The Dish

Not likely. Saddam’s latest gamble is less an indication of his intent to disarm than a sign of how desperate his plight is. He wants to use the inspection issue – its vagaries, details and endless process – both to split the Security Council (i.e. France) and to buy time. This was, of course, always a risk and one of the strongest arguments for by-passing the U.N. altogether. But Bush’s speech was smarter than Saddam may recognize. The resolutions Bush invoked mean that Iraq must do far far more than simply play the inspector cat-and-mouse game again. It must actively disarm, destroy its weaponry, allow U.N. monitors a long-running role in the country, and give up its active sponsorship of terrorism. The White House is therefore absolutely right to throw the issue back to the Security Council with the assertion that “this is a tactical step by Iraq in hopes of avoiding strong U.N. Security Council action. As such, it is a tactic that will fail.” We’re now headed, I think, for a fight over what genuinely unfettered inspections require and which resolutions Iraq is supposed to adhere to. I say: unconditional, unfettered, military-backed inspectors with no time limit on their withdrawal; and every single U.N. resolution. Apart from the obvious need to have real access anywhere any time, it also seems to me that inspectors should have the right to interrogate Iraqi scientists and be in a postion to offer them political asylum if needs be. The regime’s very existence impedes genuine inspection, which is why some political space must be created for inspections to work adequately. My best guess is that there will be several rounds of shenanigans and a great deal of brinkmanship in the weeks ahead. But whatever happens, the U.S. cannot let the inspections regime return to the farce of the 1990s. Meanwhile, war preparations need to continue apace. They’re the reason we have this concession. They’ll be the reason we get any more.

THE BRITS RALLY: A dramatic swing in British public opinion toward war with Iraq. Even the Guardian is aghast:

Three weeks ago a similar Guardian/ICM poll asking the same question showed 50% opposed to a military attack on Baghdad and 33% in favour, a gap of 17 points. Now the gap has narrowed to four points with 40% against the possible war and 36% in favour. The rise of the “don’t knows” from 17% to 24% suggests that growing numbers are no longer sure that they disapprove of the idea.

This is called leadership. Bush and Blair have done this. Without them, it would not have happened.

THE LAST WORD ON SOUTH FLORIDA: Yes, Dave Barry has it down.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “Defense attorneys had asked the jury to spare Westerfield’s life by portraying the defendant as a family man who has contributed to society through his patented design work on devices used in medicine and other fields. Westerfield had no prior felony record and played an active role in the lives of his children and close friends, defense attorney Steven Feldman said. ‘He’s a good man but for one three-day weekend of terror,’ he said.” – From MSNBC’s account of the conviction of David Westerfield for kidnapping and killing a 7-year-old girl.

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG: Why I’m wrong about appeasement; wrong about the New York Times and Zimbabwe; wrong about the war; wrong about Chomsky; and wrong about the U.N. Welcome to the most masochistic Letters Page on the web.

If I were Saddam, I’d start playing games now. What the administration needs are clear criteria for acceptable inspections – so that they are meaningful and real and permanent. Those criteria must be adhered to. Saddam cannot be allowed to wriggle out of this again. That’s all I can say based on a single sketchy AP story. Check in tomorrow for more. (For the media record: Drudge had this minutes before anyone else. That’s why he rules.)

They’ve just declared that the air above them – for 60 km – is a weapons-free zone. No, I’m not making that up.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “TEN YEARS from now, will we be looking back asking how the United States could have thought that an unprovoked, preventive war on Iraq could succeed when the signs of danger were so clear and ominous? How the impossibility of accomplishing the mission through air power would lead levels of American casualties not seen since the Vietnam War? How an oil shock and deficit spending for war would plunge the United States and world economies into a major recession? How an administration so focused on getting rid of Saddam failed to create a workable policy to shape a post-Saddam Iraq?” – Karen J. Alter, Boston Globe.

