The Bush Timetable

...But the Administration did not succeed in demonstrating this...

...His political advisers clearly think otherwise...

...More to the point, the timetable comes nowhere near meeting that of the Bush Administration, which is apparently thinking of some kind of military operation to oust Saddam Hussein before the end of the year...

...That was very bad news for President George W. Bush, who talks disarmament but means regime change...

...Yasser Esam Hamdi is an American who was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, raised in Saudi Arabia, and captured by Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan while serving with the Taliban...

...Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that the economy outranks terrorism as a priority for Americans by 38 to 30 per cent, and that 64 per cent lack the confidence to invest in stocks...

...We will not allow any terrorist or tyrant to threaten civilization with weapons of mass murder," he said in a short September 11 speech on Ellis Island...

...Last January the President's political adviser, Karl Rove, got some criticism for saying that Republicans should view the war on terrorism as "an issue to take to the country," suggesting it could be used for partisan advantage...

...Nothing to Celebrate Returning to the 9/11 anniversary, I do not see the transformation of America in the past year that many talk about...

...Much attention has been given to a Czech intelligence report of a meeting between hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague five months before September 11...

...According to the Washington Post, the soaring positive attitudes toward government after 9/11 have largely fallen back...

...the inception of the movement for racial integration, starting with the Armed Forces...

...And, for what it is worth, Osama bin Laden has called Saddam Hussein a "bad Muslim" in a videotape unearthed in Afghanistan by CNN...

...Unlike UNSCOM, staffed by experts from national governments with access to home intelligence sources, UNMOVIC works for the United Nations and is subject to UN bureaucracy...

...It averred that anyone labeled an enemy combatant by the Administration has no rights, and furthermore that the courts have no right to interfere...

...The State of the Union summons to a new "culture of responsibility" to replace the "culture of selfishness" became almost a mockery in the subsequent light of Enron et al...

...The Serbs, the Irish and Australians, among others, have formally marked historic disasters...

...The other justification was Iraqi participation in anti-American terror...

...It could be the key issue in dozens of House and Senate races, he noted...

...Bush suggested phase two when he said, "Action will be unavoidable...

...And every time Attorney General John Ashcroft finds some new reason to lockup suspicious people and deny them legal rights...

...Campaign expert Dick Morris observed in the Hill newspaper that Bush had "great ratings for fighting terrorism and only mildly positive, or negative, ratings on anything else...

...During the summer, the President mostly kept out of the controversy among his advisers over invading Iraq...

...One was a clear and present danger of the use of weapons of mass destruction...

...It is probably politically incorrect to be talking politics in the context of countering terrorism, but someone has to...

...White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said in August that the Administration was working on a strategy, but "you don't introduce new products in August...

...I have vivid memories of the profound changes World War II brought about-the entry of women into the work force...

...The President's address to the UN Assembly, the strongest indictment yet of Iraq's government, was meant to introduce the first phase of a two-phase Administration strategy that had been in the making all summer...

...He did not say unilateral American action, but he did say, "We must stand up for our security...

...When Federal District Court Judge Robert G. Doumar ordered unrestricted access to counsel for Hamdi, the decision was reversed by the appeals court, which told him to hear more arguments and get more facts before ruling...

...and a multilateral worldview, which enabled the country that had torpedoed the League of Nations to create the United Nations...

...Some of the momentum for action against the Iraqi dictator generated by the President's hardhitting speech to the UN General Assembly on September 12 was already starting to dissipate...

...Moreover, in time 9/11 would become another Memorial Day, when some gather to hear patriotic speeches but most enjoy the day off roasting hot dogs in their backyards...

...American experts doubt that much would be learned...

...Why does that matter politically...

...Ashcroft's Justice In the way that Miranda denotes a suspected criminal's rights and Roe denotes abortion rights, Hamdi may come to denote an enemy's rights...

...Having designated Iraq as part of an "axis of evil," the Administration was unable, despite its strenuous efforts, to show definitively that Baghdad is involved in anti-American terrorism, or that it is ready to use chemical, biological or nuclear weapons...

...By scheduling that speech for the day after September 11, the President used the emotion of the commemoration to bring Iraq and AI Qaeda into a seamless web of violence...

