While we await some definitive indication as to whether we should list those on American Airlines Flight 587 among our war dead or merely among our most tragically unlucky, while we wonder about the capacity of Rudy Guiliani and George Pataki to keep showing up as twin towers of unspeakable grief, perhaps we can glance toward a familiar place not too far in the future.
What will it be like in postwar America? Will its citizens be as familiar with global energy policy as with the favorites for the Oscars? Will its leaders be able to anticipate the lethal international ricochet of a foreign policy misstep? Will they be as attuned to the factors that soothe a world community as they are to the factors that impact their own political shelf life? Will we date our checks 2004, or 2014?
It seems the specter of postwar politics only gets put on the table as something the Afghans must deal with immediately. We are immensely sensitive -- frozen in fear if you prefer -- to the potential political composition of postwar Afghanistan, as though Afghanistan is going to come out the other side like some studio-applauded makeover mom on Oprah.
When, and if, the explosions cease among those joyless hills, Afghanistan will be chaos and desperation, death and hunger, just as it's been. The only issue is: under whose doomed direction?
We are now in a posture where the U.S. airline industry is playing Russian roulette with ruin and where we hope to coax people to the greatest city in the world by stuffing Billy Crystal into a chicken suit because of something that's been going on in Afghanistan. We are in that posture because of something that's been going on in America.
This week, sizzling off the presses of Denoel, the French publishing house, comes a book by security expert Jean-Charles Brisard. Brisard spent years studying Osama Bin Laden's financial resources, but according to Ethan Bronner in Monday's New York Times, the wallop in his pages comes in the words of former FBI anti-terror operative John P. O'Neill, who was killed in the World Trade Center attacks.
O'Neill, who quit the bureau in disgust over its inability to press Saudi Arabia on its connections with bin Laden, says in the book, "all the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organization can be found in Saudi Arabia." Before he accepted a job as head of security at the World Trade Center, O'Neill told Brisard the FBI was hindered in international terrorism investigations by the State Department, and for one increasingly obvious reason: oil.
The Sept. 11 attacks were not five hours into history when President Bush told the planet that America would make no distinction between terrorists and the nations that harbor them, but clearly, important distinctions have been made. A nation, like Saudi Arabia, that supplies 10 percent of the annual smack going to the American oil junky and whose bounteous flow helps stabilize prices on much of the balance is apparently in line for some "distinctions." Even if 16 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudis.
Oops.
At the same time, U.S. hostility toward the Kyoto accords, in which the world's industrial giants agreed to a formula for reducing the amount of carbon dioxide they produce, continues to put this country in a position of suggesting that global warming is a problem for the rest of the world to deal with, even as America is the prime source of heat-trapping pollutants.
The way to deal with all of this, apparently, or at least the way to deflect attention from it, is to spend $1 billion a month routing religious zealots from caves and mud huts. While Larry King was trying to sort it all out with a video queue of quick thinkers the other night, he broke for a commercial for a company touting "energy solutions."
Now there's an idea. An energy solution.
In postwar America, will General Motors continue to produce hyper-muscular horsepower vehicles getting 11 miles per gallon? Or having been given a few hundred million in tax breaks as part of that economic stimulus plan, might it consider a less destructive long-term strategy?
In postwar America, will we be encouraged to resume our lives as normal, or will we finally be encouraged to sit down and think about it a little?
Gene Collier's e-mail address is gcollier@post-gazette.com
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