Run-up: The road to Iraq

...Attacked," there were multiple pictures of the burning towers, and on page 7 the Times carried the picture that became the most horrifying of all to Americans—a telephoto shot of a man unable to escape from the World Trade Center falling to his death as a result of having chosen to jump rather than burn...

...In the new age of terrorism, it was crucial, he argued, for America to identify and destroy any threat "before it reaches our borders...

...But Drew's 2001 falling man photograph, which was shown around the world, caused such anger among American newspaper readers, who saw it as exploitive, that it was shunned by most U.S...

...At the core of the papers and speeches that made up the "National Security Strategy" was the idea that the cold war doctrine of containment was over...

...The same linkage with the Bush administration also held true for a group of liberal thinkers and writers who came to be known as the Liberal Hawks because of their belief that Saddam Hussein needed to be overthrown...

...Within days, two sets of 9/11 images had become an indelible part of American life...

...From the public's point of view, Powell's speech, which drew widespread support in the media, was never significantly challenged by the Left or by the massive antiwar demonstrations of 2002 and 2003, which in their "No Sanctions, No Bombing" slogans all but ignored the question of how to stop Saddam from committing more crimes against his own population...

...While in power, Bush and his supporters often seemed indifferent to the charge that they had invaded Iraq without having hard evidence of Saddam's military capability...

...Provided they were willing to die—whether for ideological reasons or because they believed a martyr's death was a prelude to paradise—there was no obvious counter-threat that America could rely on to deter them...

...Voters were comforted by the idea that the president had devised a foreign policy doctrine that put America first, no matter what other nations did...

...The result was that in February 2003 Daniel Libeskind, a Bronx-born architect whose best-known building before 2003 was the Jewish Museum in Berlin, was chosen to be the master planner for the World Trade Center...

...I rest my case on the following," Makiya declared...

...The terrorists who caused 9/11 were not part of another nation-state...

...Early on, the city's mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, set the tone for the terms under which the reconstruction would be discussed, when he declared, "If it were up to me, I'd devote the entire sixteen acres to the memorial...

...11 to its rightful place on the calendar: as the day after Sept...

...The country was not, however, satisfied with just helping the families of the 9/11 victims return to normal lives...

...By, 2002 no politician had put himself in a position to benefit more from the rise of 9/11 culture and the surge of patriotism accompanying it than George W. Bush...

...editors after September 12...

...I do not want it to become a day that defines us...

...Since 2004, accounts of how the Bush administration maneuvered the country into a war of choice in Iraq with the false claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction have quickly made it on to the bestseller list...

...A worst-case scenario based on unverified intelligence estimates began to take on a life of its own...

...It also made irrelevant the unipolar dominance in world affairs that America enjoyed during the twelve years between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the fall of the World Trade Center in 2001...

...He was not worried about the threat Saddam posed to the West...

...One hundred and two 9/11 widows and their post-9/11 children were flown to New York by the forum for a baby shower and luncheon at Cipriani, a posh Manhattan restaurant, where on taking her seat each widow found a toy angel and a $4,000 check waiting for her...

...U.S...

...If the vote had been held after the November elections, Senator Ted Kennedy speculated, there would have been more opposition to the force resolution, but for liberal and moderate Democrats alike, much closer to the truth was military historian Andrew Bacevich's observation, "[O]pposition to war had become something of a third rail: only the very brave or the very foolhardy dared to venture anywhere near it...

...But 9/11, Americans understood, changed this uneasy historical arrangement...

...Equally important, as far as most Americans were concerned, was doing as much as possible for the 9/11 victims and their families...

...government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons for mass destruction as the core reason...

...The most dramatic moment for the liberal internationalists came shortly after the 2002 midterm elections...

...The second set focused on the 9/11 rescuers, epitomized in the public's mind by Thomas Franklin's Bergen Record picture of three firefighters raising a flag over the World Trade Center's smoking ruins in a pose reminiscent of the marines in Joe Rosenthal's iconic Iwo Jima photograph from the Second World War...

...The World Trade Center had been attacked once before...

...The panel included the former UN secretary general Sir Brian Urquhart, the former Iranian ambassador to the UN Mansour Farhang, historian Frances Fitzgerald, culture critic Todd Gitlin, political scientist Michael Walzer, and Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya...

...Such an analysis is too easy on the rest of us...

