The Opportunity of a Lifetime

What if the attacks on September 11, 2001, had not been seen as a new Pearl Harbor? Only three months earlier, after all, Disney's Pearl Harbor (the "sanitized" version, as Times columnist Frank Rich labeled it), a blockbuster made with extensive Pentagon help, had performed disappointingly at the multiplexes. As an event, it seemed irrelevant to American audiences until 9/11, when that ancient history--and the ancient retribution that went with it--wiped from the American brain the actual history of recent decades, including our massive covert anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, out of which Osama bin Laden emerged.

Here's the greatest irony: From that time of triumph in 1945, Americans had always secretly suspected that they were not "invincible" but exceedingly vulnerable, something both pop culture and the deepest fears of the cold war era only reinforced. Confirmation of that fact arrived with such immediacy on September 11 largely because it was already a gut truth. The ambulance chasers of the Bush Administration, who spotted such opportunity in the attacks, were perhaps the last Americans who hadn't absorbed this reality.

As that New Day of Infamy scenario played out, the horrific but actual scale of the damage inflicted in New York and Washington (and to the US economy) would essentially recede. The attack had been relatively small, limited in its means and massive only in its daring and luck--abetted by the fact that the Bush Administration was looking for nothing like such an attack, despite that CIA briefing given to Bush on a lazy August day in Crawford ("Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US") and so many other clues.

Only the week before 9/11 the Bush Administration had been in the doldrums with a "detached," floundering President criticized by worried members of his own party for vacationing far too long at his Texas ranch while the nation drifted. Moreover, there was only one group before September 11 with a "new Pearl Harbor" scenario on the brain. Major Administration figures, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, had wanted for years to radically increase the power of the President and the Pentagon, to roll back the power of Congress (especially any Congressional restraints on the presidency left over from the Vietnam/Watergate era) and to complete the overthrow of Saddam Hussein ("regime change"), aborted by the first Bush Administration in 1991.

We know as well that some of those plans were on the table in the 1990s and that those who held them and promoted them, at the Project for the New American Century in particular, actually wrote in a proposal titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses" that "the process of transformation [of the Pentagon], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event--like a new Pearl Harbor."

We also know that within hours of the 9/11 attacks, many of the same people were at work on the war of their dreams. Within five hours of the attack on the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was urging his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq. (Notes by an aide transcribe his wishes this way: "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden].... Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.")

We know that by the 12th, the President himself had collared his top counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, and some of his staff in a conference room next to the White House Situation Room and demanded linkages. ("'Look under every rock and do due diligence.' It was a very intimidating message which said, 'Iraq. Give me a memo about Iraq and 9/11.'") We know that by November, the top officials of the Administration were already deep into operational planning for an invasion of Iraq.

And they weren't alone. Within the Pearl Harbor/nuclear attack/war nexus that emerged almost instantly from the ruins of the World Trade Center, others were working feverishly. Only eight days after the attacks, for instance, the complex 342-page Patriot Act would be rushed over to Congress by Attorney General John Ashcroft, passed through a cowed Senate in the dead of night on October 11, unread by at least some of our Representatives, and signed into law on October 26. As its instant appearance indicated, it was made up of a set of already existing right-wing hobbyhorses, quickly drafted provisions and expansions of law enforcement powers taken off an FBI "wish list" (previously rejected by Congress). All these were swept together by people who, like the President's men on Iraq, saw their main chance when those buildings went down. As such, it stands in for much of what happened "in response" to 9/11.

But what if we hadn't been waiting so long for our own thirty-six-hour war in the most victorious nation on the planet, its sole "hyperpower," its new Rome? What if those pre-existing frameworks hadn't been quite so well primed to emerge in no time at all? What if we (and our enemies as well) hadn't been at the movies all those years?

Movie-Made Planet

Among other things, we've been left with a misbegotten "billion dollar" memorial to the attacks of 9/11 (recently recalibrated to $500 million) planned for New York's Ground Zero and sporting the kinds of cost overruns otherwise associated with the occupation of Iraq. In its ambitions, what it will really memorialize is the Bush Administration's oversized, crusading moment that followed the attacks. Too late now--and no one asked me anyway--but I know what my memorial would have been.

A few days after 9/11, my daughter and I took a trip downtown, as close to "Ground Zero" as you could get. With the air still rubbing our throats raw, we wandered block after block, peering down side streets to catch glimpses of the sheer enormity of the destruction. And indeed, in a way that no small screen could communicate, it did have the look of the apocalyptic, especially those giant shards of fallen building sticking up like--remember, I'm a typical movie-made American on an increasingly movie-made planet and had movies on the brain that week--the image of the wrecked Statue of Liberty that chillingly ends the first Planet of the Apes film, that cinematic memorial to humanity's nuclear folly. Left there as it was, that would have been a sobering monument for the ages, not just to the slaughter that was 9/11 but to what we had awaited for so long--and what, sadly, we still wait for; what, in the world that George Bush has produced, has become ever more, rather than less, likely. And imagine our reaction then.

Safer? Don't be ridiculous.

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