Amazing what moral clarity can do for world affairs. Now that president Bush has essentially called the U.N.’s bluff, various countries and allies seem to be singing a different tune. Here’s the Saudi story. This is particularly true of the Arab world where strength leads to respect and respect leads to acquiescence. Even Egypt now seems on board. The question now is whether inspectors, backed by military force, can really determine whether Iraq’s potential nuclear capacity is operational. According to one Iraqi defector, the four years since the Clinton administration gave up on policing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have led to elaborate schemes to conceal them at all costs. We’ll see. But at least the burden of proof is now where it should be: on Iraq, not on the U.S. And almost all of that is president Bush’s doing.

CLINTON AND AL QAEDA: If you haven’t yet, read Lawrence Wright’s extraordinary piece of reporting in the New Yorker. It’s not online and it’s endless, but every page tells you something new about the provenance of al Qaeda, its roots in Egyptian radicalism, and its emergence in the 1990s as such a lethal force. But one thing that deeply impressed me is how damning an indictment this piece is of former president Clinton. What Wright shows is that Clinton’s passivity and inconsistency in the face of Islamist terrorism undoubtedly made matters far worse than they otherwise would have been. By engaging in piece-meal, ineffective and disastrous retreats and half-hearted swipes, Clinton not only failed to stop al Qaeda, he gave it new strength and vigor. It started early on with Clinton’s panicked withdrawal from Somalia:

Bin Laden glorified in the fact that his men had trained the Somali militiamen who shot down two American helicopters in the “Black Hawk Down” incident, in October of [1993], prompting president Clinton to withdraw all American soldiers from the country. “Based on the reports we received from our brothers in Somalia,” bin Laden Said, “we learned that they saw the weakness, frailty and cowardice of U.S. troops. Only eighteen U.S. troops were killed. Nonetheless, they fled in the heart of darkness.”… Emboldened by the success of the “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia, bin Laden escalated his campaign against America.

When the Islamists saw how Washington responded to their terror, they ratcheted their campaign up. And why wouldn’t they have? Perhaps the worst of all worlds was Clinton’s highly dubious decision to send missiles to attack al Qaeda in Sudan and Afghanistan. Here’s Wright again:

The strikes which, in the big-chested parlance of military planners, were dubbed Operation Infinite Reach, cost American taxpayer seventy-nine million dollars, but they merely exposed the inadequacy of American intelligence. President Clinton later explained that one of the strikes had been aimed at a “gathering of key terrorist leaders,” but the meeting in question had occurred a month earlier … The failure of Operation Infinite Reach established bin Laden as a legendary figure not just in the Muslim world but wherever America, with the clamor of its narcissistic culture and the presence of its military forces, had made itself unwelcome. When bin Laden’s voice came crackling across the radio transmission – “By the grace of God, I am alive!” – the forces of anti-Americanism had found their champion. Those who had objected the the slaughter of innocents in the embassies in East Africa, many of whom were Muslims, were cowed by the popular response to this man whose defiance of America now seemed blessed by divine favor. The day after the strikes, Zawahiri called a reporter in Karachi, with a message: “Tell the Americans that we aren’t afraid of bombardment, threats, and acts of aggression… The war has only just begun; the Americans should now await the answer.”

Part of that answer was 9/11. Notice that this story isn’t written by a conservative opponent of Clinton or in a conservative magazine. It’s by a superb reporter in a left-liberal magazine. No, Clinton is not responsible for al Qaeda, just as Chamberlain wasn’t responsible for Hitler. But Clinton is absolutely responsible for the consequences of his inaction and his appeasement. And it’s vital, if we are to prevent a repeat of the fecklessness of the 1990s, that we remember this lesson and take it to heart.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “George Bush is trying to hijack the UN. Delegates thought it was just a routine peacetime trip. They were settling back in their seats for a snooze when suddenly a scary-looking American president broke through the flimsy doors into the UN’s cockpit, grabbed the controls and tried to steer it into a catastrophe. Will anyone have the courage to overpower him or will they nervously sit it out, hoping that they might somehow survive?” – John O’Farrell, the Guardian. (Thanks to the bloggers at i330.org.)