...At the same time, a series of influential writers on the Left also went out of their way to disassociate themselves from the idea that America got what it deserved on 9/11 or that it was "a leading terrorist state," as MIT's Noam Chomsky argued...

...Even more change was on the way...

...In a speech on the Senate floor, liberal Democrat Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, backed the president, insisting that Saddam's current weapons "pose a very real threat to the United States," and among the force resolution's final supporters were Democratic House minority leader Richard Gephardt and Democratic senators Tom Daschle, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry, who in casting his vote declared, "I will vote yes because I believe it is the best way to hold Saddam Hussein accountable...

...The World War IV idea was initially put forward in the Wall Street Journal in November 2001 by Eliot A. Cohen, who later took a leave from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins to accept a position in the Bush State Department...

...From a low of 51 percent in the last Gallup poll taken before September 11, his approval rating shot up to 90 percent in Gallup's September 2122 poll, then hovered between 86 percent and 89 percent for the rest of the year...

...But in the fall of 2002, most Americans did not worry about that...

...global or Middle Eastern policy," American Prospect editor Harold Meyerson cautioned in the magazine's October 2001 issue," and in the January-February 2002 issue of Mother Jones, in an essay ironically titled "Blaming America First," Todd Gitlin challenged the thinking of the country's "left-wing fundamentalists" who saw the attacks of 9/11 "as nothing more than an outgrowth of U.S...

...We Are All American," Jean-Marie Colombani, editor of Le Monde, observed on September 12, 2001, in a front-page editorial that was at once an expression of sympathy and a recognition of the blow 9/11 dealt American exceptionalism...

...To say this is not to exempt the Bush administration from the charge that it was so determined to go to war with Iraq that it was willing to use dubious intelligence—or simply cherry-pick the facts—in order to justify invasion...

...The image of the president standing on the rubble of the Twin Towers with his arm around a New York firefighter, talking through a bullhorn, would make a lasting impression on voters...

...This kind of investigative journalism was welcome because it paved the way for starting over...

...In the September 28, 2001, Washington Post, columnist Charles Krauthammer called on America to go after Syria, Iraq, and Iran as soon as it took care of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and in the right-wing Weekly Standard Robert Kagan and William Kristol insisted, "For the war on terrorism to succeed, Saddam Hussein must be removed...

...Makiya's motives in calling for an invasion of Iraq could not have been further from those of the Bush administration...

...In both cases, grief and fear were the dominant forces...

...War was war as far as most Americans were concerned, and in the weeks following Powell's speech, there was no stirring up the kind of antiwar opposition that might have been possible if passage of the force resolution in the fall of 2002 had generated significant controversy...

...The article that got the most attention was one that Miller coauthored with Michael Gordon, the Times's senior military correspondent...

...In both the Second World War and during the cold war, Americans were certain of who their enemies were and how to deal with them...

...They had no grounds for complaining about the president's pursuit of the Afghanistan War, and when they tried to switch the focus of the election to the economy, they got little traction with security-conscious voters...

...In the past the Times had been highly critical of Bush's foreign policy, and so the reports by Miller (she left the paper in 2005 after a bitter, public controversy about the inaccuracy of her reporting and her over-reliance on information from Iraqi dissidents) gave the president new credibility...

...Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts," appeared on page one of the Sunday, September 8 edition and in chilling language warned, "Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb...

...On September 20, just nine days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush responded to the country's anxiety by creating an Office of Homeland Security, and on October 8 his choice to head Homeland Security, former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, officially took charge with widespread approval...

...If there is a chance of it happening, a 5 to 10 percent chance, you have a moral obligation, I say, to do it...

...But the most important effort to help the 9/11 families get back on their feet was not private...

...The danger of such a doctrine was the combination of unilateral power that it gave to America and the risks it posed if other nations claimed such power for themselves...

...When the now-controversial USA Patriot Act came up for a vote in October, the president had no trouble getting approval of provisions in the act that allowed the government to detain immigrants without charges and lowered the legal standards for intelligence wiretaps...

...If just once in a while they broke through America's defenses, they made their point: the military might of the United States could not protect it from a small, determined group willing to die...

...Beneath the Times's September 12, 2001, banner headline, "U.S...

...Even more important for Bush, within the foreign policy establishment there was skepticism about a war of choice with Iraq...

...By the fall of 2002, the president was ready to carry out Rove's midterm election strategy and take advantage of the political culture that 9/11 had fostered...

