Deja Vu All Over Again

As I've alluded to over the last little while, and as regular readers have probably noticed with the somewhat lighter posts over that same time, I've had a project at work keeping me very, very busy. As a result, I haven't had the time to keep up with the news as much as I'd like and as I usually do. So this week when I read Frank Rich, instead of nodding at his insights and chuckling at his wordplay, I became very depressed at the troubling collection of facts he featured. I haven't been completely out of the loop as to what's going on--I know about the crying judge in the Anna Nicole case; I saw bald Brittany; I'm aware that the Oscars are being handed out tonight in Hollywood. But I didn't hear the quote Rich takes from the former CIA agent on Olbermann. I didn't know that Congress heard testimony this week about a resurgent al Queda. What kind of dysfunctional news media do we have? (Yes, that is a rhetorical question).

We've seen this before, and Rich starts in a nostalgic mood, asking, "Where Were You That Summer of 2001?"

"United 93," Hollywood's highly praised but indifferently attended 9/11 docudrama, will be only a blip on tonight's Oscar telecast. The ratings rise of "24" has stalled as audiences defect from the downer of terrorists to the supernatural uplift of "Heroes." Cable surfers have tuned out Iraq for a war with laughs: the battle over Anna Nicole's decomposing corpse. Set this cultural backdrop against last week's terrifying but little-heeded front-page Times account of American "intelligence and counterterrorism officials" leaking urgent warnings about Al Qaeda's comeback, and ask yourself: Haven't we been here before?

If so, that would be the summer of 2001, when America pigged out on a 24/7 buffet of Gary Condit and shark attacks. The intelligence and counterterrorism officials back then were privately sounding urgent warnings like those in last week's Times, culminating in the President's Daily Brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." The system "was blinking red," as the C.I.A. chief George Tenet would later tell the 9/11 commission. But no one, from the White House on down, wanted to hear it.

The White House doesn't want to hear it now, either. That's why terrorism experts are trying to get its attention by going public, and not just through The Times. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A. bin Laden unit, told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann last week that the Taliban and Al Qaeda, having regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan, "are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States" (the real United States, that is, not the fictional stand-in where this same scenario can be found on "24"). Al Qaeda is "on the march" rather than on the run, the Georgetown University and West Point terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman told Congress. Tony Blair is pulling troops out of Iraq not because Basra is calm enough to be entrusted to Iraqi forces - it's "not ready for transition," according to the Pentagon's last report - but to shift some British resources to the losing battle against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.

Icing on the cake that I saw but that Rich didn't include (which may have been after his deadline) was Friday's statement from General Peter J. Schoomaker, out-going Army chief of staff, that it didn't really matter whether we got Osama or not. "I don't know that it's all that important, frankly," he told the Rotary Club in Fort Worth. "We know he's not particularly effective. I'm not sure there's that great of a return." There's nothing like lowered expectations. But Rich continues:

This is why the entire debate about the Iraq "surge" is as much a sideshow as Britney's scalp. More troops in Baghdad are irrelevant to what's going down in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The surge supporters who accuse the Iraq war's critics of emboldening the enemy are trying to deflect attention from their own complicity in losing a bigger battle: the one against the enemy that actually did attack us on 9/11. Who lost Iraq? is but a distraction from the more damning question, Who is losing the war on terrorism?

The record so far suggests that this White House has done so twice. The first defeat, of course, began in early December 2001, when we lost Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora.

. . .
That mistake - dropping the ball on Al Qaeda - was compounded last fall when Mr. Bush committed his second major blunder in the war on terror. The occasion was the September revelation that our supposed ally, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, had negotiated a "truce" with the Taliban in North Waziristan, a tribal region in his country at the Afghanistan border. This truce was actually a retreat by Pakistan, which even released Qaeda prisoners in its custody. Yet the Bush White House denied any of this was happening. "This deal is not at all with the Taliban," the president said, claiming that "this is against the Taliban, actually."

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see any wry laughs this time around. Frank Rich has simply given us a very sobering assessment of where we are now compared to where we were five-and-a-half years ago. It looks live maybe everything didn't change after all.