The 19-man army

What I can’t get over is how Osama bin Laden managed to damage my country so badly with an army of 19 men.

I guess we would have to concede him his victory in New York. That defeat was an awful price to pay for ignoring all the intelligence that pointed to an attack.

After that, though, it wasn’t any time at all before we completely acknowledged his unique (in our battle history) skill and determination as an enemy. We know his tactics and understand his strategy. Why, then, five years later, are we still letting him bleed us?

All terrorists are media experts. They know how to manipulate reaction. They know how to get into the news, get onto television, and stay there. Tim McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building at 9 o’clock on the morning of a sunny day. Bin Laden’s pathetic soldiers flew the airplanes into the towers at 9 on the morning of a sunny day. They did that for an excellent reason. They wanted to give the cameras maximum time to see. The plot just discovered in Britain all involved blowing up planes coming from Europe to the United States. Those are daylight flights. Going the other direction, they all take off in the late afternoon or evening.

Reaction is bin Laden’s sword. At first it was a tiny sword, no bigger than 19 boxcutters being snuck through security. Today the sword is huge, for one simple, maddening reason, one reaction that bin Laden was counting on: we are helping him swing it, with our Iraq war, and Patriot Acts, and surveillance schemes, and end runs on the Constitution, and dissolution of values and principles into so-called correct ideology.

So much damage, that sword has wrought in five years. And now it is so late, and we are bleeding from so many cuts. There must be someone in my country’s leadership who has the skill, intelligence and determination to take the sword out of bin Laden’s hands. But I can’t think of a name. All the famous names, in the national leadership, and I can’t think of one who would know exactly what to do, and how to do it, at this point. It certainly hasn’t been George Bush. He may be the Decider, but what we need desperately is a Uniter.

We need someone to remind us who we are. The Bush administration keeps telling us we’re safer than we were five years ago. I don’t feel safer. There’s this huge sword swinging around. Our leadership, with all its display, is acting just like the terrorist wants us to act, then suggests we are dead wrong if we disagree. It makes all of us out to be acting just like the terrorist wants us to act. But we’re not that way. I watched the buildings burning on Sept. 11, and at some point got on email and messaged everybody I knew that we should think what the terrorists would want us to do, and then do the opposite thing. Nobody objected, or disagreed. So it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know how to fight a terrorist. We just all need to be brought together in this quiet, firm, fight, and quickly.