...Their enemies were other nation-states that could be defeated or, at a minimum, neutralized by America's military superiority...

...For Ignatieff, the justification for war was Halabja and the "malignancy" of Saddam's future intentions, and for Pollack, Saddam's "murderous regime" with its violations of "every moral code in existence" was grounds for U.S...

...Especially in New York City, ordinary citizens quickly became involved in the plans for the site, showing up in record numbers in 2002 at design hearings and making it clear that they did not want a rebuilt World Trade Center in which real estate interests were paramount...

...In October 2001, 85 percent of Americans, according to the Gallup poll, believed that a future terrorist attack was likely, and a year later, 60 percent of those polled by Gallup still believed a future terrorist attack was likely...

...In the days immediately following 9/11, Bush had faltered...

...Believing that America should have done more to stop the ethnic cleansing and genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, they called for a new American engagement in world affairs that put an end to the cautious retreats of the post-Vietnam era...

...Those such as Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect and the editors of the Nation were outspoken opponents of an Iraq war, believing that a preemptive attack set a dangerous precedent in international law...

...The 2001 events that had made headlines prior to 9/11—from Bush's rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming to Barry Bonds's pursuit of the single-season home-run record—quickly came to seem part of a distant era...

...In justifying his initial support of the Iraq War, Packer cited "the legacy of the Halabja poison gas attack" that Saddam had unleashed in 1988 against his own Kurdish population...

...Americans did not want to see their president fail in a crisis, and in the aftermath of 9/11, voters were more than willing to cut him slack on those occasions when he did not perform up to par...

...1,140 trash receptacles were removed and replaced with 400 bomb-resistant trash containers, but elsewhere the changes were highly visible...

...11 shattered any illusion that America is secure from foreign attack...

...They fail to show how in the eighteen-month run-up to the Iraq War between September 11, 2001, and the start of combat operations on March 20, 2003, the United States developed a 9/11 culture that made war seem like a logical next step in preventing another terrorist attack...

...Michael Ignatieff, the director of the Carr Center For Human Rights Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government...

...Paul Berman, the author of Terror and Liberalism...

...All on the panel, save Makiya, were filled with doubts about an American-led war in Iraq...

...A terrorist group could be stopped a dozen times, a hundred times...

...When we look at how 9/11 affected the United States, we see a response based, on the one hand, on widely shared fears and, on the other hand, on the belief that the cold war doctrine of containment that George Kennan had put forward in 1947 for dealing with the Soviet Union's expansion was outmoded...

...At a meeting with the rescue workers at Ground Zero on Friday, September 14, he made headlines with an impromptu speech declaring, "I hear you...

...In August 2002, Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser under presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, dealt the administration an unexpected setback when on CBS's Face the Nation he warned against a U.S...

...Americans were divided on whether the Bush administration had gone far enough with its diplomatic efforts in dealing with Iraq...

...AMERICA THE VULNERABLE In a 2004 eSSay, "Addicted to 9/11," New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman declared, "I want a president who can one day restore Sept...

...At a November 22 forum at New York University, entitled "Ambiguities of Intervention: Iraq and After," a distinguished panel of liberal thinkers gathered to discuss a possible war with Iraq...

...Wright was far from alone in doing the kind of investigative journalism that faulted the FBI and the CIA for sloppy intelligence work...

...The same fault finding was central to Time's "How the FBI Blew the Case," Newsweek 's "What Went Wrong," the Wall Street Journal's "FAA Chose Not to Warn Airlines on Pivotal Arrest Before Sept...

...Katie Couric devoted a nightly news feature to the "Wives and Mothers of Victims of Flight 93...

...invasion of Iraq...

...In the run-up to the Iraq War, the intellectuals of the liberal Left were of two minds...

...Rove's strategy was a perfect fit for the president...

...At Metro subway stations, the changes were subtle...

...America now reserved for itself the right of "acting preemptively...

...The events of 9/11 showed that preparations for a terrorist attack, unlike one by a traditional army, did not depend on a large buildup of men and materiel, and, by the same token, defeat did not pose the kinds of problems it did for conventional military leaders...

...For historic comparison, we need only look at the front page of the New York Times for December 8, 1941...

...It was government sponsored...

...nor were they fazed by Defense Department undersecretary Douglas Feith's admission, made at Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings, that there were "enormous uncertainties" surrounding the administration's war plans...

