Part I:

Iraq is far away -- on this the Bush administration counts. If your child or spouse or friend has not died there or your friends or relatives aren't billeted there, the war in Iraq is an abstraction and American deaths in Baghdad or Baquba or Najaf at best tiny, abstract tragedies like those "walls" of faces of the dead in periodic newspaper memorials, each no bigger than your littlest fingernail.



To make that war just a little less abstract, for a moment, let's imagine our troops not in Iraq but at the top of some vast tower of a skyscraper from which, every day, two, or three, or four of them are forced in full view to leap to their deaths, as in fact many workers in the Twin Towers did on that fateful day exactly three years ago. Imagine further that the pile of those who have leaped and died, young soldiers, male and female, sent to fight our President's "war on terror" on the battlefields of Iraq, has slowly risen until by the third cycle through the first 11 days of September, this September 33rd you might say, it has already passed the thousand-body height, only several hundred short of the halfway mark to the total of those who died in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon that terrible morning.



With our generals and pundits talking about a 5 to 10 year stay in Iraq, with our President unwilling even to put a date on our departure because he considers us in a near eternal war with evil, with his opponent only hoping to pull our troops out by the end of a first term in office (leaving, of course, the young men and women of other lands to fight in their place), imagine further that by September 44th, given the present rising casualty rate, that pile of young bodies may be at, or close to, or just beyond the height of the one created on that very first September morning. Imagine then, on the fourth cycle from now, September 77th, or for that matter on the tenth cycle, September 110th, how high that pile might rise.



If you find this a disturbing image, then welcome to the world of September 33rd.



On that initial September 11th, thousands of people from many countries, all in three buildings, went to their deaths. By this September 33rd, three years later, in addition to those 1000-plus young Americans dead in Iraq; and another 132 in Afghanistan, and many thousands of Afghan civilians dead in our initial bombings and in the chaos as well as civil and guerrilla warfare that followed, the latest guesstimates on Iraqi civilian deaths go as high as 30,000 or more, not counting the thousands of Iraqi soldiers, often conscripts, who died in our several-week long invasion of the country. In the meantime, deaths worldwide from acts of terror, slaughters on trains in Spain, or in banks, hotels, and temples in Turkey, or in buses in Israel, or in the streets and clubs of Indonesia, or on the streets and in mosques in Pakistan, or in a classroom in Beslan -- often thanks to disparate movements, causes, reasons -- are significantly on the rise. And can there be any question that they feed upon one another, each new act of terror since September 11th, making others imaginable, possible, plausible. For all of the victims of these acts (and for the victims, whether in Chechnya, in the Palestinian occupied territories, or elsewhere of acts that made these acts conceivable), and especially for those who suffer directly because of the decisions of the Bush administration, we would have to commandeer many towers from which streams of horrified and often utterly innocent people, young and old, whose main attribute, it often seems, is simply that they are not Americans, would have to leap.



And, if George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others in this administration are right, we should be thinking of this as nothing but Death's hors d'oeuvres, with the main feast, a gorging guaranteed to last years and years, still to come. From the moment that whacked-out former CIA director and neocon James Woolsey publicly stated during the invasion of Iraq what the rest of the neocons of the Bush administration already wanted to believe -- that we were in World War IV -- the President and the Vice President have been plugging the theme of eternal war on a World War II template of "theaters" ("the Iraqi theater") and "fronts" ("Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism").



In this approach, they undoubtedly feel there is practical, short-term help for their reelection bid. After all, the President's father won his Gulf War but ended it too soon -- not only before Saddam fell but so many months before his reelection campaign that his wartime popularity ratings plunged. In the opposites game his son has long been playing, he and his advisors surely see a powerful advantage in eternal war against that vague boogeyman Terror, a "war" that should never leave an opening for the voting public to consider realities at home (as they did in the 1992 election).



But, of course, there's far more to it than that. They have a deep desire to be in a new age of "world war." It suits their vision of power and dominance, and so they've done much to create a world at war; but they also want to be able to cycle endlessly back to their version of September 11th, 2001 as if time itself had stood still. It hasn't. We are no longer in the world that existed on that terrible day, a world from which there were undoubtedly a number of paths to take, a number of responses open to us all. They took one path. They willingly stepped through the door to carnage that Osama Bin Laden had so thoughtfully left open for them, and so stepped into the world as imagined by a minor Saudi figure, a wealthy young man seized by fundamentalist belief. He had played a modest role in the CIA's and the Pakistani intelligence services' successful attempt to turn Afghanistan into the Soviet Union's Vietnam. He was a man without a home, who had wandered the world making what once seemed grandiose, even ludicrous, pronouncements, but now seem anything but.



In its audacity, the plan he put his stamp of approval on for September 11, 2001 still takes one's breath away. It was hidden in plain sight. After all, its perpetrators, the men preparing to commit mass murder, entered our country largely under their own names, took flight lessons in full view, bought the paper-cutters and mace, bags and airline tickets here, and then boarded those planes without much ado or challenge. They were successful because no one who mattered was looking, least of all the leading figures in the Bush administration, a group of political as well as religious fundamentalists and Cold Warriors who weren't giving a second's serious thought to acts of terror in the United States.



Our leaders go to war



Like them, for a moment, let's cycle back to that original September 11th. I remember exactly where I was in New York City that day and just how strange and disorienting it felt. On the anniversary of that moment, we all spend time remembering where we were, and where those people in the towers were, and what they, as well as those who tried so desperately to rescue them, were going through. Far less attention is paid to the September 11th of the two men, along with Osama bin Laden, who would plunge us into what can only be imagined as a new era -- George Bush and Dick Cheney. On this September 33rd, while the expectable articles of memorial are appearing, few indeed will be remembering George and Dick's September 11th, 2001, and yet their acts on that day told us all too much about where we were headed.



As The 9/11 Commission Report reminds us, at the moment the first plane struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46:40 AM, the President was about to enter a classroom at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida. He was informed by Karl Rove just before going in that "a small, twin-engined plane had crashed into the World Trade Center." At 9:05 that morning, with the President and some schoolchildren sharing a book called My Pet Goat, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card entered the classroom and whispered in the President's ear, "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack." The President, as all who have spent time on-line or seen Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 know, sat immobilized in that classroom for another 5-7 minutes. "His instinct," George Bush told the 9/11 Commission in his co-appearance with Dick Cheney, "was to project calm" and to avoid, he evidently claimed, scaring the reporters in the back of the classroom (even as "he saw their phones and pagers start to ring"). For all those who have seen the video of the President sitting in that classroom anxiously biting his lip, this is of course an absurd explanation. I think it's safe to say that, marooned in that room without staff or advisors in the vicinity, he panicked and froze.