When a Democrat is President, New Yorkers will address problems as problems. When a Republican is President, all the world's problems are placed on him.
New Yorkers have displaced all their anxiety about Islamic terrorism, an unsolvable problem, and placed in onto Bush, whom they can openly hate without getting their heads chopped off and feel like they're being productive. Hold a "Bush is Hitler" rally in Union Square, and all your bohemian neighbors will tell you that you're brave. Go to the Al Farooq mosque on Atlantic Avenue and hold a rally where you say "Islam is the problem!" and they will come out and kill you where you stand, just like they did Ari Halberstam. If you are an effete New Yorker who wants to feel like a hard guy doing something about terrorism, obviously your only option is to blame it all on Bush.
I live in New York City, and the "It's our fault they attacked us" rallies were already starting to form in Washington and Union Squares within two weeks of the attack, long before there was any action on Iraq.
What if you lived in a village that was being attacked repeatedly by a bear, and some people said, you either had to accept being killed at some point by the bear, or you had to go out into the woods with your blunderbuss and confront the bear. Well, a possible reaction to being faced with this choice would be to develop the theory that the bear is attracted to the village because the chef at the village inn cooks tasty food and that attracts the bear, so if they can manage to kill the chef, they won't have to confront the bear. They make a plan to take out the hapless chef, which is insane of course, but has the advantage of being immeasurably more appealing than hunting the bear, which would be scary.
New Yorkers, cowards that they are, are conspiring to kill the chef rather than the bear. It has nothing to do with Iraq or OBL at this point. It has to do with psychological displacement of fear onto New Yorkers' traditional objects of hatred: White male Christians. The appeal of doing this is too powerful to resist, apparently. I was driving on the FDR, and someone had hung a sign from an overpass "Osama Bin Forgotten!" What a crock. New Yorkers would like to think this is all about Bush and OBL. But that doesn't explain '93 and Abdul Rahman Yasin. So they don't talk about him and he's gone down the memory hole.