...action Worried that, as Bill Keller had predicted, his stance, along with that of the other Liberal Hawks, would help the Bush administration, Ignatieff complained, "I don't like the company I am keeping, but I think they are right on the issue...

...When the attack on Pearl Harbor, the day with which 9/11 is most often compared, occurred, America's angry response was unambiguous...

...The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon...

...The danger of atomic annihilation during the cold war years proved scary, but the threat of mutually assured destruction brought with it a hope that the average American found reassuring...

...But it was not just the cold war era that 9/11 made irrelevant...

...The national appetite for such looks back in time was, it turned out, unlimited...

...The opposite pattern was true for the events of 9/11, which millions of Americans witnessed on their television sets in real time...

...The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon shocked the country in a way that went far beyond the immediate loss of life and property they caused...

...From the start, Bush had labeled the 9/11 attacks "mass murder" committed by faceless cowards, and the anxieties that shaped the public's initial response to 9/11 reinforced his views...

...For Berman, Saddam's Iraq had "the look of Europe in 1939, updated to the post-Cold War Middle East...

...It was a principled stance for Ignatieff and the other Liberal Hawks to take, but as the Bush administration continued to press for war, it was also a stance that prevented liberals from mounting effective and unified opposition to the president...

...THE POLITICS OF PREEMPTION The selection committee that a month before the start of the Iraq War named Libeskind master planner was certainly not motivated by the idea of providing aid and comfort to the Bush administration...

...But opposing them was a powerful group of liberal internationalists who, in varying degrees, favored war as the only way to overthrow Saddam Hussein...

...The 9/11 widows who had been pregnant at the time of the attacks were a special concern, and the private charity efforts on behalf of the widows, who would later be described as "perfect virgins of grief," peaked on the first anniversary of 9/11 at a much-publicized gathering sponsored by the Independent Women's Forum...

...Then in 2002, the news stories and programs devoted to 9/11 families increased exponentially...

...Democrats, already on record supporting the president on the war in Afghanistan, which a Gallup poll showed had a public approval rating of 91 percent in March 2002 and 83 percent six months later in September, found themselves in a no-win situation...

...With Libeskind, grief and fear supported architecture that, above all else, paid homage to the tragedy of 9/11...

...Thanks to all these grudging allies, Mr...

...10 and before Sept...

...As long as the Soviet Union and the United States did not have a death wish, they had a basis for settling their disputes without direct nuclear confrontation...

...embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Jersey barriers were installed around the Washington Monument...

...Over the course of the 1990s, the Liberal Hawks, among them George Packer of the New Yorker...

...The sense of security that even the Second World War had barely dented was over in a matter of hours, and in its place was an unprecedented set of fears about the steps America needed to take to defend itself...

...and Britain," we see a map of where the fighting in the Pacific is going on...

...They were men bound by no set of conventional rules about waging war...

...11," and the New York Times's "F.B.I...

...In practice, the Biden-Lugar resolution would not have constrained Bush for long, but he still found it onerous, and once again, he got what he wanted when he asked for more power to protect the country...

...On September 18, 2001, Diane Sawyer led the way on Good Morning America with a show that featured two of the United Flight 93 widows...

...Chief Admits 9/11 Might Have Been Detectable...

...In the fall of 2001, the instant popularity of 24, a FOX television show in which Jack Bauer, a dedicated CIA counterterrorism expert played by Kiefer Sutherland, does not hesitate to use torture to stop America's enemies, reflected the country's desire to be made safe again and its willingness to pay a high price for security...

...But in the wake of 9/11, plans for making Washington safe from terrorists escalated...

...But the 9/11 attacks were so different in their quality and careful planning from the 1993 attack that they transformed American thinking by puncturing— in a way that has not been repaired—the belief that the United States was a safe haven compared to the rest of the world...

...But in the end, Makiya, the last speaker of the evening, was the one who drew the greatest cheers from the NYU audience when he argued that war presented the only chance for removing Saddam Hussein from power and achieving democracy in Iraq...

...Although 9/11 culture had helped move the country to the brink of war, an Iraq war was still not inevitable at this point...

...Pictures of the actual attack did not reach America until December 14, when Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox brought them with him on his flight from Oahu, and they were not released to the Times and other papers until December 16, twenty-four hours after Knox reported to the nation on Pearl Harbor...

...Weisberg made the same point, calling Saddam "a genocidal butcher on an epic scale...

