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United we stood - for a little while

By PHILIP GAILEY
Published September 11, 2005

Four years after the 9/11 attacks, where are we as a nation? Certainly not where most Americans probably hoped we would be.

We are not a nation at peace - with the world or with ourselves. The 9/11 carnage united the country and the civilized world, but it didn't last. Today, the country is fractured and polarized, and its political discourse is shrill and destructive. The only thing more toxic than the floodwaters in New Orleans is the vicious partisan atmosphere in Washington. Sometimes, it sounds like Americans are more at war with themselves than with any foreign enemy. We are at each other's throats over the Iraq war, gay marriage and religion.

Our post-9/11 world has been one mostly of inconvenience, not sacrifice - except for U.S. soldiers in Iraq and their families back home.

We trimmed back some of our civil liberties, with the promise that the Patriot Act would make us safer, and now FBI agents are snooping through our library records. We've accepted the hassle of airport security, including a no-fly list that is notoriously inaccurate (Ted Kennedy wound up on it as a potential security threat), but worry that terrorists next time will target our subways and trains, as they did in London and Madrid. We have suspended due process for anyone we consider a terrorist suspect and degraded the Geneva Conventions.

The shock and grief of 9/11 brought out the best in the American people, though not in the Bush administration, the Congress and much of Corporate America. The Enron fraud and other corporate scandals robbed investors and workers of their retirement income. We are bogged down in an unpopular war in Iraq that we didn't have to fight and that we can't seem to win or end. A nasty presidential election in 2004 knocked the scabs off old wounds from the Vietnam War. Out-of-control spending and soaring budget deficits in Washington cloud our children's future. Photos of U.S. soldiers torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq made us feel shame, but no high-ranking military officer has been held accountable. The Homeland Security budget has become another federal pork barrel.

And now comes Katrina, a catastrophic hurricane that overwhelmed government at every level and shook public confidence in its ability to deal with another terrorist attack, the one that hits a major city with biological, chemical or even nuclear weapons. We still feel vulnerable because we are.

It's true that we haven't had another terrorist attack on our soil since 9/11, although al-Qaida terrorists have been busy murdering innocent people in other countries. But we know we are still their No. 1 target.

President Bush squandered the national unity that formed around his post-9/11 leadership with his administration's lies and miscalculations in taking us to war against Saddam Hussein's regime. The war has damaged U.S. relations with old allies and exposed the limits of the world's only superpower. Good people were misled and used by administration hawks.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said last week the United Nations speech he delivered giving a detailed description of Iraq's weapons programs has left a permanent "blot" on his record. He told ABC's Barbara Walters that it was "devastating" and "painful" to learn later that he had been misled about the accuracy of the intelligence he was given.

The president rarely mentions the name of Osama bin Laden these days, lest he remind Americans that the al-Qaida leader continues to be on the lam. Bush had rather talk about Saddam Hussein, who is about to stand trial for his crimes against humanity while Iraq edges closer to Islamic theocratic rule.

Bush's Iraq policy has borne bitter fruit, at home and abroad. It has divided Americans, damaged the U.S. image in the world and given terrorists a rallying ground. And we are supposed to feel safer?

Some day, when the war is over, we need to think about the kind of country we want to be. Teddy Roosevelt's vision of America is not a bad place to start: "The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, safety first instead of duty first, a love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life. This country will not be a permanently good place for any of us to live unless it is a good place for all of us to live."

Philip Gailey's e-mail address is gailey@sptimes.com

[Last modified September 10, 2005, 00:48:02]