Posted on 09/10/2003 4:05:02 PM PDT by BigWaveBetty
And may God bless and keep safe all our brave troops fighting to keep us free.
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THE PRESIDENT: We are here in the middle hour of our grief. So many have suffered so great a loss, and today we express our nation's sorrow. We come before God to pray for the missing and the dead, and for those who love them.
On Tuesday, our country was attacked with deliberate and massive cruelty. We have seen the images of fire and ashes, and bent steel.
Now come the names, the list of casualties we are only beginning to read. They are the names of men and women who began their day at a desk or in an airport, busy with life. They are the names of people who faced death, and in their last moments called home to say, be brave, and I love you.
They are the names of passengers who defied their murderers, and prevented the murder of others on the ground. They are the names of men and women who wore the uniform of the United States, and died at their posts.
They are the names of rescuers, the ones whom death found running up the stairs and into the fires to help others. We will read all these names. We will linger over them, and learn their stories, and many Americans will weep.
To the children and parents and spouses and families and friends of the lost, we offer the deepest sympathy of the nation. And I assure you, you are not alone.
Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.
War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing.
Our purpose as a nation is firm. Yet our wounds as a people are recent and unhealed, and lead us to pray. In many of our prayers this week, there is a searching, and an honesty. At St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York on Tuesday, a woman said, "I prayed to God to give us a sign that He is still here." Others have prayed for the same, searching hospital to hospital, carrying pictures of those still missing.
God's signs are not always the ones we look for. We learn in tragedy that his purposes are not always our own. Yet the prayers of private suffering, whether in our homes or in this great cathedral, are known and heard, and understood.
There are prayers that help us last through the day, or endure the night. There are prayers of friends and strangers, that give us strength for the journey. And there are prayers that yield our will to a will greater than our own.
This world He created is of moral design. Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance, and love have no end. And the Lord of life holds all who die, and all who mourn.
It is said that adversity introduces us to ourselves. This is true of a nation as well. In this trial, we have been reminded, and the world has seen, that our fellow Americans are generous and kind, resourceful and brave. We see our national character in rescuers working past exhaustion; in long lines of blood donors; in thousands of citizens who have asked to work and serve in any way possible.
And we have seen our national character in eloquent acts of sacrifice. Inside the World Trade Center, one man who could have saved himself stayed until the end at the side of his quadriplegic friend. A beloved priest died giving the last rites to a firefighter. Two office workers, finding a disabled stranger, carried her down sixty-eight floors to safety. A group of men drove through the night from Dallas to Washington to bring skin grafts for burn victims.
In these acts, and in many others, Americans showed a deep commitment to one another, and an abiding love for our country. Today, we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called the warm courage of national unity. This is a unity of every faith, and every background.
It has joined together political parties in both houses of Congress. It is evident in services of prayer and candlelight vigils, and American flags, which are displayed in pride, and wave in defiance.
Our unity is a kinship of grief, and a steadfast resolve to prevail against our enemies. And this unity against terror is now extending across the world.
America is a nation full of good fortune, with so much to be grateful for. But we are not spared from suffering. In every generation, the world has produced enemies of human freedom. They have attacked America, because we are freedom's home and defender. And the commitment of our fathers is now the calling of our time.
On this national day of prayer and remembrance, we ask almighty God to watch over our nation, and grant us patience and resolve in all that is to come. We pray that He will comfort and console those who now walk in sorrow. We thank Him for each life we now must mourn, and the promise of a life to come.
As we have been assured, neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, can separate us from God's love. May He bless the souls of the departed. May He comfort our own. And may He always guide our country.
God bless America.
President George W. Bush holds the badge of a police officer killed in the September attacks. "And I will carry this," said President Bush during his address to Congress Sept. 20. "It is the police shield of a man named George Howard, who died at the World Trade Center trying to save others. It was given to me by his mom, Arlene, as a proud memorial to her son. This is my reminder of lives that ended, and a task that does not end."
President George W. Bush embraces a firefighter at the site of the World Trade Center during his visit to New York Sept. 14.
Speaking to an audience of thousands at the Department of Defense Service of Remembrance Dec. 11, President George W. Bush pays tribute to those who lost their lives at the Pentagon.
