The London Plot
NY Times Lead Editorial, August 11, 2006
For almost five years now, we have carried around the legacy of Sept. 11.
There is no sunny morning that does not revive its memory. The news of a
terrorist plot against America-bound airliners yesterday called up
feelings that are never all that far below the surface.
There is nothing Americans want more than to win the war on terror, to
come to a place where people no longer feel it is a fine thing to forfeit
their own lives and the lives of innocents in order to make the world
notice their anger and frustration. It is a point on which the country is
absolutely undivided. It is one matter about which subway commuters,
airline passengers and mall shoppers feel no irony or cynicism whatsoever.
It comes like a punch to the gut, at times like these, when our leaders
blatantly use the nation’s trauma for political gain. We never get used to
this. It never feels like business as usual.
On Wednesday, when the administration already knew that British agents
were rounding up suspects in what they believed was a plot to blow up
planes en route to the United States, Vice President Dick Cheney had a
telephone interview with reporters to discuss the defeat of Senator Joseph
Lieberman of Connecticut in a Democratic primary. Mr. Cheney went off on a
rather rambling disquisition, but its main point was clear: In rejecting
Mr. Lieberman, who supported the war in Iraq, the Democrats were
encouraging “the Al Qaeda types.” Within the Democratic ranks, the vice
president added, “there’s a significant body of opinion that wants to go
back – I guess the way I would describe it is sort of the pre-9/11
mind-set, in terms of how we deal with the world we live in.”
The man who beat Mr. Lieberman, Ned Lamont, lives in Greenwich, a suburb
full of commuters who work in New York high-rise buildings. They are
completely aware of the way international terrorism can come crashing down
on an ordinary family, leaving the survivors stunned and bereft. A dozen
of their neighbors died at the World Trade Center. They will never be able
to go back to a “pre-9/11 mind-set.”
But that did not seem to deter Mr. Lieberman from scoring a cheap sound
bite yesterday. Leaving Iraq, as Mr. Lamont advocates, “will be taken as a
tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes
in this plot hatched in England,” he said. “It will strengthen them and
they will strike again.”
Here is what we want to do in the wake of the arrests in Britain. We want
to understand as much as possible about what terrorists were planning. To
talk about airport security and how to make it better. To celebrate what
worked in the British investigation and discuss how to push these efforts
farther. It would be a blessed moment in modern American history if we
could do that without turning this into a political game plan.
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http://select.nytimes.com/2006/08/11/opinion/11krugman.html?th&emc=th
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