The Year of George Bush
Posted Dec. 24, 2001
By Jamie Dettmer
insightmag.com
A New York City fireman gazes in disbelief at the remnants of the World Trade Center´s twin towers, which were leveled on the morning of Sept. 11.
Life comes back to the injured city. Shoppers and tourists once again are filling the streets of the Big Apple, and the hotels that remained hauntingly de-serted following the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are buzzing. But the memories won't go away and, for many out-of-towners, there is a pilgrimage to be made this holiday season — to "ground zero" where a religious zealot, whose grim handiwork will be remembered long past his eventual death, snuffed out 3,000 lives.
For those marked by the atrocity, this will be a desperate Christmas. The absence of their spouses, children, friends or lovers will leave them marooned in a bleakness that even getting the head of the man whom President George W. Bush has dubbed the "evildoer" won't be able to relieve. The rewards of revenge have their limits.
This was the year of Osama bin Laden, and next year threatens to be shaped by him and his followers — or at least by the reactions to the challenge of al-Qaeda terrorism. Despite the speedy toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan there is much unfinished business for the Bush administration. Al-Qaeda has been dealt a grievous blow and its members dispersed, but their very dispersal, especially of the leaders, poses new threats. Al-Qaeda cells remain, as does its infrastructure of terror.
From the start of America's fight back Bush warned that the struggle against al-Qaeda would be no short-lived affair and that victory wouldn't come with one crushing battlefield victory. As other countries have discovered — Britain, Spain, Israel and Colombia among them — terrorism is not easy to root out nor prevent, and the very process of attempting to do so can provide fertile ground for renewed recruitment.
Like New York City, the nation's capital remained subdued and shaken this Christmas season, with its inhabitants aware that an assault on the homeland would continue to alter the lives of Americans, both in perceptible and more disguised ways, from heightened security at airports to a curtailing of civil liberties. And not only America's: The effects of the strike against the United States spread far and wide, from Afghanistan to Russia, from Israel to the Philippines.
The consequences for many places are trouble ahead: In Gaza and on the West Bank and in the cities of Israel increased tensions in the Middle East are plain to see, with a stalled peace process now stripped bare of the fictions that kept it half-alive. Suicide bombers and zealous Jewish settlers, Hamas and Israeli hawks, Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon have seen to it that the skeptics had a point when arguing in the 1990s that the Oslo peace process merely would reposition the avowed enemies ahead of another major bout of bloodletting and animosity.
Arafat never could (and didn't want to) deliver what the West hoped for: A deferential Palestinian statelet that would turn its back on the teeming refugee camps of Lebanon and Jordan, forget past grievances and settle for second-class status. The Israelis may have mishandled the peace process, too, by pockmarking the Palestinian Authority with Jewish settlements, splitting Arafat's land into two disconnected parts and piling on humiliation with on-again off-again restrictions on access to jobs in Israel. But in the end their "partners in peace" have really only wanted one thing: for the state of Israel to cease to exist.
And so the season of peace has become a season of war, rendering the Holy Land again an unholy place of hatred, bombs, tears and implacable enmity.
Wider afield in the Middle East the poison continues to seep. As high-ranking U.S. officials have made clear, and as a Department of Energy report disclosed by Insight recently demonstrated, there is ample evidence to suggest that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein remains determined to forge weapons of mass destruction, including deadly VX gas. Will a reckoning come to the Persian Gulf in 2002?
Iraq tops the administration's terrorist list now. Within Bush's War Cabinet Baghdad is favored as the next target as the United States seeks justice and an end to terrorist threats from overseas. Momentum for taking the war on terrorism to Iraq was building as Christmas loomed with several of the United States' Middle East allies suggesting discreetly that they would support a committed effort to unseat the "butcher of Baghdad." Reportedly Turkey has offered NATO bases there for strikes on neighboring Iraq.
But as the new year approached, debate within the Bush administration about the methods to be used in taking the fight to Saddam continued. Should the United States launch a major ground war against him or rely on air strikes and covert action in both the Kurdish north and Shi'ite south to bring him down? Some aides argue the latter approach will be ineffective; others maintain the United States does not have the troops available.
With bin Laden apparently having slipped the noose in the White Mountains of Afghanistan, a move against Iraq may be delayed while al-Qaeda's leader and his top lieutenants are pursued.
But "delay" is the operative word and while European allies and Russia publicly have raised objections to the United States moving against Baghdad, few doubt that this is one Bush administration that Saddam won't see out.
Moreover, the disagreements on the Iraqi front are not likely to be too disruptive in U.S. relations with the European Union. Nor are differences likely to undermine the warming intimacy between Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Out of evil some good has come.
As Bush emphasized in the days following the terror attacks, one of the most heartening developments of the year was the overwhelming wave of support the United States received from the Europeans. That came in distinct contrast to the earlier trans-Atlantic friction that emerged soon after Bush arrived in Washington, with the Europeans ready to find fault with an administration they saw as too much America-first and unilateralist. The Balkans, trade, nuclear-arms control, global warming — all were bones of contention. To the amazement of his critics, Bush displayed a deftness in foreign affairs that, instead of following international consensus, brought the important world leaders around to the U.S. point of view, albeit reluctantly.
Britain was at the forefront of the Europeans rallying to America's side. On the floor of the House of Representatives, where Bush delivered a well-received fighting speech to Congress, a roar went up from the assembled lawmakers when British Prime Minister Tony Blair entered the gallery above them.
