Sun - March 28, 2004

Bush's claim 'the world is more safe with Saddam gone' must sound most cynical to the people in Spain...

His comment touches upon two issues fundamental to the American presidential campaign. Namely, does the West belong in Iraq and is the world safer from terrorism today than it was four years ago?

Thoughtful people might answer these questions differently. Thoughtful people might also view the answer to the first question as independent of the answer to the second. What follows are simply my own opinions. Yours may vary.

The events of September 11, 2001 changed the way that I see the world and my country's place in it. My views did not change simply because terrorists struck a target in the United States—for Timothy McVeigh had claimed that dubious distinction years earlier. Nor did they change merely because people I know died when the World Trade Center collapsed. They changed because terrorism transformed itself that day into nothing less than an immediate, unavoidable threat to Western civilization.

Before 9-11, I gave terrorism about as much daily thought as I gave to choosing a favorite brand of toilet tissue. It seemed remote and unobtrusive. It was someone else's problem. If terrorist campaigns, such as those waged by the IRA or Basque separatists, revolted me with their indiscriminate carnage, at least their perpetrators rationalized them by reference to political ends. One could agree or disagree with the ends sought or the means used, but the presence of cause and effect at least left room for diplomacy and the prospect of eventual peace.

The terrorism of 9-11 reflected more than a new and different kind of destruction on a larger, more immediate scale. Osama Bin Laden and his followers didn't seek the release of political prisoners, the recognition of separatist rights, or the creation of a Palestinian homeland. Their raison d'être was to destroy Western ideas and Western people, both of whom they considered anathema to their fundamentalist values.

This meant that the inevitable question—what do they want?—could not be answered solely by withdrawal from the Middle East. It could not be answered by political reform. It could not be answered by releasing prisoners. It could not be answered by increasing foreign aid. It could not be answered by United Nations resolutions. It could not be answered by appeasement.

What did they want? They wanted us to die.

It's difficult to fathom that kind of hate. I've tried to comprehend why any group would kill so indiscriminately, why young men would be willing to give their lives for the sheer satisfaction of taking strangers with them. I don't understand it. Nor do I understand why Muslim houses of worship still succor such zealots. Surely, Islam is not a corrupt religion. Yet how can any faith that pays fealty to God embrace men whose hearts and minds have become so numbed that they kill in God's name?

But I digress from the important points, which are that they wanted us to die.

And that I wasn't willing to satisfy them.

Once those planes hit the Towers, I knew we were at war. I didn't yet know with whom or for what, but I knew that being at war meant that many more people would die on both sides. Yes, I was angry. Yes, I wanted revenge. But only the callous revel in vengeance. My mind rebelled at the inevitable consequences of war—the loss of national innocence, the loss of life.

I saw no other alternative.

Good friends of mine opposed the war on terror. Their reasons varied. Some believed that violence inevitably begets violence. Some thought that poverty bred the terrorism, and they couldn't bring themselves to hate indigent people. Some felt that the United Nations ought to play a greater role in the conflict.

I respected their views; I just didn't understand their hesitation. Violence begets violence, but Bin Laden and his followers had vowed to kill us. They had the desire, the funding, and the cunning to do it. They had openly declared their ambition to secure nuclear and biological weapons. Sitting out the conflict wasn't an option we were afforded. How could we stand down our troops and hope for the best?

How, too, could we avoid war simply on socioeconomic grounds? If poverty alone bred terror, the slums of Western cities would be constantly rife with political revolt. The poor may be underprivileged, but they have integrity. They have pride. They try to rise above their circumstances, not fly airliners into 110-story buildings. But all this is beside the point. He may be morally bankrupt, who has ever claimed that Osama Bin Laden is poor?

As for the U.N., I've always liked the concept of a body where nations can meet to discuss international affairs. Yet I'm reluctant to trust any organization that grants equal votes to democracies and to dictatorships, to those who oppose terror and to those who support it, to regimes that slaughter their own people and to governments that spend millions on foreign aid. I believed that the U.N. should play a key role in the war on terror. I simply distrusted its allegiance to the cause.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that even though I voted for his opponent, Al Gore, I supported President Bush when he committed American troops to Afghanistan.

What I worried about most–and worry about still—were the complex changes in domestic policy that followed 9-11 in the United States. The passage of the Patriot Act, which gave broad new powers to federal agencies. The unification of intelligence services under an umbrella organization. The seeming dehumanization and increased racial profiling of Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern, and Central and South Asian people. Whether or not these changes have aided the war on terror, my fear is that they will have lasting, unwelcome consequences for my country long after that conflict ends.

Which brings me back to the first question posed in this article: Is the world safer from terrorism today than it was in 2001? I believe it is. Although Al Qaeda remains a serious threat, its members fill jails around the world. International cooperation in investigations of terror and armed assaults on known terrorist strongholds have thus far circumvented attempts to inflict civilian loss of life on a scale approaching that of 9-11.