WHY NOT ENGLISH? The Blair government wants Islamic immigrants to speak English when they immigrate. They’re going to set up an English test for citizenship. If I were Bush looking for a good domestic initiative that would also help the war on terror by helping to assimilate Islamic would-be Americans, I’d follow Blair’s lead and ask Ron Unz in for a meeting.

OVER THERE: Matt Welch brought this link to my attention. It’s a blog-site from troops. Illuminating and important to see the men and women still fighting al Qaeda far away from home. Send them your best.

THE ECONOMIST VERSUS ISRAEL: Well, you make the call. Here’s an article on the current Economist website that serves as a brief for Arab anger against the United States and the West. Here’s a paragraph:

As any simple Arab citizen will confirm, resentment of the superpower has never been a response to America itself. Rather, it is a response to its policies: its throttling of Iraq, sanctioning of Libya and Sudan, and, above all, its generous bankrolling of an aggressive Israel. “Take Israel out of the equation,” says a businessman in Jeddah, “and, poof, we’ve basically never had a problem with America.”

“Take Israel out of the equation?” Is that a new metaphor for getting rid of the Jewish state? “Any simple Arab citizen” is also a telling quote. How can you be a “citizen” in a hereditary monarchy, a theocracy or a police state, the current options on offer to the Arab world? Notice too the complete absence of any reference to rabid anti-Semitism among Arab populations. It isn’t even a question raised to be rebutted. It is simply ignored. Why? Notice also the strained call that Arab “governments must devolve more power to the people”. You mean … democracy? Why is the need for un-euphemized democracy so obvious to the Economist’s writers in every part of the world except the Middle East?

PALESTINIAN GAY-BAITING: No surprise that Yassir Arafat’s police state viciously persecutes gay people. No surprise the American left largely
ignores it. One Yalie speaks truth to campus power.

CONSERVATIVES AND MENTAL HEALTH: An amazing sub-head in the New York Times Magazine: “Pete Domenici is a social and fiscal conservative. So how did he become the Senate’s leading advocate for the mentally ill?” Just think about the assumptions behind that headline. Conservatives definitionally cannot favor treating mental illness as a serious matter. Why? Because they’re callous, bad, selfish, inhuman people. Why else? The article drips with the same kind of left-liberal condescension, although it’s perfectly well researched and written in every other respect. The truth is: such issues are not explicable on a liberal/conservative spectrum. Awareness of the seriousness of mental illness is largely a function of understanding the science that shows it to be indistinguishable from what we arbitrarily call “physical” illness. Once you have grasped that, the need for an end to what amounts to active discrimination against the mentally ill in our society becomes apparent. Good for Domenici for seeing this for decades. Good for the Bush administration for being the first to take the argument seriously. Brickbats for the Times Magazine for falling for easy anti-conservative bigotry. (They’ve changed the subhead in the online version. Perhaps someone saw sense.)

A reader sends in another twist to Bush’s smart game this summer in flushing out his opponents:

One other component of Bush’s remarkable summer strategy that I think you missed: The leaking of the legal memo from White House lawyers that Bush didn’t need Congressional approval prior to directing military action in Iraq. The blowhards in Congress – and their predictable, knee-jerk desire to be involved and oppose any assertion of presidential power – led to demands that they debate the issue even before the November elections!

I say: let’s get them on record.

THE PRICE OF TOUGH TALK: Funny, isn’t it, that the French are now becoming a little more friendly, and that the Palestinians are thinking about dumping Arafat. That clumsy oaf Bush actually speaking his mind, destroying our foreign alliances, upsetting the world. And it works!

