ELLEN GOODMAN: At 9/11 plus 5, we're trapped by failure of imagination

[babylonsister]

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/4174159.html

Sept. 9, 2006, 8:36PM
At 9/11 plus 5, we're trapped by failure of imagination

By ELLEN GOODMAN

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But here is something I never imagined five years ago: that America would lose our status as the good guy in the struggle against terrorism. I didn't imagine that our government would squander the righteous role won for us the hard way by victims falling from the Twin Towers and firefighters racing to their deaths.

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When we went into Afghanistan in hot pursuit, the world stayed with us. But then we swung from a just war to a pre-emptive war, from a war on terror to a war of choice, from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein.

"When we crossed the (Iraq) border, there was another great pause, then a transfer of sympathy," an American intelligence officer told Newsweek. "The entire Islamic world took a step to the right." The Bush administration imagined flowers and rose water, shock and awe, mission accomplished. It failed to imagine civil war, and that step to the right.

We went from the Twin Towers to Abu Ghraib, from civil defense to civil war, from innocent passengers to soldiers in Haditha. We blew it all on Iraq. In one poll, Europeans now find us more of a threat to world stability than even Iran. In a survey of 14 countries, none of them believe that removing Saddam made the world safer. And in Iraq itself, only 2 percent of the people now believe we invaded to liberate them from tyranny while 76 percent think we did it "to control Iraqi oil." Imagine that.

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