Today's date, Sept. 10, has become shorthand for an age of innocence, an idyll under blue skies--as the clock ticks toward 8:46 the next morning, when the first hijacked jet hits the first tower and America wakes to war.
In truth, Sept. 10 was the last day not of innocence, but of an era of dangerous delusion. The hijackers were already trained and en route to the targeted flights. The training camps in Afghanistan were in full swing. The malice brewed in the tyrannies of the Middle East had for years been spilling out in acts of terror. Sept. 10 capped a decade in which America under the first President Bush began by walking away from a Gulf War only half won, leaving Saddam Hussein in power. Then we elected Bill Clinton, who declined to confront our worst enemies in the peculiar belief that they would more or less return the courtesy. And so came Sept. 11, 2001.
It was a lesson learned at horrific cost. Which makes it doubly unsettling that as we head into the third year of this war, there's a rising chorus--not only from Democratic contenders, former Clintonites and assorted Frenchmen, but some of it from within George W. Bush's own administration--chanting that we've gone far enough, maybe even too far.
The idea seems to be that except for chasing down al Qaeda operatives here and there, and making us doff our shoes at airports, it's time for America to go back to sleep. President Bush goes on television to update us on the immense task that he accurately describes as "rolling back the terrorist threat to civilization," and the big news is sticker shock over Iraq. Mr. Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, reinventing herself in Foreign Affairs as the rhyming sage of the modern age, aches to remake the Bush administration policy in which--as she puts it--"reliance on alliance had been replaced by redemption through preemption."
France, Germany, Russia and the careerocrats at the U.S. State Department are all insisting that an outfit that until this past March was still colluding in the oil-for-palaces business with Saddam Hussein--yes, the United Nations--is now the best bet for inculcating democracy, or at least passing the buck, in Iraq. And Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who has failed utterly to provide leadership in the matter of actually eliminating such threats as the former regime of Saddam or the nuclear dangers now on the front burners in Iran and North Korea, would like us to follow his path to world peace--the path of 17 failed U.N. resolutions on Iraq, the peace of Sept. 10 in New York.
There is a siren lure amid this racket. At its core, it poses a question compelling even to those who believe in facing deadly truths and dealing with them: When will this war be over?
The answer is not pleasant. This war, in the most basic sense of a fight to defend our freedom, our society of liberty and justice, is far larger than Iraq, Afghanistan or even the entire Middle East. The real war here is the old human struggle of good versus evil, a war that is part of what we are, part of the long volatile history of mankind. Never has there been so much to celebrate; rarely has there been more peril. Among individuals, we cannot hope to eliminate entirely all cold and gloating killers, people such as al Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri, drunk on his dreams of destruction, threatening in recent weeks to launch "an attack that will make you forget Manhattan." There will always be someone who delights in terror and ruin, and seeks ways to inflict it. And as we all know, modern technology, along with its mighty blessings, offers arsenals so terrifying we can all have our moments of wishing to live forever suspended in that last spell of denial, the 10th of September.
But neither is this war hopeless in scope. We are not fighting every psychopath or fanatic in existence; we are pitted against those who have found some organizing structure to foster and arm them. Effective terrorist groups are not as a rule made up of amateurs. Agents need to be recruited, trained, housed, equipped and coordinated. If you are planning to hijack a plane, it helps to practice at a facility such as Saddam's jet fuselage at Salman Pak. If you want to set off nuclear bombs, or spread deadly disease, you will probably need some pals, or at least business partners, in states that care nothing for civilized norms, such as North Korea or Iran.
Tackling the world's worst tyrannies, clearing away the systems that foster terror, is at the heart of this war. It is a daunting, dangerous, costly task; it is far from over, and if we stop short, we are incubating nightmares that will make this Sept. 10, 2003, look as tranquil as the same day two years earlier.
We can debate the precise methods of the very imprecise art of replacing tyrants who threaten us with democracies that do not. But as a price tag for the defense of our own nation, which is the real issue behind regime change in Iraq, $87 billion is small potatoes. If it is used well, the return in terms of a safer world could be vast. In the 1990s, at U.S. behest, and largely with our money, the International Monetary Fund threw more than twice that amount into emerging markets such as Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea and Russia, not to defend our civilization, but in the less edifying interest of bailing out some bad investments.
