big-lie culture that dominates American politics today.

Editor's note: This article continues a Salon series exploring the impact of 9/11 five years after the attacks.

By Joan Walsh

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The number of Americans who died that day at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pa. -- 2,873 -- has been surpassed by the number of American soldiers who've died in the so-called global war on terror, the vast majority -- almost 2,700 -- killed on the utterly unrelated battleground in Iraq. Add in almost 30,000 U.S. military casualties and a reported 46,307 dead Iraqi civilians, according to Iraq Body Count, and the tragedy is staggering -- more than we, or the Iraqi people, should have had to bear. The quick victory in the Afghan war against the Taliban, which had broad national and global support, now seems on the verge of being reversed; every week brings more killing, more repression. This week alone the New York Times reported that the Afghan city known as Little America is now the capital of Taliban resurgence and opium production. Global sympathy in the wake of the attack has turned to global distrust and disdain.

Maybe the loss I regret most was the shimmer of national and international unity we enjoyed after the attack -- the warmth I felt from friends and acquaintances and even strangers those first raw days, a seriousness and purpose I felt more broadly in the following weeks. Like most Americans, I didn't vote for this president. To me, Dec. 12, 2000, the day the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount that Al Gore would have won, is another day of infamy in U.S. history. But I was willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt in the weeks after 9/11, let him build on the global support we'd won and do something thoughtful and effective about al-Qaida. His response in those early weeks seemed uncharacteristically measured; he warned against targeting Muslims, he took almost a month before striking Afghanistan.

Since that time, though, we've seen hubris beyond imagination. We've watched an unbridled executive-branch power grab, warrantless wiretaps, the curtailing of privacy rights; a pervasive smog of secrecy descended to obscure our government. Outrage about torture, rendition and secret prisons here and abroad is dismissed with a flippant "We don't torture" from the president. And all of it has been shellacked with an ugly culture of bullying in which dissent equals treason, shamelessly, five years after the attack. Last week it was Donald Rumsfeld comparing war critics to people who appeased Hitler; this week we had Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice saying they're the sort who would have ended the Civil War early and let the South keep its slaves. Their intimidation is meant to say that the very freedoms worth fighting for -- the right to dissent, the right to question our government -- might have to be abridged while we fight. Politically, that truly is more than we can bear.

Still, we've seen nothing so brazen as the president's "war on terror" victory lap this 9/11 anniversary week, three speeches to tell us he's made us safer though there's still more to be done, and pay no attention to the carnage in Iraq. Bush's 2006 anniversary shtick is an eerie inversion of his first anniversary shtick in 2002, another election year, when he used the sad occasion as a platform to sell the Iraq war. Back then, you'll recall, he'd changed the subject from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein at least partly because we'd blown our chance to capture the al-Qaida leader at the end of 2001. So he went months without mentioning the man he'd once vowed to capture "dead or alive." The normally quiescent White House press corps was moved to ask him about it at a March 2002 briefing, and here's how Bush replied:

"... You know, I just don't spend that much time on him ... to be honest with you. I'm more worried about making sure that our soldiers are well-supplied; that the strategy is clear; that the coalition is strong."

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