Why? Well, given the latest terror warnings, they said, they had decided to take their young child and leave the city. They were calling us from a vacation home a half-day’s drive from Washington. These folks aren’t rubes; they’re well-educated types on a first-name basis with powers that be. They’ve got money and their jobs are portable. But the harsh truth is this: Osama bin Laden had put them on the run.
While President Bush prepares to lead a nervous, fearful nation into a new miltiary battle in Iraq, citizens here at home are just beginning to deal with the sobering, everyday facts of life in the global war on terrorism. Maybe people love “reality” shows these days because the real reality–ominipresent security checks, incessant alerts and alarms, an overburdened economy–is too disturbing. Polls show that Americans, by and large, believe (or at least hold out the hope) that the president knows what he is doing in the war generally and in Iraq specifically. But voters are deeply worried about the future nevertheless.
The administration didn’t intend to darken the weather patterns of politics when they scheduled a briefing at the Department of Homeland Security. They weren’t trying to build domestic support for an attack on Iraq. In their plodding way, they had decided the week before that it was time for the newly created agency to step out into a lead role, and to highlight emergency-preparadness measures that households long have been advised to take. But the briefing was followed within a day by more urgent official warnings about the threat of Al Qaeda attacks in this country, and–as if on cue–by the re-emergence of bin Laden.
The Department of Homeland Security was speaking to the whole country. The result, at least along the New York-Washington Corridor, has been a kind of low-grade panic. The reason is understandable: Both cites have been attacked once, and it’s not unreasonable to think they will be attacked again. So plastic sheeting and duct tape instantly have become symbols of the new age. Families examine their living patterns, their list of emergency phone numbers, local escape routes and the number of windows in the basement.
Where do we go from here? The president’s most important argument–repeated even by once-reluctant Iraq warriors such as Colin Powell and George Tenet–is that ousting Saddam Hussein and his regime in Baghdad will make Americans safer, that it will help drain the fetid swamp in which Islamic terrorism grows. But bin Laden (or someone officials believe to be bin Laden) took to the airwaves to essentially make the opposite case: that attacking Iraq will confirm the need for a remorseless global jihad against America, the West and Israel.
Somebody is wrong about Iraq. Let’s hope it’s Osama. Until we know, I can’t really tell my friends to return to the city.
