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Six years later, 9/11 effects still unknown

By HOWARD TROXLER
Published September 11, 2007

I always kind of figured the "war on terror" should have started in 2000, under President Clinton.

On Oct. 12 of that year, Islamic extremists launched an attack against the U.S.S. Cole in a port in Yemen, killing 17 American sailors and injuring 39 more.

This was an act of war and it deserved war in response. And when Yemen dragged its feet at helping, I would have told Yemen that its alternative was to become a big sheet of molten glass.

Eleven months later, on Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida struck at the United States through an amazing confluence of insane audacity and sheer luck, and our own slowness in grasping the warnings.

Soon after that came the weird postscript to 9/11, the anthrax attacks, sending us over the edge.

We eventually got the man who planned the Cole attack. But just the other day, the guy who planned the Sept. 11 attack supposedly sent out a new video. As for the anthrax mailer, who knows?

After Sept. 11, our president led us into Iraq.

I like to horrify my friends by raising the question of whether, 50 or 100 years from now, the U.S. invasion of Iraq will be judged to be a good thing. You never know.

But in the short run, it mostly looks like ambitious men such as Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz used 9/11 to throw America's weight around in a post-Soviet world.

If you know what is going on in Iraq today, then you are a smart cookie. At any rate, much of the world, which mourned with us after 9/11, views us cautiously after Iraq. I will be curious to see, if we keep it up, whether the rest of the world ever gangs up on us.

They can't out-bomb us, but it seems to me it would not take much to cause big trouble for a house built upon credit cards, national debt, trade deficits, fake mortgages and a Wal-Mart economy.

The history books, too, will talk about the assertion made by the Bush Administration that when the president is acting as the Commander-in-Chief, he can do anything at all legally, and declare anybody an "enemy combatant."

On top of that, they're reading mail and listening to phone calls. I do like the airport security, though. You bet.

Since Sept. 11, the U.S. government has stopped plots that genuinely seemed to have the ability to cause damage. I like to think that there are more successes we don't know about yet.

But we also have locked up a bunch of people in Guantanamo, tortured and humiliated some guys, shipped some to other countries for who knows what, and made a big deal of indicting some low-grade big talkers.

Six years turns out to be too short a time to assess 9/11, except for this: Knocking down even our tallest buildings and killing us in large numbers did not change our founding principle.

The principle stated in our Declaration and spelled out in our Constitution is that every person has inalienable rights. They can't be taken away by any government or king or external force, not even by bombs and crazy extremists.

As always, the biggest danger to our freedoms is that we might one day decide to give them up ourselves.

I hope you can stop by from noon to 1 p.m. today for the weekly live chat on TroxBlog. Click on the "Blogs" link at www.tampabay.com or go to blogs.tampabay.com/troxler.

[Last modified September 10, 2007, 19:18:40]