AL-NOT-SO-BRIGHT: A reader comments on Madeleine Albright’s fatuous op-ed in the New York Times yesterday and my commentary on it:

I think you missed the larger point on the Albright piece – She agrees that Saddam is a mortal threat, that he is actively seeking nukes, and that regime change is necessary. Then she notes that Saddam doesn’t have nuclear capability yet and that his army is weak – and she offers these as reasons for waiting rather than taking military action now! The other remarkable thing about Albright’s article is that she calls for the UN to issue an ultimatum to Saddam, that she believes that the ultimatum will be rejected, but is steadfast in her position that we are not close to the time when we should take military action against him. So, we should issue an ultimatum expecting non-compliance and then back down when it is not complied with. Good strategy! Did she work for the Clinton administration or something?

MOVIE TITLE OF THE YEAR: Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Will Saletan at Slate is honest enough to realize that president Bush has essentially outmaneuvered his opponents. Ignore Will’s silly credentializing with the left. Like many others, Will’s short memory simply ignores Bush’s campaign pledge to take Saddam out if he didn’t renounce weapons of mass destruction. But the good news is that Will recognizes that Bush has spectacularly called the U.N.’s bluff. As he puts it, “If you think that an American invasion of Iraq is unwise and that the world would be better off with unfettered U.N. weapons inspections backed by the serious threat of force, you’re probably right. But if you get what you want, thank Bush.” Even Howell Raines had to concede that the president is right today. The Times will now, of course, try to wriggle out of this. They call for a “thoughtful and resourceful plan” for weapons inspections, whatever that means. But they’re flailing. They can hardly back Saddam, but very shortly, when Saddam refuses to allow real and meaningful inspections, they will have to choose between supporting Saddam and supporting Bush. Even the Bush-haters on 43d Street may have to back the president, a delicious irony not lost on the White House. (Liberal journalist Patrick Tyler tries yet another anti-Bush spin-job today, but it’s looking desperate).

CHECK: It seems clear to me in retrospect that Bush’s summer strategy has been really, really smart. Let Cheney and Rummy threaten unilateral strikes. Get all those boomer lefties with Vietnam complexes to get so scared that they all but beg the president to go through the U.N. And then go through the U.N.! Now what do the Bumillers and Tylers and Kristofs do? Either they have to fess up and say they have no problem with weapons of mass destruction in Baghdad or they have to back real disarmament, which will, of course, mean war or regime change. The Times will try to argue for a long inspections regime, for the same merry-go-round that the Clinton administration fecklessly tried forever. But last March, they opined that “unless [Baghdad] fulfills those cease-fire requirements now, Iraq invites the kind of coercive actions Mr. Bush has threatened.” (My italics.) It’s now six months after “now”. How much longer can we afford to wait? Once again, advantage Bush.

A CASE IN POINT: Check out how desperate uber-lefty Robert Fisk has gotten. No, of course he doesn’t back Bush. But he does say that “one of the most telling aspects of the Bush speech was that all the sins of which he specifically accused the Iraqis a good proportion of which are undoubtedly true began in the crucial year of 1991.” (Again, my italics.) What’s interesting about this is that the anti-war left no longer disputes the mass of evidence that Iraq has flouted U.N. resolutions. How could they in the face of what Bush has so devastatingly outlined? They just think that nothing serious should be done about it. Fisk’s argument (Like Sontag’s) for doing nothing is that at some point in the past the U.S. had dirty hands in the matter. But even granting them this point, doesn’t that make it more incumbent on the U.S. now to set things right? Fisk doesn’t answer this. Because he cannot. The case Bush made today at the U.N. is basically unanswerable. So the anti-war left will simply come up more excuses, side-shows and changes of subject. I can’t wait. A reader writes to point out the similarities in Bush’s strategy with his tax cut and his war on terror:

On both issues he faced a vocal opposition to his policy and in both instances his strategy was the same: Silence & Patience. His initial stances on both issues were so rigid and resolute (as well as right), that the debate quickly moved away from the “if” of a tax cut or a regime change to more qualitative arguments, like the size of the tax cut, or the timing of the attack. I think this is more than coincidence. It seems Bush is becoming the rock against which his enemies break themselves.