Likewise Russia, America's old Cold War foe, rallied, with Putin being the first foreign leader to call Bush to extend condolences and to offer assistance in the hours following the attacks on New York City and Washington. Even the announcement in December by Bush of his intention to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty couldn't undermine the promise of a new chapter in U.S.-Russian relations.
As 2002 beckoned both the White House and the Kremlin appeared ready for a long-haul effort to improve on the post-Cold War relationship between the United States and Russia that had soured in the latter days of the chaotic and corrupt administration of Boris Yeltsin. And the tone between the two countries by the end of the year was very different from earlier in the year when U.S. counterintelligence agents unmasked the spying of FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen and dozens of Russian "diplomats" were expelled.
Warmer relations with Moscow were offset, though, by deteriorating relations with Beijing, which was far less sanguine about the ABM Treaty withdrawal than Moscow and obviously frustrated with Putin's tilt toward Washington. The Chinese had been eager to form an anti-U.S. axis with Russia.
For a fledgling Bush administration the year started badly on the Chinese front with an ugly standoff between the two countries over the midair collision in international waters of a Chinese F-8 fighter/interceptor and a U.S. Navy EP-3E spy plane.
The subsequent seizure by the Chinese of the U.S. aircraft, which made a stunning emergency landing on Hainan Island, and the Chinese demand for an U.S. apology over the incident before releasing the crew provided the new American president with an opportunity to demonstrate his mettle. And despite the lack of European backing and much foreign carping the White House refused to back down. There was a new sheriff in town.
Far from being a "national humiliation," as some in the conservative media worried it might become, the spy-plane confrontation with China handed Bush his first foreign-policy success. It foreshadowed the steady response Bush and his top aides showed later in the year when the United States suffered its first homeland attack since Pearl Harbor.
The year of bin Laden? Yes, but it also could be argued that 2001 was the year of George W. and the making of a presidency. He came into office a disputed chief executive, but he saw the year out as a worthy president, the legitimate leader of a wounded America that needed leadership.
As he has done throughout his short political career, Bush exceeded the expectations of the skeptics. His strengths overcame his shortcomings. No great rhetorical speaker, his conversational style and sincerity steadied a nation at a moment of crisis, as did the able performance of an administration stacked with heavyweights. Earlier in the year he had surprised the naysayers by securing passage of major tax cuts.
Bush's contribution was great, but uplifting also was the unity of a nation in the face of tragedy. It was no better expressed than in the heroism of the firefighters and police officers in New York City and the self-sacrifice of the passengers onboard American Airlines Flight 93, who fought the hijackers of their aircraft, crashing the plane in rural Pennsylvania instead of Washington. Or writer and TV commentator Barbara Olson, who calmly called her husband, U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, from the doomed plane heading for the Pentagon.
There was other heroism to be applauded in 2001 at home and abroad. The dogged and dignified performance of the outgoing mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, was noteworthy, as was the bravery of Pakistan's President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who persuaded his nation to back the United States, probably risking his very life to do so.
But there also were less uplifting events. Unity wasn't as forthcoming as the times demanded in the nation's capital — or, more precisely, on Capitol Hill — when it came to issues concerning the economy. Both parties were intent on blaming the other for the recession or for making it worse, undermining Bush's efforts to secure a quick stimulus package after the aggressive interest-rate cutting of the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee under Chairman Alan Greenspan failed to lift the flagging economy quickly.
The Wall Street Journal described the battle over the stimulus bill as a "political fiasco" and, along with many economists, argued that prolonged debate had made the package so irrelevant that recovery would start without help from Congress' concept of stimulus.
The administration's difficulties on Capitol Hill, from the problems it faced in securing judicial nominations to getting its energy policies passed, underscored the huge setback the White House suffered with the defection early in the year from Republican ranks by Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords. Despite all the talk of bipartisanship in Washington, his abandonment of the GOP allowed the new Senate Majority Leader, Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), to use the Senate as a weapon to beat up on the Bush administration.
As far as Daschle was concerned, his obstructionism on the stimulus package was a matter of principle. He argued the Bush plan rewarded corporations and the rich and didn't provide enough assistance to the poor and the newly unemployed. But others maintained Daschle was eager to please organized labor and other bedrock Democratic constituencies ahead of what insiders say is the Senate majority leader's plan to run for the presidency in 2004.
Narrow partisanship may have stopped at the water's edge following Sept. 11, but on domestic issues it roared on, auguring badly for a more positive tone being displayed in next year's congressional races (see "It Still Will Be the Economy, Stupid").
Nor did Congress earn praise for its timid response to the bizarre Chandra Levy episode and the revelations about Rep. Gary Condit's (D-Calif.) affair with the missing intern and his other many extramarital activities. The initial reaction from members of Congress was to circle the wagons, with only Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) ready to speak out in condemnation ahead of his laggardly colleagues.
Heroism and sordidness, accomplishment and treachery, fear and the overcoming of fear — the human condition was shown in all its glory and all its sadness in a year that the United States shall never forget. But surely what shown through, and what will be remembered, was fortitude and the kindness of strangers; of firemen displaying no hesitation when plunging into a towering inferno; of a president consoling the pregnant wife of a U.S. serviceman killed when the Pentagon was struck; and of the shrines decorated with flowers, and cards and letters created outside fire and police stations in New York City thanking those who sacrificed.
The year ahead will be full of changes but will be faced by a country that has been strengthened.
Jamie Dettmer is a senior editor for Insight. |
