THE FEAR MONGERS STRIKE AGAIN?

At high noon on January 20th, the life of the man who takes the oath of office will have what can be called an “existential transformation.” From that moment and for the next four years, he will carry an inescapable, constitutional and profoundly personal responsibility: prevent another horrific terrorist attack in the United States.

Whoever becomes president, in varying degrees, for years has found fault, criticized, attacked how President Bush and his administration have conducted the “war on terror” since the 9/11 terrorist attack. For the man taking the oath of office, all that is over.

The 9/11 attack was an “existential” event because it changed not only America and Americans, but fundamentally what it means to be president. It is to live every minute of every day with a responsibility awesome beyond words: asking himself he has done everything in his power to prevent another terrorist attack that may kill, not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of Americans.” Going to bed every night not knowing, as Hillary Clinton warned in her campaign, if the phone will ring at 3 in the morning.

But isn’t this kind of talk precisely what so many Democrats and so many in the media have been denouncing for years? Isn’t this “fear mongering?” Isn’t this the “despicable” tactic of Bush and the Republican Party of using 9/11 to creating fear in the American people in order to justify the Iraq war? Isn’t this the tactic of using “the war on terror” as excuse to undermine fundamental political rights? And isn’t this the Republicans tactic to defeat Barrack Obama in November?

Lets look at two reports in the July 14th issue of Time magazine that ask a relevant question: is Osama bin Laden still a real threat to the U.S.? We know he is alive somewhere in the Pakistani-Afghanistan frontier and there are reports that he may have a serious kidney disease. According to Time, the answer is clear. “Bin Laden remains determined to kill large numbers of Westerners and disrupt the global economy.”

“Since 9/11,” the reports continue, “al Qaeda and its affiliates have bombed Western-owned hotels around the Muslim world, attacked a number of Jewish targets and conducted suicide operations against oil facilities in the Middle East: we can expect more of the same in the future. Al Qaeda has also used new tactics and weapons – like the surface-to-air missile that brought down an Israeli airliner in Kenya in 2002. And it retains a long standing desire to acquire a radiological bomb. But al-Qaeda’s most dangerous weapon has always been unpredictability. That’s why it is dangerous to dismiss bin Laden as a spent force.”

Now, again, all this is pretty much what the Bush administration have been saying, and that often is dismissed, in the words of a recent newspaper editorial, as “the White House indulging in…its signature fear mongering.”

But if bin Laden is still alive and at large in November, something similar to the Time reports is likely to be what the president-elect will be told in intelligence briefings. No American president will again underestimate bin Laden. The American government ignored his 1996 “declaration of war against the U.S, ” then minimized his deliberate acts of war against the U.S. – the 1998 deadly attack on U.S. embassies in Africa and the 2000 attack of an American war ship.

Precisely because “al Qaeda’s most dangerous weapon is unpredictability,” the president must make decisions and act on the assumption that al Qaeda, or any other of a number of terrorist groups, is preparing and waiting for the opening to again attack the U.S.

It is this assumption that changes the nature of the American presidency. There is the famous aphorism by Samuel Johnson in the 18th century: “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.” Nothing focuses the mind of a person, or a nation, than the reality of imminent destruction. Priority – not what is important, but what is most important – becomes evident. This is what happened, of course, after the shock of the 9/11 attack. What everyone believed to be the inevitability of another attack concentrated the minds of the President, of everyone in his government, and for a time, virtually every American.

The excellent book “Decision and War” by former Pentagon official Douglass J. Feith describes that the terrible fear after 9/11 was not only that new terrorist attacks would take many more lives and cause more physical destruction, but that it would destroy what Americans have most cherished throughout the nation’s history – the “American way of life,” beginning of course with individual freedoms.

So back to January 20th. If the man taking the oath is Barack Obama, he made “ending the war in Iraq” the essential campaign promise that won him the nomination. After he began to indicate that he may “refine” his position as to when and how, he felt he had to emphatically reaffirm that he has not changed. That as President, the first question he will ask the Joint Chiefs of Staff is how soon can we withdraw the troops out of Iraq.

But there is a prior question: are we doing everything in our power to prevent the next terrorist attack? The details of when and how to “withdraw” from Iraq, generating so much heat during the campaign, will depend on the answer. The new president will have no choice but to assume that if he doesn’t prevent it, there will be another terrorist attack that may involve a nuclear weapon, or other weapon of mass destruction, with unimaginable consequences.

Does this sound like “the fear mongers strike again?” It is in fact the existential reality facing the President and the American people.