...National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice went no further than to say that if Saddam Hussein gets weapons of mass destruction, he would wreak havoc at home and abroad...

...If the Administration can decide on its own who has rights and who does not, who can have a lawyer and who cannot, who is an enemy and who is not, and assert that its findings are not subject to judicial review, then it endangers the very liberties President Bush says he is trying to defend...

...President Bush has often said that the fight against terrorism is not a partisan matter...

...According to the New York Times, UNSCOM once flew a U-2 spy plane over a site it was preparing to inspect and photographed the parade of Iraqi vehicles carrying off the material being worked on there...

...I can imagine bands of Al Qaeda terrorists meeting in caves on 9/11 to commemorate their great victory over the American colossus, but for us to declare it a national holiday would be like celebrating December 7, Pearl Harbor Day...

...In short, it will not be easy for the Bush team to trump Saddam's ace...

...UNMOVIC was never allowed to enter Iraq, but may now get its chance thanks to Saddam Hussein's astutely timed move to let it in...

...That strikes me as a singularly unwise idea...

...But we do not need a holiday to remind us of September 11.1 think of it every time I take my shoes off for airport inspection, every time I see a plane overhead, every time I look with a flicker of suspicion at someone acting a little strangely...

...This asserts a novel separation of powers between the Executive and the Judiciary...

...It would not be able to carry out the kind of aggressive surveillance that UNSCOM did...

...During the Civil War, the Supreme Court prohibited military detention of noncombatant Americans without appeal so long as the courts were functioning...

...And it is very improbable-especially after Saddam has had four unmonitored years to refine his art of concealment-that UNMOVIC could root out any existing weapons development programs...

...The UNMOVIC team is actually two teams-63 biochemical experts of 27 nationalities based in New York, and 16 nuclear experts based in Vienna...

...And by a small majority, Americans believe the country is seriously off on the wrong track...

...It challenged the Security Council to obtain in short order adherence to a litany of inspection and disarmament resolutions, or, the President declared, the UN would become "irrelevant...

...A 1971 law, looking back to the detention of Japanese-Americans without legal recourse during World War II, forbids the imprisonment of American citizens except pursuant to an act of Congress...

...Whether they are all available after four years of waiting remains to be seen...

...When the judge called for documents, the Justice Department refused to provide them...

...The USA Freedom Corps that President Bush called for last January has not taken off...

...Currently in a Navy brig in Norfolk, Virginia, he has not been charged with anything, but has been designated an "enemy combatant" and denied legal representation...

...Even before the rollout of his UN offensive, polls showed 65 per cent support for military action against Iraq...

...Instead, the President's media advisers planned the September 11 Ellis Island j speech, with the Statue of Liberty aglow: behind him, as a curtain raiser for the tough UN speech, and for a fall featuring President Bush as war leader...

...But the Administration proceeded as though its suppositions were fact, and the Democrats on the whole were fearful of contradicting it...

...Under the UN resolution that created UNMOVIC, once it arrived in Iraq it would have 60 days to develop a procedure plan for submission to the Security Council, plus another four months to reach preliminary conclusions about Iraq's cooperation and compliance...

...But what if Attorney General Ashcroft says that in the case of an enemy combatant, even the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction...

...That meeting has not been corroborated, however, nor is the CIA sure how important it was if it did happen...

...volunteerism...

...It replaced UNSCOM, the United Nations Special Commission that was kicked out of Iraq in 1998 for being too intrusive...

...The call for a Congressional vote before the October recess, said Morris, could dominate the headlines and "sweep all before it...

...Still, one hears some talk about designating September 11 a national holiday...

...By contrast, the year since 9/11 has left us with little more than a profusion of flags, a heightened sense of respect for uniformed public servants, and an uneasy sense of vulnerability...

...Because a nation focused on AI Qaeda and Saddam Hussein is less likely to be focused on a shaky economy, stock market gyrations, corporate scandals, and the rising costs of health care...

...On Shaky Grounds In the run-up to armed intervention the Bush Administration had tried hard to establish two kinds of justification...

...The Administration maintains that this law does not apply to enemies...