And a rock on which this country can increasingly rely for its self-defense.

WHERE ARE THE DEMOCRATS? The short answer is that they’re so busy calling for us to have a debate that they’ve forgotten to join it. How many Democrats have come out clearly either for or against a war with Iraq? Very, very few. Daschle bravely said yesterday that the Democrats were “not prepared to make any commitment” to voting on a war resolution until yet more questions are answered. He’s scared shitless. The New Republic rightly puts the boot in this week. It’s one brilliant editorial. An honorable exception is Bob Kerrey, whose piece in the Journal yesterday was wonderfully sane and sensible. But he’s retired from the Senate! As for the rest of them? Pathetic weather-vanes. You know, the media hates the fact that Republicans might use the war on terror as a campaign issue this fall. But I think they’re quite right to. With a few exceptions, the Democrats’ contribution to one of the most vital discussions this country has had in many years has been next to nothing. Why should a party that has almost nothing clear to say on the most important matter before us be entrusted with control of the Congress? They deserve to lose big.

WHOPPER OF THE DAY: “Since the administration of former President George H.W. Bush, each time Mr. Hussein has pushed, we have pushed back.” – Madeleine Albright in the New York Times today. This is sadly untrue. While Albright was secretary of state, the U.S. sat back and let Iraq try to develop weapons of mass destruction with no inspectors present and no credible military threat to force his compliance with U.N. resolutions. She is one of the people who allowed us to get into this predicament. She’s one of the few Democrats who really should keep her mouth shut.

Here’s an editorial from March 10 of this year from the New York Times. I reprint it today just to show that what president Bush is now doing has been long in the works and was once supported by the paper of record. Here’s what the Times wrote:

President Bush’s tough talk on Iraq may be working. Russia and the Arab world are now urging Saddam Hussein to readmit United Nations weapons inspectors to avoid a large-scale American attack. Pressure on Baghdad needs to be sustained, a point Vice President Dick Cheney will make on his trip to the Middle East that begins today. The journey will feature discussions about possible future military action against Iraq.

Last week Iraq held its first serious discussions with the United Nations about resuming investigations of Iraqi facilities, oversight that was suspended more than three years ago. The positive tone of the talks justifies a second meeting next month.

Meetings are not a substitute for inspections. No one knows what Iraqi scientists have been up to for the past three years, but there is good reason to fear the worst. Baghdad must not be allowed to drag out these discussions while moving ahead with the development of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Nor can there be any negotiations about diluting the inspections and arms control requirements. The team of tough, independent professionals assembled by the United Nations’ new chief inspector, Hans Blix, must be allowed to do its job unhindered, as Washington insists. Iraq’s latest effort to divert trucks imported under the oil-for-food program to military use shows that Mr. Hussein has hardly given up on his military ambitions.

This time, a show of compliance will not do. More than a decade ago, at the end of the Persian Gulf war, Iraq agreed to turn over and destroy its medium- and long-range missiles, poison gases, germ weapons and nuclear bomb materials to the satisfaction of the United Nations’ weapons inspectors. It has still not done so. Unless it fulfills those cease-fire requirements now, Iraq invites the kind of coercive actions Mr. Bush has threatened.

If the Times is in any way consistent, it will therefore applaud president Bush’s tough stance at the U.N. today when it editorializes tomorrow. In fact, I fail to see how any reasonable person who isn’t a supporter of Islamism or terrorism or pacifism can disagree with the president’s message. My suspicion is that the canards about the president’s upping the ante in Iraq as a way to distract from al Qaeda failures or a sagging economy (the smears regularly spat out on the Times op-ed page) are a strange form of projection. My suspicion is that it is the New York Times that has abandoned its once principled position of enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq by force if necessary because of partisanship and cynicism. Their hatred of this president has led them to leave the world at risk of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. We’ll see tomorrow if they have any integrity on this matter, won’t we?