On many sides right now, we are hearing the unsavory news that if we continue this struggle, it is only because we have no choice. Actually we do. It is a choice beautifully articulated by novelist William Faulkner in 1950, as the Cold War turned hot in Korea. That year Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in his acceptance speech he laid out one option--I'd call it the dead-end option, the Sept. 10 approach, in which we duck, discuss, deny and just kind of hope to personally survive the next attack:
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?
Then Faulkner offered another option:
That is what this war is about. If we so choose. Link
The American collective memory being notoriously short, it's hard to remember that it's only been two years. Perhaps this week's ceremonies--and President Bush's speech last night, not yet given as I write--will revive and implant the lessons we learned on that fateful September 11.
The chattering classes have the shortest of all memories. Just now politicians and pundits have been dissecting the rough patch the U.S. is encountering four months after military victory in Iraq: A guerrilla remnant blowing up targets that have declined American protection, the French and Germans seizing another opportunity to give America the back of their hands at the United Nations, and the Democratic dwarves taking their New Mexico debate as an opportunity to tee off in both English and Spanish.
In the bigger picture, though, Iraq and September 11 are inseparable. I continue to believe it's likely that Saddam Hussein was complicit in the airline hijackings, but lay that aside. No serious observer can believe that we would have invaded Iraq if there had been no hijackings. The blustering of the Saddams of the world were newly relevant once Americans saw how vulnerable they were in a world of terrorism and instant communications.
The Bush administration laid out a considered rationale on how to react to this new world. The president first set it out in his speech to West Point cadets. To repeat the same quotations I used in "What We Learned" on the first September 11 anniversary a year ago:
"The gravest danger to freedom lies at the perilous crossroads of radicalism and technology. . . . Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger the American people and our nation. The attacks of September the 11th required a few hundred thousand dollars in the hands of a few dozen evil and deluded men. . . . [I]f we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. . . . Our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for pre-emptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives."
These thoughts were later spelled out in detail in a 31-page White House document, "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America." The Bush Doctrine provided, and continues to provide, the rationale for the Iraq war.
Saddam Hussein clearly supported terrorism. In a Oct. 2, 2002, letter, CIA Director George Tenet laid out Saddam's links with al Qaeda, but lay that aside. The Iraqi dictator bragged about payments to families of suicide bombers in Israel. Iraq had used chemical weapons in its war with Iran and in suppressing Kurds, and had tried to build nuclear weapons. Saddam's mental state was evident in having started two wars.
This was the essence of the case for pre-emption; it prevailed not only within the administration but by votes of 77-23 in the U.S. Senate and 296-133 in the House. The U.N. passed one resolution citing 16 previous ones, but France and Germany sabotaged the 18th one. So President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair sent forces to topple the Saddam regime.
It's necessary to rehearse this history to keep current concerns in perspective. The lightning coalition attack was not subjected to chemical attack, and so far searchers have uncovered no troves of weapons of mass destruction. The administration clearly underestimated the difficulty of the postwar reconstruction. But in the larger picture, these are mere details. The September 11 attacks are a warning that we have to deal with a new world, and the Bush Doctrine either is or is not the necessary response.
The president's critics are not rising to this challenge. In their debate the other night, the Democratic candidates blathered about his failing to bring along the U.N., meaning the Germans and French. Pundits have drawn a new line in the sand, one casualty a day is too much. But we lost some 3,000 Americans in one day on September 11; our soldiers are in Iraq to prevent that from happening again to our civilians at home.
Remember too, we're in the middle of a battle. In his famous aircraft carrier speech the president declared "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended." But he also warned that "difficult work" remained. "The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done."
In mid-battle, reverses can be expected, but do not necessarily presage the outcome. Our forces can learn to curb guerrilla attacks. Correcting earlier hesitancy, they have summoned some alacrity in building an Iraqi government. In the coming week I would not be surprised if Secretary of State Powell succeeds at the U.N., winning more help from around the world despite the French. Similarly, I would not be surprised if the resignation of Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas proves to be a step toward the removal of Yasser Arafat.
The Bush Doctrine and the fall of Saddam have created a new world environment. It surfaces problems previously ignored, as we once ignored the threat of terrorism. But once the problems surface we have an opportunity to resolve them. While there's no guarantee we will always succeed, we've also learned that the United States has great power, not only military but moral. And over these last two years since September 11, the naysayers have been consistently wrong. Link
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