Facing Reality

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Just before 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11--the moment that, two years ago, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center — President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their wives stepped onto the lawn of the White House for a moment of silence. During that long day of remembrance, the President's only public engagement was at St. John's Church on Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House. A year ago, Bush spent 14 hours visiting all three sites of destruction and death — downtown Manhattan, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pa. He ended that pilgrimage with a speech at Ellis Island — the Statue of Liberty and the wounded New York City skyline providing a backdrop both poignant and uplifting. This year, by contrast, a White House aide said before Sept. 11, "the message is low key." It could hardly have been lower.

In brief and halting remarks after the service at St. John's, the President remembered those who lost their lives two years ago, and the heroism, decency and compassion shown by Americans on that "sad and terrible day." Sept. 11 is worth remembering for all those reasons and for one other, which is now proving impossible to forget. In his response to the attacks, Bush launched the U.S. on an unprecedented and hugely ambitious campaign to rid the world of terrorism, to remove those regimes that aided terrorists in the past or might do so in the future, and to ensure that weapons of mass destruction do not leach into the hands of terrorists or their sympathizers. But to do that, Bush set out an even grander effort to pacify an arc of crisis running from Marrakesh to Bangladesh. Hence, two wars so far — in Afghanistan and Iraq — plus a concerted U.S. effort to set Israelis and Palestinians on a road map to a peaceful settlement. In the most hopeful version of the Administration's strategy, these objectives come together in a virtuous circle — and peace breaks out all over. Having seen that the U.S. was a "strong horse" in Afghanistan and Iraq, Palestinian radicals would realize — by some process never quite explained — that there is no point continuing to use violence as a way of advancing their political goals.

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All this may yet come to pass. The Bush Administration remorselessly reminds anyone who will listen that it never promised a quick and easy consummation of its policies. But it has not come to pass yet, and Bush was forced to reckon last week with the reality of the enormous task he has set himself and to acknowledge that it is messier, more daunting and more complicated than he ever imagined. Bush needs help, and he has admitted as much by calling on the U.N. Security Council to pass a new resolution to encourage the flow of more money and armed forces into Iraq. How he copes with the new reality on the ground and whether he gets the help he seeks will determine the fate of his presidency.

The Big Picture
For a few weeks, as the anniversary of Sept. 11 approached, the White House was thinking how best to advance the Administration's goals. Aides knew the news from Iraq was unsettling the public, and they knew too that it would take more than a few presidential homilies to calm everyone's nerves. "There was a time," said a White House aide, "when we could just give a speech, and that would take care of an issue. We can't do that now." The new strategy was to "big-picture Iraq" and place the struggle there in the larger context of the global war on terrorism. Bush was pleased with his reception at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention on Aug. 26, and it was on that day that the idea of giving a televised speech to the nation began to take shape. So on Sept. 7, after the NFL games, Bush, the go-it-alone ranger, turned reluctant multilateralist. He called on other countries, whatever their "past differences" with the U.S., to step up to their "present duties" in what the Administration likes to call the "central front" in the war on terrorism. "Members of the United Nations," said Bush, "now have the opportunity — and the responsibility — to assume a broader role in assuring that Iraq becomes a free and democratic nation." Bush said he would ask Congress for $87 billion in the current fiscal year for the military and for reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan. That breathtaking figure constitutes 11% of the entire discretionary spending in the federal budget.

But the grim reality in the arc of crisis was unchanged by his speech. Two days after the President spoke, suicide bombers from Hamas, the radical Palestinian group, killed 15 Israelis in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The Israeli government responded by announcing that it had made a decision to expel Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Authority, from the West Bank. Then al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite-TV channel, showed a videotape of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri — the leader and ideologist, respectively, of al-Qaeda — strolling around a boulder-strewn mountainside with the insouciance of a couple of friends hiking in the Adirondacks, a sobering reminder that those who lead the network responsible for the worst terrorist attacks in history remain at large. On Friday U.S. forces in Iraq were involved in a fire fight at Fallujah in which they killed eight Iraqi policemen, and the same day, two American servicemen died in another battle. "The forces of reality have set in," said Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in what may be the year's finest understatement.