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September 30, 2002, Issue

The Great Escape
By Byron York

With the help of the FBI, the Saudis and the bin Laden family chartered an aircraft to pick up family members in Los Angeles, Orlando, and Washington. The plane then flew the relatives to Boston, where — one week after the attacks — the group left Logan Airport bound for Jeddah. The massive 9/11 investigation was just beginning: "The Department of Justice is waging a deliberate campaign of arrest and detention to protect American lives," Attorney General John Ashcroft said on November 27. But the bin Ladens did not have to worry about that. While FBI agents looked into bin Laden family members in the Boston area immediately after September 11, it appears that the agents' first chance to interview them came on the day they left the U.S. Each family member was given the all-clear on the basis of a single, day-of-departure interview — conducted, in FBI spokesman Bill Carter's words, "at the airport, as they were about to leave."

The Fire Last Time
By Ramesh Ponnuru

Barbara Boxer said that 3-4,000 dead was "the best-case scenario." Robert Novak and the late Rowland Evans reported that the minimum was 20,000 casualties. A ground assault on Iraqi-occupied Kuwait would mean "tens of thousands of U.S. dead," warned Pat Buchanan. In the event, the public and the allies supported Bush, the Iraqi army turned out to be a paper tiger, and fewer than 150 Americans lost their lives in combat. The fact that the Cassandras were spectacularly wrong last time does not, of course, prove that they are wrong this time. But one might have expected them to issue fewer confident predictions of doom, or even to reconsider their assumptions. Nothing of the sort has occurred. The above worthies and their like-minded peers seem to have learned only one thing from Gulf War I: Don't put specific numbers on casualty estimates. We are still sure to get mired in the next quag.

“An Aroused Citizenry”
By Victor Davis Hanson

We associate democracies with peace, and thus think that it is hard to convince thousands of free citizens to support a war. But we need not despair about getting democratic approval for the action against Iraq. Herodotus wrote that it was easier to convince thousands of free Athenians than a few skeptical Spartan oligarchs to go to war. In fact, consensual governments have never been averse to fighting — read Thucydides' account of how the frenzied Athenian assembly insisted that their generals invade Sicily. Democracies are actually war-prone owing to their very moral conceit — their confidence in the superiority of their culture and system of government. Indeed, once democracies get their blood up, free citizens — not their professional generals — prove to be the truly bellicose. Nicias the Athenian, George McClellan, and perhaps our current reluctant Pentagon hierarchy have all learned the peril of standing in the way of an aroused citizenry.

Majority Report
By Kate O’Beirne

Since 1994, when Republicans won 54 seats and took control of the House for the first time in 40 years, their majority in that chamber has dwindled to a perilous six votes. GOP pollster David Winston cautiously ventures that Republicans will "barely" hold the majority. Winston points out, first, that there is a rare divergence between the number of people who approve of the president and the number of those who think the country is headed in the right direction. What happens, electorally, to the party of a president who is viewed favorably, but as presiding over a country "heading in the wrong direction"? Second, the stock market this year is an issue distinct from the perennial issues of "jobs" and "the economy." Third, the country remains evenly divided between the parties: For the first time in over 100 years, the public has gone through three election cycles without really committing to either party.

Dark Hearts
By Anthony Daniels

Mugabe's appeal is to the visceral bitterness against whites that many of his supporters still harbor. Blair's passion for Africa is at least as politically expedient. Bill Clinton, who was Blair's mentor and exemplar, was in the habit of reestablishing his reputation as a decent man by feeling his nation's pain — usually in inverse proportion to his culpability for it. Clinton turned his "concern" to Africa when threatened by scandal at home; similarly Blair hopes — by expressing his "passion for Africa" — to deflect public attention from the succession of businessmen mysteriously receiving large contracts and other favors shortly after having contributed generously to Labour party coffers. Today's corruption is making the previous government's look positively amateurish. But how could anyone suspect a man who is so deeply moved by poverty in Africa of anything as sordid as self-interest?

Gas-Mask Chic
By Andrew Stuttaford

Those wanting their own purpose-built shelters should check out www.disastershelter.com, but the homes in this line may be of limited use in Manhattan — some of these constructions are rather larger than the average apartment. Helpfully, at www.disastershelters.net guidance is given on how to design a better-than-nothing shelter (the euphemism is "expedient") for the real-estate-starved or the simply improvident. One suggestion is to huddle under a table in a basement with "two feet of books or other heavy objects . . . placed on and around the table." Anything by Bernard Lewis should work particularly well. In the event of chemical attacks, Approvedgasmasks.com boasts a wide range of protective gear: the Scott ProMask, the SGE 1000, the SGE 400se, the MSA Advantage 1000, the MSA Advantage 3000, the MSA Night Ranger (lens resistant to shrapnel!), the MSA Ultra-Twin, and the M-95 Military. Fashionistas will appreciate the different colors available at Gasmasks.com: neon yellow, midnight black, or, for the tactless, cobalt blue.

Crunchy Cons
By Rod Dreher

We are as suspicious of big business as we are of big government. We rarely watch TV, disdain suburban sprawl, and spend our money on good food we prepare at home. My wife even makes her own granola. Much of our crunchy conservatism comes from simply being carried along by the tide of our lives, and discovering by trial and error things that work well. But it's also grounded in the basic attitudes we've long held. That, generally speaking, Small and Local and Particular and Old are better. That beauty is important to the good life. That we are citizens before we are consumers. And most important of all, that faith and family are the point of life. We agree with Russell Kirk, who observed, "The best way to rear up a new generation of friends of the Permanent Things is to beget children, and read to them o' evenings, and teach them what is worthy of praise: the wise parent is the conservator of ancient truths."

Ideologues Without Borders
By John O’Sullivan

In the past, it was taken for granted that when immigrants settled in their new country, they would assimilate to its legal and cultural norms. Their assimilation would eventually culminate in their taking citizenship, and their children would be Americans, or Australians, or Canadians. But an entirely different intellectual context has arisen. Immigration is not felt to be a major event in the immigrant's life: He is merely going somewhere else. Law professors Peter Spiro of Hofstra and Peter Schuck of Yale oppose the present citizenship oath because it requires that new citizens must renounce "all allegiance and fidelity" to their former homeland. Law professor Stephen Legomsky goes so far as to argue that Americans with dual citizenship should not even be expected to give greater weight to U.S. interests if America should get involved in a conflict with their other homeland. Far from regarding the idea of "dual loyalty" as a slur on immigrants, he sees it as a legitimate political choice.

Truth Teller
By John J. Miller

When I visited the 94-year-old Teller at his home on the campus of Stanford University, on August 26, the scheduled topic of our conversation was missile defense. The so-called "father of the H-bomb" might also be called the grandfather of missile defense — a longtime supporter of anti-ballistic technology who introduced Ronald Reagan to the concept more than 15 years before there was a Strategic Defense Initiative. This ought to be a moment of great satisfaction for Teller, who now has both outlived the ABM Treaty and watched the Bush administration proceed with its full-steam-ahead program to develop the capability to shoot down enemy rockets and warheads. Teller is pleased by these recent developments, and he's happy to say so.

Books, Arts & Manners

Soldiers of the State — Michael Knox Beran
The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History, by Philip Bobbitt

A Proud Day — Christopher E. Baldwin
Heart of a Soldier: A Story of Love, Heroism, and September 11th, by James B. Stewart

Music: Bell Telephone Calling — Jay Nordlinger on some oldies but goodies on DVD

City Desk: Towers Still — Richard Brookhiser on the World Trade Towers

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