...policy...

...There was a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance on the Friday following 9/11, and by the next week, the media began stressing the trauma experienced by the 9/11 survivors in a series of television programs and newspaper articles that centered on how those who had lost a family member were coping with their lives...

...At key moments in the debate over the resolution, as few as ten of the Senate's one hundred senators were on the floor, prompting the Washington Posfs Dana Milbank to report, "America took a step closer to war yesterday—with a yawn...

...They included a $250,000 award for pain and suffering and an additional $50,000 for each dependent, a figure that by March 2002 was changed to $100,000, with the result that the average award—before any mandated deductions for life insurance, pensions, and government benefits—climbed from $1.65 million to $1.85 million...

...As Democratic senator Christopher Dodd and Republican senator Chuck Hagel wrote in a joint New York Times op-ed in the fall of 2001, "The events of Sept...

...Polls showed that slightly more than half of all Americans favored sending ground troops into Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, but this pro-war sentiment was qualified...

...September 11 was not followed by a military draft, a dramatic increase in taxes, or a presidential appeal for sacrifice...

...It is easy to see why...

...From October 2001 to November 2002, the New Republic ran an "Idiocy Watch" column that regularly satirized anyone who suggested America bore responsibility for 9/11...

...Then the idea was expanded on in Commentary in February 2002 by Norman Podhoretz, the magazine's editor from 1960 to 1995...

...The deadliness of the 9/11 attacks made it reasonable for Americans to conclude that terrorists willing to use passenger planes as weapons against civilians would not hesitate to employ weapons of mass destruction if they could get their hands on them...

...Our President Shows He's No Giuliani," a Newsday headline proclaimed...

...His moral-obligation argument simply provided the administration with another reason for going to war...

...Democrats remembered that in 1991 their opposition to the Gulf War had made them seem weak on national security issues, and for the most part they made passage of the force resolution as uncontroversial as they could...

...Overnight, Americans found that the pictures they carried in their heads of 9/11 shaped their sense of how they were prepared to deal with its causes, and that their view of the causes of 9/11 in turn led them to decide on the steps starting over required both by way of mourning the victims and by way of preventing a second 9/11 from happening...

...The humanitarian challenges that the country had faced during the Clinton years, in Somalia, in the former Yugoslavia, and in Rwanda, gave way to concerns in which Americans now asked, Are we doing enough to protect ourselves...

...Americans were not deterred by Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki's warning, made in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, that several hundred thousand troops, more than double the administration's calculation, would be needed to occupy Iraq...

...Bush will be able to claim, with justification, that the coming war is a far cry from the rash, unilateral adventure some of his advisers would have settled for," Keller wrote...

...His next step was to ask for a resolution giving him authority in advance to use force in Iraq if Saddam Hussein did not fully comply with United Nations inspectors searching his country for weapons of mass destruction...

...Friedman's resentment of the way in which 9/11 has been inflated certainly makes sense, but at the same time, he is far too dismissive of the reasons why 9/11 quickly went from being a terrible event to a state of mind...

...The most important and visible effort at memorializing the men and women who died on 9/11 came with the reconstruction of the massive World Trade Center site in New York...

...The terrorism that burst upon us this September cannot be understood, solely or even preponderantly, as a reaction to U.S...

...Montel Williams did a program on the "Fiancees and Wives Left Behind...

...It did not matter so long as the group had enough recruits to draw on for the future...

...Both Cohen and Podhoretz argued from the same premise: like the cold war (World War III in their thinking), World War IV was bound to be a long war in which America should not hesitate to take advantage of its military superiority if it wanted to avoid more trouble in the future...

...The Liberal Hawks, who later would prove to be among the most powerful critics of the conduct of the Iraq War, had managed to put themselves in a situation in which their differences with the Bush administration seemed minimal just when 9/11 culture gave the president a level of power he would never again enjoy...

...With Congress, on the other hand, grief and fear supported approving whatever steps the president thought were required to protect America...

...In a New York Times/CBS News poll published in February 2003, 66 percent of Americans said they approved of the United States taking military action against Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but 59 percent also said that they believed the United States should give the UN weapons inspectors more time to do their work, and 63 percent said that the United States should not act without the support of its allies...

...In addition to a united Republican Party (Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island was the only Republican senator to vote against the force resolution), President Bush now had a newly energized conservative Right behind him...

