How secure are you?
Petraeus' empty words and the real terror threat. Plus: Larry Craig's libidinal misstep is grounded in modern male sexuality.
By Camille Paglia
Read more: Camille Paglia, Opinion
Sept. 12, 2007 | Six years after the attack on the World Trade Center, what is the state of national security in the U.S.?
The Bush administration assures us that, thanks to its invisible hand, we are far safer than we would have been with a bleeding-heart Democrat at the helm. I suspect this is true: The lack of scruple about constitutional guarantees that has been openly flaunted by Vice President Dick Cheney might well have nipped nascent conspiracies in the bud -- though at the price of the massive surveillance and targeting of innocent citizens.
Should there be another major attack on U.S. soil, even Democrats suspicious of Republican hype would snap into survivalist mode, where defense of hearth and home is an elemental instinct. What Bush and company puff as the "war on terror" is no mirage: radical jihadism, exacerbated by the arrogant stupidity of our invasion of Iraq, does indeed threaten the very existence of Western civilization, whose peace and prosperity depend on a complex infrastructure and communications system vulnerable to catastrophic disruption by small bands of ruthless saboteurs.
But if some Democrats too facilely dismiss the gravity of the threat, Republicans have not helped their cause by their propagandistic conflation of shadowy al-Qaida with the authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein, who held Iraq together, as his fascist forebears in Assyria and Babylon had done, through brutal repression. Some conservatives can go off the deep end: earlier this year, for example, I heard New York radio host Steve Malzberg deride Barack Obama's cautious caveat that, after another attack, we would need to learn "whose fingerprints are on the bomb." Malzberg flatly proclaimed, "If we're hit again with a dirty bomb, we should immediately tactically nuke Tehran and Damascus." Welcome to World War III.
Psychological survival seems to demand mental erasure. The liberal mainstream media censor the raw footage of the burning and collapsing WTC towers out of contorted deference to the victims' families, while conservatives block out the horrific suffering and devastation inflicted on innocent Iraqis through our bombing and occupation of Iraq. Noble motives cannot excuse injustice.
A moment that will surely live in political infamy was the confident declaration by the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christine Todd Whitman, that the air was safe to breathe in lower Manhattan -- a statement that, only a week after 9/11, seemed bizarrely premature to me but that was blatantly designed to restore faith in the viability of the financial district. Meanwhile, the acrid fumes from subterranean fires kept pumping out their toxic brew, whose delayed effects are still unknown. It isn't simply the selfless, tireless search-and-recovery workers at ground zero who need be concerned about their long-term health. Whitman was a vigorous, genial former governor of New Jersey who seemed primed for an eventual presidential run, but her career was shipwrecked amid the blinkered partisanship and general managerial mediocrity that have characterized the George W. Bush White House. Whitman's fall was a loss for feminism.
I had no interest whatever in Gen. David Petraeus' predictable report this week of the success of the troop surge in Iraq. Words and more words -- what's new? Just get our troops the hell out of there -- now! A phased withdrawal, requiring the removal of massive amounts of supplies and equipment, will take months. But there isn't the sketchiest plan because Bush is dug in to the bitter end and will toss this hot potato to the incoming president -- who (no matter which party wins) won't dare to act. And of course Iraq needs to remain neutralized when American or Israeli bombs start dropping on Iran, which I have little doubt they will do by next year. Bush-Cheney, lacking a clear record of achievement, want to go out with a bang.
Next page: What Larry Craig may have in common with thuggish soccer fans