"An event of this consequence is very hard to understand." The event former Congressman Lee Hamilton was describing earlier this week is September 11, 2001. But of course September 11 itself is not hard to understand. They came, they killed.
For many people this is sufficient understanding of 9/11. They believe the job now is simple: Resist and stop more of their killing. However, unlike the proponents of apocalyptic Islam, most normal people in time seek a degree of understanding, even of an enemy who fights by the rules of pre-civilization. Mr. Hamilton, the vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, was commenting on ABC's now-controversial movie, "The Path to 9/11." The hard-to-understand path to which Mr. Hamilton alluded is obviously not a single event but the origins and organization of the Islamic terrorist movement that began years back and besets the U.S. and the world today.
One can only agree with Mr. Hamilton. The war on terror is more complex, nuanced and indeed more interesting than the general public has been given to believe.
For instance, one oft-cited benchmark of its progress is the status of Osama bin Laden. That he is presumably still alive and at large is taken to mean that President Bush's offensive against the post-9/11 terrorists has "failed," as John Kerry noted this week on the eve of September 11. The Bush administration, Mr. Kerry told CNN, "failed to capture and kill Osama bin Laden when they had him in the mountains of Tora Bora. And that's why we are more threatened today with an al Qaeda that has reconstituted itself in some 65 countries."
This is the Alien vs. Predator model of fighting terror. Bin Laden himself has picked up on the tendency of our political culture to reduce complexity to melodrama. For 9/11, al Qaeda released a propaganda documentary on al-Jazeera this week, depicting masked men training, while Bin Laden walks among them. The New York Times described bin Laden in the 9/11 tape as "looking almost regal."
As to the war in Iraq, daily readers of first-line Internet news services such as Yahoo News know that this event has been reduced simply to body-count headlines. Yahoo News's homepage at mid-day Wednesday: "Bombings, mortar attacks kill 39 in Iraq."
If this is the available public context, then serious people have to assemble an understanding of terror as best they can. It isn't easy. In his comment on the ABC movie, Lee Hamilton said that "news and entertainment are getting dangerously intertwined." But given the alternative, it makes sense to me if people seek a better sense of the obsessions and compulsions inside Islamic terrorism in movies such as "United 93" or ABC's remarkable "The Path to 9/11."
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