The Election and September 11

By Daniel Henninger
Thursday, September 11, 2008

On this, the seventh time the United States has observed the events of September 11, 2001, one may say with confidence: Forget national unity.

That John McCain and Barack Obama had to set aside their differences over the war on terror to stand together this morning at the grim hole that was the Twin Towers testifies to the political divide that emerged after September 11.

While the government has broken up several terrorist plots, these real-world events have been overwhelmed by the political battles over the Bush antiterror policies -- the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, warrantless wiretaps, military commissions, CIA interrogations of terror suspects. Lest we forget, as someone said, let's revisit the bare details of that day. This presumably is the reason for anyone's antiterror policies.

On that Sept. 11, 19 Islamic terrorists took control of four U.S. airliners. They flew two of them, with their passengers, into the upper floors of the World Trade Center towers. A third plane flew into the side of the Pentagon on the banks of the Potomac. Passengers on a fourth plane, United 93, fought the terrorists, and it crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The first plane disappeared entirely inside the WTC's north tower and began to burn. The other airliner slammed into the east side of the other tower. Some people jumped off the top floors of the 110-story buildings. About 10 a.m., the south tower collapsed. Then 28 minutes later, the north tower collapsed. The second building's fall created the rolling storm of debris and dust often shown on TV. For many weeks, New York was a half-closed city of human ruin. Some 2,974 innocent people died that day.

On Sept. 20, President Bush delivered a speech before Congress, whose recurring theme was, "We will come together." That coming together was going to include giving law enforcement "additional tools...to track down terror here at home."

The first Patriot Act passed the Senate in October 2001 by a vote of 98 to 1. After that, the unity of Sept. 11 started to fall apart.

Many Democrats, Barack Obama among them, break this subject into what they say are two distinct issues -- Bush's war in Iraq, which they oppose, and the war on terror, which "everyone" supports. Democrats said the partisan divide was about civil liberties and "who we are."

However, this blurs the history and substance of their opposition. To be sure, the unpopularity of the Bush presidency and most of the Democratic opposition rhetoric lies with the war's worst years from 2004 to 2007. But the war didn't start until March 2003. The most substantive political opposition grew out of the war on terror, not Iraq.

In November 2002, after judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review ruled in support of the Justice department's policy on wiretapping suspected terrorists, the dams of anti-Bush opposition burst. Soon-to-be House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers said, "Piece by piece, this Administration is dismantling the basic rights afforded to every American under the Constitution." The ACLU railed against "intrusive surveillance warrants."

The story and fury of this fight are familiar, but bear in mind that back then Barack Obama was off in Springfield, Illinois, chairing the state's Senate Health and Human Services Committee. He arrived to the Beltway terror battles in early 2005.

U.S. Sen. Obama's role in the opposition to the Bush antiterror policies is hard to pin down. In his Feb. 2006 floor statement on reauthorizing the Patriot Act, he said, "This is a complex issue." Indeed. It would take a grammarian three blackboards to diagram the senator's qualifying statements to vote for the bill. Indeed, most Democrats voted for the February reauthorization after staging a massive bonfire of Bush-centric opposition the previous year.

Nothing focuses the mind like a presidential primary, and so clarity for Sen. Obama arrived this February when he was among 31 senators who voted to deny telecom companies immunity for lawsuits involving taps of overseas terrorists. The telecom immunity fight had burned across most of 2007.

A complete cynic would argue that the Democratic opposition on antiterror tools was mainly about knee-capping the Bush presidency, that a President Obama's anti-terror policy in practice is something we could live with. Really? I find it hard to believe. We will listen closely in the presidential debates to what Senators Obama and McCain say about Islamic terror. The economy may be the election's No. 1 voting issue, but economic cycles wax and wane. America's divide over 9/11 goes deeper.

To vote for Sen. Obama is to vote for a Democratic party that used up more of the political system's available oxygen for seven years fighting a U.S. president than it did the perpetrators of September 11.

Political struggle is inevitable, but given the realities of life that 9/11 revealed (as did the bombings in Europe), the relentless totality of the Democratic opposition to the Bush administration's policies is hard to square.