SONTAG AND LINCOLN: A reader makes a telling point about Susan Sontag’s grasp of history:

You quote Susan Sontag (in your Salon piece) mentioning Lincoln, and she says that he made “bold statements of new national goals in a time of real, terrible war.” Funny thing, though, that the North never declared war against the South in the Civil War – only the South declared war. Why? Look to Lincoln’s address to Congress on July 4, 1861, where he specifically states that the action of the southern states is one of rebellion, NOT secession. To declare war would require acknowledging that the South was a legally separate and sovereign entity. Therefore Lincoln merely called for force to be gathered and used to suppress the unlawful rebellion. How interesting that Sontag would ignore Lincoln’s warmongering-without-formal-war while criticizing Bush for the same.

Additionally, in taking on the Civil War Lincoln took for himself a vast array of power (even dictating to Congress when they should meet) that Bush and Ashcroft have never even dared consider, even with their occasional overreaching granted. Of all presidents, Sontag picks a mighty odd one to try to make her points with. Seems like if she were a writer at the time of the Civil War, her own arguments would demand that she lay even more caustic venom at Lincoln’s feet than Bush’s.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes-
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

– Emily Dickinson (#341)

YESTERDAY: I couldn’t watch the television. We’ve all seen enough. It was a very high tide here. The water kept coming and coming toward the wharf I live on until it lapped almost underneath. As the tide crested, three boys and a chocolate lab puppy played in the surf, tossing branches into the water and having the puppy fetch. On wharves to either side of me, Old Glory fluttered. And as the sky cleared, and the boys left, the beagle and I went for a walk on the beach and fetched a cup of tea from a nearby coffee-shop. I wanted a normal, quiet day. I wanted to live a piece of the normality that was so abruptly snatched from so many a year ago. I wanted quiet. Quiet before more dread of the future. It occurs to me that my somewhat insistent view that we need to fight back against the roots of this horror might be misconstrued as a love or passion for war. I hope not. In fact, I think some of the anger many of us felt a year ago is related to our hatred of war. I loved the innocence of America when I came here almost twenty years ago. The one strain of American isolationism I warmed to was the natural and so American desire to be left in peace on this continent, to start the world anew, to live as if the routine of war and threat and danger were forever dispelled by the vast oceans that surround this continent. I love the fact that Americans actively hate war, its trappings, its necessities. No lover of freedom loves war, which always limits freedom. But war was brought here – a vile, almost medieval religious war, fueled by hatred and resentment and paranoia and failure. Their campaign, alas, is not a metaphor. They are brutally opposed to such things. Even imagery is banned under their austere form of Islam. They read literally; they hate with divine dispensation. Our campaign against them and their sponsors and supporters in Baghad and Damascus and Ryadh and Tehran is not therefore a function of our love of war; but our determination to end it, and to liberate that part of the world from the despots and psychoses that now hold it back.

THE BEST 9/11 PIECE: Lileks always makes me feel less lonely.

SCHRODER’S GAMBLE: The German Chancellor has made clear that he opposes any military intervention to rid the world of Saddam’s threat of weapons of mass destruction. But re-reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s superb piece in the New Yorker earlier this year, a reader came upon this passage:

Saddam Hussein never gave up his hope of turning Iraq into a nuclear power. After the Osirak attack, he rebuilt, redoubled his efforts, and dispersed his facilities. Those who have followed Saddam’s progress believe that no single strike today would eradicate his nuclear program. I talked about this prospect last fall with August Hanning, the chief of the B.N.D., the German intelligence agency, in Berlin. We met in the new glass-and-steel Chancellery, overlooking the renovated Reichstag. German industry is well represented in the ranks of foreign companies that have aided Saddam’s nonconventional-weapons programs, and the German government has been publicly regretful. Hanning told me that his agency had taken the lead in exposing the companies that helped Iraq build a poison-gas factory at Samarra. The Germans also feel, for the most obvious reasons, a special responsibility to Israel’s security, and this, too, motivates their desire to expose Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. Hanning is tall, thin, and almost translucently white. He is sparing with words, but he does not equivocate. “It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years,” he said.

