Rich Strikes Back

Almost five years have gone by and people are beginning to realize that we are in the same position, but worse. I didn't see this movie for basically the same reasons I didn't see Titanic. I knew how it ended and I used to work in Hollywood. I recommend The Player if you want to understand the design process.

Too Soon? It's Too Late for 'United 93' - New York Times: "Whatever the movie's other failings, that message is clear and essential: the identity of the enemy. The film opens with the four hijackers praying to Allah and, in keeping with the cockpit voice recording played at the Zacarias Moussaoui trial, portrays them as prayerful right until they murder 40 innocent people. Such are the Islamic radicals who struck us on 9/11 and whose brethren have only multiplied since.

Yet how fleeting has been their fame. Thanks to the administration's deliberate post-9/11 decision to make the enemy who attacked us interchangeable with the secular fascists of Iraq who did not, the original war on terrorism has been diluted in its execution and robbed of its support from the American public. Brian Williams seemed to be hinting as much when, in effusively editorializing about 'United 93' on NBC (a sister company of Universal), he suggested that 'it just may be a badly needed reminder for some that we are a nation at war because of what happened in New York and Washington and in this case in a field in Pennsylvania.' But he stopped short of specifying exactly what war he meant, and that's symptomatic of our confusion. When Americans think about war now, they don't think about the war prompted by what happened on 9/11 so much as the war in Iraq, and when they think about Iraq, they don't say, 'Let's roll!,' they say, 'Let's leave!'

The administration's blurring of the distinction between Al Qaeda and Saddam threatens to throw out the baby that must survive, the war against Islamic terrorists, with the Iraqi quagmire. Last fall a Pew Research Center survey found that Iraq had driven isolationist sentiment in the United States to its post-Vietnam 1970's high. In a CBS News poll released last week, the percentage of Americans who name terrorism as the nation's 'most important problem' fell to three. Every day we spend in Iraq erodes the war against those who attacked us on 9/11.

Just how much so was dramatized by an annual report on terrorism issued by the State Department on the same day that "United 93" opened nationwide. The number of terrorist attacks was up by a factor of nearly four in 2005. While Al Qaeda is scattered, it has been replaced by what Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar, describes as "a many-headed hydra that is just as deadly and far harder to slay." Osama bin Laden, no longer an operational leader, retains, in the State Department's language, "the capability to influence events, and inspire actual and potential terrorists."

We remain unprepared should they once again strike here. Like Hurricane Katrina before it, the Dubai Ports tsunami proved yet another indictment of our inept homeland security. While the country hyperventilated about the prospect of turning over our ports to a rare Arab ally, every expert on the subject, the former 9/11 commissioners included, was condemning our inability to check cargo at any point of entry, whether by sea or land, even if the Sopranos ran the show. Congress's Government Accountability Office reported that in a test conducted last year, undercover investigators smuggled enough radioactive material past our border inspectors to fuel two dirty bombs.

To add insult to this potential nuclear Armageddon, Afghanistan is falling back into the hands of religious fanatics; not even the country's American-backed president, Hamid Karzai, dared to publicly intervene in the trial of a man facing execution for converting from Islam to Christianity. "The Taliban and Al Qaeda are everywhere" is how a shopkeeper described the situation to the American commander in Afghanistan, The Times reported last week. These were the conditions that spawned the hijackers of "United 93" — all four of them trained in Qaeda camps in Afghanistan under Taliban rule. At this rate, we are in danger of marking the next anniversary of 9/11 with a reboot of the Afghanistan war we were supposed to have won more than four years ago.

Our level of denial about these setbacks is embedded not just in the White House, which blithely keeps telling us "we're winning" the war on terror, but also in the culture"

Yep, those bombings of markets, teachers being murdered in front of students and masked men taking busloads of police recruits and executing them, shows we are making progress. That might be some people's definition of winning, but it isn't mine.

The ability of this administration to distort the truth and refuse to confront the reality that is facing them defies all logic. The fact that Americans keep falling for it defies all reason. Running around telling the world how to behave is a little ridiculous since we can't even clean up our own backyard.

Tags: Frank Rich, Iraq, Taliban, Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, White House, terrorism