...The Force Resolution was a bold bid by the president for unchecked power, and the counter-response of Senate Democrats and moderate Republicans was a bill by Democratic Senator Joe Biden and Republican Senator Richard Lugar of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee requiring the president to get a UN Security Council resolution for war or make a determination that the weapons Iraq possessed constituted "so grave" a threat to the United States that war was necessary...

...The Capitol Visitors Center, an underground complex that took up 580,000 square feet and cost $621 million—more than double the planned amount—grew exponentially with the addition of tunnels designed to serve as evacuation routes, and by early 2003, the National Park Service's plans for increasing security at the Washington Monument included a defensive perimeter of stone walls as well as the requirement (later cancelled following criticism from the Commission of Fine Arts and preservationists) that visitors enter the monument via a 400-foot entry tunnel from a lodge on the east side of the monument grounds...

...If prior to 9/11 the country had been too soft and too slow in responding to terrorist threats, there was now justification for reversing course...

...In September, 71 percent of those surveyed in a Gallup poll said that the government's actions had prevented further terrorist attacks...

...STARTING OVER By ContraSt, what Americans and the mainstream media did have an appetite for was investigative reporting that showed America's intelligence agencies had not been diligent enough in responding to the information they already had about terrorists...

...and Kenneth Pollack, a member of the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, had become liberal interventionists...

...From here on in, there was no slowing the move toward war...

...But it is to argue that blame for the Iraq War cannot simply be put on the deceptions of the Bush administration, serious as these deceptions were...

...Bush was as a result strongly positioned to build the 2002 Republican political campaign around the idea that he needed more members of his party in Congress to help him carry out the policies that would protect America from future terrorist attacks...

...Keller's prediction proved accurate...

...At Ridge's and the Bush administration's disposal was $40 billion in emergency spending that Congress had approved with little debate...

...The terrorists who targeted America on 9/11 knew their deaths were a certainty whether they succeeded or failed in their mission...

...Security checks at airport terminals and a color-coded Homeland Security Assessment System quickly became routine in America, visible reminders of how dangerous ordinary life had become, and in New York City the safety measures were even more extreme, with the increased use of surveillance cameras in Lower Manhattan and the police department's creation of an intelligence unit staffed by analysts speaking, among other languages, Urdu, Pashto, Farsi, and Hindi...

...the Second World War culture that evolved after December 7, 1941, helped bring about a united country...

...They were not hoping to beat the odds, and in the kind of asymmetric warfare that they waged, they did not worry about a string of setbacks...

...In the fall of 2002, Bush was, however, still not in a position to do as he pleased...

...The Democrats were not about to stand in his way...

...Most Americans found it only natural that they should be on the lookout for new terrorist threats...

...The images of 9/11 that Americans began using in 2001 to define the attack immediately set the tone for all that followed...

...During the 1990s, the conservative Right had opposed nation-building in Africa as well as in the former Yugoslavia on the grounds that such humanitarian efforts were not in America's self-interest...

...But the president recovered quickly from his early missteps...

...We can go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America," Rove observed in a widely reported speech before the Republican National Committee...

...FLIGHT OF THE LIBERAL HAWKS As the country moved closer to war, Scowcroft never changed the position that he took in his "Don't Attack Saddam" Wall Street Journal op-ed...

...In January 2002, Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser, spoke openly of making the president's handling of the war on terror the focus of the 2002 midterm election...

...In 1998, an underground Capitol Visitors Center was approved by Congress after a gunman killed two Capitol Police officers while they were on duty, and in that same year, following bombings of the U.S...

...From armed forces in which 16.4 million American served to Victory Gardens that at their peak accounted for 40 percent of all the vegetables grown in the United States, Americans devoted more and more of their energies to defeating Japan and Germany...

...The first step in trying to help the 9/11 victims came in trying to make the families of those who died financially whole...

...On February 26, 1993, Ramzi Yousef, the son of a Palestinian mother and a Pakistani father, who had grown up in Kuwait, drove a truck filled with a massive homemade bomb into the World Trade Center garage, causing an explosion that blew through six stories of steel and cement, leaving six dead and 1,042 injured in its wake...

...The impact of this small, but influential, group on the Iraq debate was captured in February 2003 in a widely read New York Times op-ed piece, "The I-Can'tBelieve-I'm-a-Hawk Club," by Bill Keller, the Times's future executive editor...

