Post 9/11

Ellen Goodman has a good article on the lessons of September 11th. It's a point I've harped on before, but why not harp on it again?

But three years and one Iraq War later, what exactly does the president mean when he talks about the lessons of September 11 and how his opponent didn't learn them?

"First of all," he says, "we face an enemy which has no conscience. They are cold-blooded. Therefore, you can never hope for the best with them. You cannot negotiate with them. ... The only way to secure America, to keep us safe, is to find them and bring them to justice before they hurt us again."

Of course you cannot negotiate with zealots who fly planes into buildings. You cannot reason with people who kill and die in the name of heaven and the hope of 72 virgins. You can only stop them.

But the central lie of this campaign is in the way the administration has conflated the war on terror and the war in Iraq. It's the way he had morphed Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the religious fanatic and the secular dictator, September 11, 2001, and March 19, 2003. It's the way he has drawn a composite of one intractable "enemy": the jihadist in the cockpit.

The lesson of September 11, says Bush repeatedly, is that "we must take threats seriously before they come to hurt us." His punch line is: "And I saw a threat in Saddam Hussein."

Bush no longer claims directly that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He tells us rather that he "saw" a threat. This is the Bush doctrine. And anyone who doesn't accept his vision -- even when it clashes with reality -- is dismissed as "soooo September 10th."