So the head of German intelligence believes Saddam will – not “might” but “will” – have a nuclear capacity in three years. And he also believes no single missile-strike will remove it. Why hasn’t anyone called Schroder on this?

THE PRO-WAR LEFT: Lest we forget it exists, here’s a passage from an email I just received:

I have always been a knee-jerk liberal, and passionate Democrat. (While George Bush and I were both at Yale, I canvassed New Haven working class neighborhoods for Eugene McCarthy.) But September 11 has made me a kind of War-On-Terror liberal, something like the old Cold War liberals I used to – mistakenly, I now see – disparage. Anyway, I am now completely behind the war against the Islamic fascists. And I think Sontag is a contemptible fool. Your perspicacious reader was exactly right to suggest the world has passed her by; I think this is a deep problem for many people just now.

Hope again.

flashbulb memory. As time passes, the chronology gets jumbled up; we fumble on the details; we airbrush some parts and highlight others. We re-imagine the past to make it more coherent, meaningful, bearable. One ongoing study at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Psychology Department – of a large, country-wide sample of people – is finding out that we have already forgotten some things about September 11. How much time between the first and second plane? Which tower fell first? What was the flight number of the second plane? Was the Pentagon hit after both World Trade Center Towers? We forget. We conflate. We confuse.

But we also know, of course, that this kind of memory is not the most important one. Some events solder themselves into our consciousness so intensely that they change the way we see the world for ever. The details barely matter. The change itself matters. Your child is killed in a car accident; your mother is diagnosed with breast cancer; your best friend betrays you; your wife is raped. These kinds of events stop your life for a moment; your soul freezes while the rest of the world swivels around you to a new position. Part of you insists: this hasn’t happened. Part of you demands: move on. Most of you knows that neither is an option.

And most of us know that there is no moving on from September 11. It wasn’t a random tragedy for which grief is a slow-acting salve. It was a massacre – a cold-blooded, fanatical murder of civilians by men possessed by a theocratic ideology. It was an invasion – the violation of sovereign American soil, the erasure of a visible monument to American success and energy and civilization. It was a crime – the filling of the air of a great city with the irradiated dust of innocent human lives. It was a statement – that radical Islam intends to attack and destroy the very principles of the Enlightenment that underpin the American experiment – freedom of religion, of conscience, toleration and secularism. The appropriate response to this act of nihilism and evil is therefore not grief or remembrance or sadness or reflection, although each of those has its place. The appropriate response is rage.

For whatever else September 11 was, it was a declaration of war. That war continues. The totalitarian force of fundamentalist Islam, like the forces of Nazism and Communism that preceded it, has not disappeared. We briefly defanged it in its most important lair in Afghanistan, but even there, it has not been extinguished. Saudi Arabia, the chief exporter of this murderous ideology, remains protected by the West. Saddam Hussein is currently laboring to manufacture weapons of mass destruction which his allies in the Islamist terrorist network would dearly love to use on American soil. The United Nations and much of the civilized world would rather let him do so than face the risks of taking him on. Suicide bombers – ideological comrades of the twisted sociopaths who flew planes into the World Trade Center – have not relented in attempting to destroy the democratic state of Israel. Anti-Semitism, now as in the past a core of the totalitarian mind, has metastasized like a cancer throughout the Middle East and back into its ancient home in Europe. Educated men and women who regularly find the slightest fault in democratic Western societies, vie with each other to provide excuses, justifications and rationalizations for the murderous tyrannies and blood-thirsty mobs of the Arab Middle East. In a welter of arguments, articles, op-eds and books, intellectuals are eagerly laying out the case that the murderers of 9/11 died for an explicable and justifiable cause, that the West itself is in part responsible for what was unleashed against it, that war can be avoided, that there is nothing but shades of gray in this complicated world.

