[Mb-civic] EXCELLENT: A Hole in Which Hopes Are Buried - Richard Cohen - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

A Hole in Which Hopes Are Buried
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By Richard Cohen
The Washington Post
Tuesday, April 4, 2006; A23

NEW YORK -- President Bush is starting to look beyond his presidency. 
His focus is on his legacy, which he is sure will vindicate his decision 
to go to war in Iraq. But his most fitting memorial is likely to be 
where I was Sunday: the immense gash in Lower Manhattan known as Ground 
Zero. More than 4 1/2 years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the 
hole has yet to be filled.

Tourists come and look. The selling of souvenirs is prohibited at the 
site itself, but around the corner, on Vesey Street, peddlers hug the 
shadows. The proper souvenir to take away from this place, though, is 
the memory of its immense emptiness. It's a hole filled with broken 
promises and silly rhetoric, an inverted monument to the Bush 
administration's unfathomable failure even to capture Osama bin Laden.

Where is this killer? Still in Afghanistan or nearby Pakistan, is the 
unofficial answer. Certainly not caught, is the official answer. This 
terrorist, this madman, this mass murderer of clerks and stockbrokers, 
of deliverymen and cooks, of IT guys and shoeshine men, is still on the 
loose. Bin Laden was the guy Bush was going to get, dead or alive, or 
something like that, but he is still at large, mocking us with his 
occasional tapes and his insufferable freedom. Even Afghanistan, 
liberated from the Taliban, is receding into chaos. The Taliban, it 
turns out, never left.

The failure to capture or kill bin Laden is the failure of Bush and his 
Pentagon team of incompetents -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and 
the former commander of the Afghan and Iraq wars, Tommy Franks. One is 
still in office, the other is getting rich on the lecture circuit, and 
neither offers much of an explanation for why the mass killer of 
Americans still has not been caught. "Wherever he is, if he is, you can 
be certain he is having one dickens of a time operating his apparatus," 
Rumsfeld once said. Yes, this is comforting. And tell me also that bin 
Laden's mail is often late.

More Sept. 11 tapes surfaced last week. These were recordings of 130 
calls to New York's 911 emergency operators. Mostly you could hear only 
one side of the conversation, the operators', but at least one family 
released a tape of their son making his last call from the World Trade 
Center. The awful helplessness of the operators as the immensity of the 
tragedy dawned on them, the impeccably calm voice of a man about to die 
-- all this parted the memory curtain many an American had draped around 
the event, and the pain returned. The other shoe has not dropped. Bin 
Laden giggles in his mountain lair.

Little wonder Bush focuses on posterity. The present has to be painful. 
His embrace of incompetents, not to mention his own incompetence, is 
impossible to exaggerate. Rummy still runs the Pentagon. The only 
generals who have been penalized are those who spoke the truth. (They 
should get some sort of medal.) Victory in Iraq is now three years or so 
overdue and a bit over budget. Lives have been lost for no good reason 
-- never mind the money -- and now Bush suggests that his successor may 
still have to keep troops in Iraq. Those of us who once advocated this 
war are humbled. It's not just that we grossly underestimated the enemy. 
We vastly overestimated the Bush administration.

This hallowed ground, this pitiless pit, has become Exhibit A on the 
inability of government to function. Plans get announced, news 
conferences held, breathtaking models shown of buildings reaching for 
the sky -- and nothing happens. George Pataki, the governor of New York, 
supposedly fashions himself a presidential candidate, yet he cannot even 
get this development underway. He is at loggerheads with the site's 
developer, and so nothing happens. In a city where developers are king 
-- this is Donald Trump's home town, after all -- you can still go to 
Ground Zero and see zero. This is 16 acres of Katrina and all it taught 
us about feeble political leaders.

Maybe we should leave Ground Zero as it is. The imagination can provide 
a fitting memorial to those who died. "We dig a grave in the breezes," 
Paul Celan wrote in his Holocaust poem "Death Fugue." We can dig ours as 
deep as the World Trade Center once was tall. The ugly emptiness will 
remind us always to be wary of the grand schemes of politicians. They 
can't build a building. They cannot capture a mass murderer. They cannot 
wage war in Iraq. This is their hole. It is, by dint of failure, George 
Bush's presidential library. His proper legacy is a void.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/03/AR2006040301609.html?nav=hcmodule
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