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Two years later
We’re not safer than we were on 9/11. Bush has made us more vulnerable.

PRESIDENT George W. Bush wants $87 billion to fund ongoing military operations in Iraq. Attorney General John Ashcroft wants the public to support a revamped version of the USA Patriot Act that will further restrict civil liberties. Both men want you to believe that you are safer today than you were two years ago. But you’re not. None of us is. The Taliban is regrouping in Afghanistan. Iraq is dangerously destabilized and becoming more treacherous for US troops by the day. And our friends and allies around the world are still suspicious — and disapproving — of our motives for invading Iraq in the first place.

Today marks the two-year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Since that terrible day, we have invaded two countries — one justified, one not — alienated much of the world, restricted civil liberties at home, and ignored pressing domestic concerns like health-care reform and economic recovery.

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: it is shocking to think that we could lose the sympathy of Europe and the rest of the world after the devastation of 9/11, yet that is just what Bush managed to achieve mere weeks after the attacks, as the World Trade Center was still burning. Today, that erosion of sympathy has morphed into outright hostility toward a foreign policy built on a foundation of arrogance. Bush lied to the American public to prompt the Iraq invasion. At minimum, he exaggerated intelligence reports about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. He continues to lie about nonexistent links between the attacks of 9/11 and Saddam’s Iraqi regime. To date, 287 American troops have died in Iraq. The number of weapons of mass destruction found? Zero. The president, along with his administration of sycophants, has dodged any public discussion of the war’s costs. Now that Bush has asked Congress for another $87 billion to pay for Iraq’s reconstruction — a sum that could, to put it in perspective, pay for six Central Artery/Tunnel Projects — members of his administration admit that they miscalculated what it was all going to cost. They have just conceded what they must certainly have known for months now: that, due to the decrepit state of Iraq’s oil-production infrastructure (which will result in an even greater payoff for Vice-President Dick Cheney’s friends at Halliburton when the company bills the government for rebuilding the machinery), estimates of revenues that could be earned through the sale of Iraqi oil were off by billions of dollars. There comes a point, it must be said, when errors of omission compound to such a point that they become errors of commission. Bush has lied to everyone: our allies, US citizens, and, perhaps most grievously, members of the US military.

Even as all this is going on, Ashcroft is touring the country, on taxpayer dollars, to promote amendments to the Patriot Act that will take even more of our freedoms away by making it easier for law-enforcement officials to circumvent due process. And when he’s not pushing legislation that will allow our government to spy on us, he’s busy banning pornography by prosecuting the makers of highly offensive, but legal, porn films (see "Don’t Quote Me," News and Features, September 5, available online at www.bostonphoenix.com) and prosecuting people who grow marijuana for medicinal use in states that have legalized the drug for this purpose (see "Domestic Stealth Bombs," News and Features, February 27, available online at www.bostonphoenix.com). This is a neo-con and fundamentalist agenda at odds with modern society. It betrays a perverse set of priorities.

It’s hard not to be sickened by the arrogant impulses of the Bush regime. The president’s open contempt for North Korean leader Kim Jong Il — easily the only thing any reasonable person could feel toward the brutal dictator, but not what the president of the United States should be expressing so freely — has stupidly exacerbated long-simmering tensions between that closed nation and the rest of the world. The result is that we are more vulnerable to attacks of mass destruction than we were two years ago. The Korean peninsula has become even more unstable. And invading the country, Bush’s seeming solution to dealing with tyrants, isn’t an option: tens of thousands of South Koreans and many members of the US military stationed there would be killed instantly.

Bush’s deliberate neglect of Palestinian terrorism against Israel has made that part of the world even more volatile — something not thought possible. Today, Israel is under near-constant attack. The Bush "plan" to bring peace talks to the region collapsed before anyone had a chance to take it seriously.

In the meantime, isn’t it curious that the lull in terror alerts from the much-vaunted Department of Homeland Security coincides with a period of electoral quiet? Expect to see us back at orange, or even red, when Bush’s re-election campaign heats up.

Are we safer today than we were two years ago? No. Bush’s brittle, fearfully arrogant, and isolationist stance in the world has done nothing to help us. In fact, we’re worse off.

What do you think? Send an e-mail to letters[a]phx.com


Issue Date: September 12 - 18, 2003
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