...During this same period, a fortified Washington, D.C., marked by the proliferation of bollards around public buildings and national monuments, came to epitomize 9/11's architectural impact...

...As Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy defense secretary, told the press in 2003, "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S...

...But in the wake of 9/11, conservatives began to call for a militant re-engagement with the world that made force a first alternative...

...By contrast, 9/11 culture never had that kind of unifying hold on America...

...On 9/11, the post-cold war era—along with the assumption that for the foreseeable future America was going to reign as the world's lone superpower in an era free from major conflict—ended as dramatically as it began...

...It was a different story for the liberal Left...

...By comparison to New York's Giuliani, who rushed to the World Trade Center site to take personal command of operations and soon appeared on television assuring New Yorkers that they had no need to panic, the president seemed indecisive...

...MAKING VICTIMS WHOLE For the country, taking precautions was only part of starting over in the wake of 9/11...

...Bush, however, was still not done taking advantage of the 9/11 political climate...

...The passengers of Flight 93, aware from their cell phones that two terrorist-flown planes had already crashed into the World Trade Center, saved countless lives by their decision to fight back, but in the wake of 9/11, Americans would always be waiting for the next fourth plane...

...As Packer observed just months before the Iraq War began, Bosnia "turned these liberals into hawks...

...But the architectural thinking about the meaning of 9/11 that vaulted Libeskind into the role of master planner for the World Trade Center paralleled the thinking that had led Congress in the fall of 2002 to give the president the power he wanted to go to war on his terms...

...Miller, who had been with the Times since 1977, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001, and served in the Middle East as the Times's Cairo bureau chief, was a highly respected reporter, known for her exclusives, and in the fall of 2002, the accounts she published about the dangers Iraq posed had an enormous impact on the debate over whether America should go to war...

...The House passed the Patriot Act on October 24 by an overwhelming 356-66 margin, and a day later in the Senate, the only no vote came from Wisconsin's liberal Democrat Russ Feingold...

...In the end, the nuanced Iraq War that the Liberal Hawks wanted was not the war for which 9/11 culture had paved the way, but that distinction ceased to matter by February 2003, when the secretary of state, Colin Powell, with George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency sitting directly behind him, went before the UN General Assembly to announce that America had "deeply troubling" evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction...

...The falling man photograph did not need, however, to be endlessly reproduced for its impact to be felt throughout the country...

...It means America speaks with one voice...

...The Drew-Franklin photos, like the thousands of amateur photographs of missing loved ones that appeared on buildings and makeshift memorials throughout New York, were complementary in the combination of grief and pride that they evoked, but they also provided an early indication of how little self-criticism America was prepared to tolerate in the wake of 9/11...

...On September 21, 2001, Congress passed the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act with one eye on bailing out the now-troubled airlines and the other eye on helping the victims of 9/11 with an open-ended, federal Victims Compensation Fund...

...The first set focused on the victims of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks whose lives were taken from them without warning...

...The Liberal Hawks were in no position to challenge the president and at the same time call, as Paul Berman did, for taking "a harder line that might bring about Saddam's collapse peacefully or, if need be, not peacefully...

...PLAYING THE FEAR CARD passage of the force resolution, the likelihood of war with Iraq became greater than at any time since September 11, and the willingness of the country to go to war at this time was increased by a series of reports from Judith Miller in the New York Times about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and its quest for atomic bomb materials...

...Two months later, the Gannett News Service published "For Families of Victims, No Holiday from the Pain of 9/11...

...The problem was that in the context of post-9/11 America, Makiya's call for invasion had the effect of strengthening the administration's hand...

...From this point on, the president was able to govern from a position of strength and, despite his economic policies, identify himself with the working-class heroes of Ground Zero...

...When televangelist Jerry Falwell, appearing on the Reverend Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network's 700 Club, declared that the "secular and anti-Christian environment" of the United States was behind God's decision to "allow the enemies of America to give us what we probably deserve," he unleashed a backlash that quickly forced him to apologize for saying that 9/11 reflected God's judgment...

...But especially in the eighteen months between 9/11 and the start of the Iraq War, what made 9/11 culture so powerful was that it became pervasive, influencing everything from pop music and architecture to daily politics...

...The president's first step in 2002 came on September 17, when he issued the "National Security Strategy of the United States," which brought together ideas that he had been voicing since the fall of 2001, when he promised to undertake "a lengthy campaign" to bring about "the defeat of the global terror network...