The world suffered losses to Al Qaeda in Bali and in Madrid—and will suffer losses again—but by and large Al Qaeda is less free to operate today than it was three years ago. If gains in this area offer scant comfort to the families of those who have lost their lives to terror, that is completely understandable—but it no more detracts from the achievements of terror combatants than the continued existence of murder detracts from a decline in murder rates.

As for Iraq, there are those who believe that the reasons for which the United States, Great Britain, and their coalition partners occupied that country are inseparable from the consequences of this action. If we invaded for the wrong reasons, the theory goes, nothing good could come of it. We would only have stirred up enmity in the Middle East that helped Bin Laden recruit more followers. Throw rocks at a hornet's nest they say and Madrid is the best evidence that you're going to get stung.

People who argue this way believe passionately in their positions. I respect that. I simply disagree with them.

I'm no apologist for the Bush administration. I supported the war in Afghanistan, but I didn't support the invasion of Iraq. I thought U.N. inspections should continue for at least until we had proof of what we know now—that Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction—or indisputable evidence to the contrary. I doubted that a canny political survivor like Saddam Hussein would ever give weapons of mass destruction to religious zealots such as Bin Laden for fear that the latter would use them against Hussein's regime.

Although I supported the Bush doctrine that nations befriending terror are our enemies, I worried that it drew a line in the sand that the American public would find too costly in terms of lives and materiel. I didn't see an easy way to withdraw from Iraq if we got involved there. I feared that the administration had miscalculated the time and the complexity of rebuilding that country. I wondered if nation building, and region rebuilding, were what the war was all about. Despite my reservations about the organization, I wanted more U.N. involvement in Iraq, not less.

Many of my concerns proved well founded.

Some supporters of the Bush administration have called it irrelevant if the United States went to war for reasons ultimately shown to be spurious. They're wrong. If we went to war because of faulty intelligence, then the intelligence network requires serious reform. If we went to war because the president misjudged or misrepresented the facts as he knew them, then he deserves to be held accountable for his sins of omission or commission.

But can anyone seriously deny at this late date that some great good has come of the Iraq occupation? One of the most brutal tyrants of the late 20th Century—a man who murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people—is in custody and will soon stand trial for his crimes. The Iraqi people have approved a Constitution. They may, God willing, vote in a new government this summer.

Those are remarkable achievements in less than a year's time. I do not believe that more than 500 young soldiers have died in vain.

I didn't support the invasion of Iraq because I doubted Iraq's larger connection to the war on terror. In this, I was wrong. Al Qaeda has made Iraq an official battleground in that conflict. Anyone watching or reading daily news reports about foreign-born combatants attacking U.S. troops can see the truth of this, but the cell that struck Madrid made the connection explicit.

Not that Al Qaeda needs provocation to attack civilians, as nightclub patrons in Bali learned so tragically last November, and as hundreds of Iraqis have since discovered.

I wish that this conflict was simply the product of throwing stones at hornet nests. It isn't. The hornets attacked long before Operation Iraqi Freedom. Fanaticism swelled their hive long before 9-11. I do not believe that the invasion of Iraq alone compelled young foreigners to give their lives for the cause of tyranny. If passion for a cause and faith in the importance of liberating a nation were so inherently compelling, then surely the U.N. would have turned out in force years ago to secure the blessings of democracy for Iraq. The U.N. did no such thing.

But it is time for the U.N. to show its mettle and to rededicate itself to building Iraq's future. It is also time for the United States to accept such help with gratitude. Combat alone won't secure the peace. We need Peace Corps volunteers to join volunteer soldiers. We need to help the Iraqis rebuild their schools and roads and infrastructure. We need to divert moneys from the oil reserves of all the Gulf region states to pay down Iraqi debt. We need to show that the world will not be dissuaded by threats, nor the cause of freedom impeded by zealots.

We need to give up the childish belief that we can simply close our eyes and wish our monsters back under the bed.

Belief that the war on terror and the Iraqi occupation were and remain someone else's problem has done as much to aggravate relations between the U.S. and its European allies as the United States's braggadocio and constant reminders that it saved Europe from fascism 50 years ago. For now, as then, the Western powers have more in common than divides them. They may disagree about policies, but they face a common threat and will share a common fate.

Let me close with a personal story that represents what the war on terror means for me. The other evening, when we went out for dinner, I overheard a little girl at another table proclaiming that it was her fourth birthday. I couldn't help thinking that if that child had lived in Madrid, Al Qaeda might already have killed her. Then I realized that they may kill her still.

I want us to fight the war on terror in a principled way because it's the right thing to do, not merely because future historians could judge this generation's actions or inactions critically.

But most of all, I want us to fight—and win—the war on terror so that little girl and others like her will have a chance to be future historians.