But through all this, we know what that day showed us. It really wasn’t complicated. That day showed us that we stand deeply vulnerable to a destructive force in some ways more dangerous than even the last two totalitarian powers Americans were called on to defeat. This enemy refuses to fight with honor; it kills civilians not as a by-product of fighting but as an end in itself; it hides and disappears and re-emerges whenever its purposes are served; it may soon have access to weapons that Hitler and Stalin only dreamed of. But it cannot be defeated the way Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were defeated because it is more like a virus than a host, infecting and capturing nation-states, like Afghanistan, and then moving on to others. September 11 showed Americans that for the first time in their history, they stand vulnerable to that force in their homeland. War has been brought to them. And, deep in their hearts, they know it.

That’s why I think that, for all the return to superficial normality, Americans really have changed. The illusion of isolationism has been ripped apart. How can America opt out of the world when the world refuses to leave America alone? The illusion of appeasement has been destroyed. Do we really think that by coddling regimes like Iraq or Syria or Iran or Saudi Arabia, we will help defuse the evil that lurks in their societies? The illusion of American exceptionalism has been shattered. The whole dream of this continent – that it was a place where you could safely leave the old world and its resentments behind – was ended that day. The proliferation of flags that day and subsequently was not a function of jingoism. It was the display of a symbol whose meaning had just been changed for ever. The inviolability of America had been destroyed. And the display of Old Glory was a signal not of blind patriotism but a way to show the world and the enemy that we loved it still and passionately, and that we were prepared to fight to restore its honor. A whole generation will grow up with this as their most formative experience – a whole younger generation that knows that there actually is a right and a wrong, and that neutrality is no longer an option. That generational power has only just begun to transform the culture. In decades’ time, we will look back and see what a difference it made.

And if we need to humanize this, perhaps we should leave our own memories of that day behind and think of those wives and husbands and children and parents who cannot live a single day without remembering. For them, normality can never return. Every evening when a father doesn’t come home, every birthday when a card cannot be sent, every Christmas when a child’s mother is no longer there is a rebuke to the very idea of our broader forgetfulness. They are symbols of our wider collective wound, goads to us when we falter in the fight back, emblems of the free society that this new enemy is determined to destroy. To paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, everything is everything and they are still missing. And they demand that our vigilance never end.

My analysis of Sontag’s op-ed will be up on Salon shortly. But I was struck by the similarity of her opposition to any description of our current struggle as war with Paul Krugman’s op-ed today as well. Here’s Sontag:

When the government declares war on cancer or poverty or drugs it means the government is asking that new forces be mobilized to address the problem. It also means that the government cannot do a whole lot to solve it. When the government declares war on terrorism – terrorism being a multinational, largely clandestine network of enemies – it means that the government is giving itself permission to do what it wants. When it wants to intervene somewhere, it will. It will brook no limits on its power… What I do question is the pseudo-declaration of pseudo-war. These necessary actions should not be called a “war.” There are no endless wars; but there are declarations of the extension of power by a state that believes it cannot be challenged.

And here’s Krugman:

But if this is war, it bears little resemblance to the wars America has won in the past. Where is the call for sacrifice, for a great national effort? How will we know when or if we’ve won? One doesn’t have to be a military expert to realize that the struggle ahead won’t involve any D-Days, nor will there ever be a V-J day. There will never be a day when we can declare terrorism stamped out for good. It will be more like fighting crime, where success is always relative and victory is never final, than like fighting a war. And the metaphor we use to describe our struggle matters: some things that are justifiable in a temporary time of war are not justifiable during a permanent fight against crime, even if the criminals are murderous fanatics.

Clarifying convergence, huh?