...Americans were also determined to make sure that those who died on 9/11 were remembered...

...The 9/11 culture that emerged in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon owed much to the Bush administration's maneuverings, but by 2002, that culture had taken on a life of its own that made what the Bush administration did openly even more important than what it did covertly...

...But neither on December 8, nor the next day, nor the day after that did the Times carry pictures of the American fleet burning in Pearl Harbor...

...The United States, as the president had declared in his June 1, 2002, graduation speech at West Point, could no longer rely on conventional military deterrence and support from its allies to defend itself...

...Americans shared this dark view...

...Barbara Walters did a special on "Families Left Behind...

...On October 11, the president won bipartisan congressional approval to use military force against Iraq as long as such force was "consistent" with America's ongoing efforts to fight terrorism...

...There, just below the headline, "Japan Wars on U.S...

...In addition to a skyscraper designed to reach to the symbolic height of 1,776 feet, Libeskind's Ground Zero plans featured a memorial area thirty feet below grade that left part of the original World Trade Center slurry wall exposed and a Wedge of Light triangle, designed to let the sun shine between the surrounding buildings on each September 11 for the exact time and duration of the 9/11 attack...

...So often American culture has been about forgetting the past and concentrating on the future, but at the core of 9/11 culture—making it readily convertible into a war culture—was the idea of preserving both the grief and grievances that came with 9/11...

...He spent most of 9/11 being shuttled from hiding place to hiding place by the Secret Service, and when he finally addressed the nation on the night of the attacks, he was far from inspiring...

...On September 11, a fourth hijacked plane, United Flight 93, was brought down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, before it could reach its intended target in Washington, D.C...

...In battling terrorism, those on the Right believed, the United States was really fighting World War IV...

...From this sense of American vulnerability, a unique, 9/11 culture began to emerge...

...Not until November 22, 2002, did the Office of Homeland Security became the Department of Homeland Security, but in the intervening months, the president had virtual carte blanche to do as he wanted in matters of domestic security and in dealing with an anthrax scare initially feared to be the work of al Qaeda...

...Jacob Weisberg of Slate...

...It ignores the widespread anger that early on led the New York Post to print a column calling on the president to "kill the bastards" responsible for 9/11 and "if Saddam Hussein makes so much as a peep, do him, too...

...Then just over a week later, in a widely quoted Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, Scowcroft argued that beginning a war in Iraq without broad international support "put at risk our campaign against terrorism as well as stability and security in a vital region of the world...

...Kenneth R. Feinberg, a Washington mediator best known for his part in resolving an Agent Orange class action suit dating back to the Vietnam War, was appointed special master of the 9/11 fund, and by late December Feinberg had set out the rules for compensating the families of the 9/11 victims...

...The best early reporting on this subject was an 8,500-word January 14, 2002, New Yorker article, "The CounterTerrorist," by Lawrence Wright, who later received the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11...

...In their writing the Liberal Hawks themselves spoke openly about how the humanitarian crises of the past, particularly those of the nineties, had affected them and made their fear of more mass killings in Iraq central to their belief in an invasion...

...The media were especially tough on those who claimed that America was asking for it...

...He was worried about the brutal tyranny Saddam exercised over his own country...

...In 1968, Richard Drew, the photographer of the 9/11 falling man picture, first won fame for himself with the grim photos that he took of Robert Kennedy after he was killed by Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles...

...IMAGES OF DISASTER The speed with which 9/11 culture fostered a new cult of masculinity was captured by conservative critic Peggy Noonan in an October 12, 2001, Wall Street Journal op-ed, "Welcome Back, Duke" in which she observed, "From the ashes of September 11 arise the manly virtues...

...Distinguishing Libeskind's plans from those of his better known architectural rivals was his insistence on emphasizing the tragedy of 9/11 in a way that captured the sentiments of the public and the 9/11 families...

...Today, the trouble with these accounts of the Bush administration's approach to the Iraq War is that they provide too narrow a picture of America in the wake of 9/11...

...The vote in the House was 296 to 133, and in the Senate it was 77 to 23, with liberal Democrats doing little to fight the president when he declared, "I don't want to get a resolution which ties my hands...

...We're about the Fourth of July...

...The hero of Wright's article was John O'Neill, a former FBI agent who had left the bureau because he found that his warnings to his superiors about al Qaeda were never treated with the seriousness that he believed they required...