Post-9/11, Stuck in Iraq

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Post-9/11, Stuck in Iraq
by James Hall, Senior Associate Editor

September 11, 2003

"Leaning Left"

James Hall I realized that 9/11 permanently changed my life as I waited at the Orlando International Airport for my ride last week. As I stood outside by the curb of the drive-in arrivals area, a car pulled up and a man got out of it and went inside to baggage claim, leaving the car running.

I looked at it - brand new, maybe a rental - and the hairs on the back of my neck began to prickle. I couldn't help but imagine someone driving a rental car full of explosives up to the terminal, leaving the car, and letting it explode. I departed the curb and edged around a hefty concrete post and looked for the parking attendants who pounce on any cars that stay in the pickup area more than a few seconds. Sure enough, they came, and I felt relief when they called in a tow truck to tow the car away.

This reaction would have been highly improbable before 9/11 - I would have been far more sympathetic to the poor guy who just wanted to pick up his party at the airport. But the sight of New York's twin landmarks dissolving in a cloud of smoky dust changed my perceptual landscape forever.

We know what terrorism is. It's 19 fanatically religious Arabs, masquerading as students, hijacking four planes, using the weaknesses in our own infrastructure to strike at us. It's camps in Afghanistan where religious fanatics trained to kill Western civilians. It's a fanatic Islamic organization that sponsored attacks on Indonesian nightclubs and hotels set up for Westerners.

So why did we go after a selfish Arab despot who enriched himself and oppressed his own people instead? Saddam Hussein modeled his Baathist regime on Nazi Germany, persecuted religious Shiites and Sunnis, and was willing to pander to any Western nation, Russian, French, or even American, willing to support him. He attacked weak nations, not the strong ones, and the only Jihad he had an interest in supporting was one with himself absolutely in charge.

Saddam Hussein had about as much in common with the religious, self-effacing Usama bin Laden as Mutt did with Jeff.

Somehow, in the post-9/11 world, the meaning of "terrorist" came to mean more than the fanatics willing to kill and die for a warped idea of Allah. Anyone who is an enemy or even an opponent has suddenly become a terrorist. The ultimate conflation of terrorist with opponent occurred this past Sunday when President Bush announced to the world that Iraq was a terrorist battlefield.

After the President's speech, Iraqis who want the occupying US soldiers to leave their country were suddenly elevated to the status of terrorists, reacting first with puzzlement and then outrage at their change of status. Yesterday's protester is today's terrorist, tomorrow's casualty.

Reinventing Iraq as a terrorist battlefield has become the administration's sole remaining reason for justifying the expense of American lives and the $4 billion a month needed to create a friendly oil-rich state at a time when we're beginning to view our Saudi partners with more than a modicum of suspicion.

You want terrorists, real terrorists? The Saudis fit the part more than Saddam ever did--a nation of religious fanatics, not secularists, and their youth manned the planes that destroyed our Twin Towers. Now young Saudis are crossing the border into Iraq in numbers to kill Westerners with mines and car bombs.

After finding an Iraq bereft of weapons of mass destruction or extensive terrorist camps like those discovered in Afghanistan, Bush administration officials must grasp for straws. Their new theory is that Iraq is our flypaper, trapping our enemies. Dozens of terrorists who would have flown into New York to cripple us will save on airline ticket money by driving to Iraq to be killed instead.

Somehow, in the minds of our national leadership, terrorists would rather flock to die in Iraq than make the long trip to the States where they could make prime time television news.

Well, Iraq is indeed flypaper. On the second anniversary of 9/11, 150,000 American soldiers are stuck there, Congress is mulling over the $87 billion bill just delivered to the table, and John Ashcroft is campaigning cross-country for Patriot Act II. And I wonder what all the Western-hating religious fanatics--the real terrorists--are doing. ***

James Hall
Orlando, FL USA

Photo of the author courtesy of staff files