After watching the harsh acrimony generated by the September 11 Commission – which, let me say at the outset, is made up of good and able members – I’ve come to seriously question this panel’s usefulness. I believe it will ultimately play a role in doing great harm to this country, for its unintended consequences, I fear, will be to energize our enemies and demoralize our troops.

After being drowned in a tidal wave of all who didn’t do enough before 9/11, I have come to believe that the Commission should issue a report that says: “No one did enough in the past. No one did near enough.” Then thank everyone for serving, send them home and let’s get on with the job of protecting this country in the future. Tragically, these hearings have proved to be a very divisive diversion for this country. Tragically, they have devoured valuable time, looking backwards when we should be looking forward.

Can you imagine handling the attack on Pearl Harbor this way? Can you imagine Congress, the media and the public standing for this kind of political gamesmanship and finger pointing after that “day of infamy” in 1941? Some partisans tried that ploy, but they were soon quieted by the patriots who understood how important it was to get on with the war and take the battle to America’s enemies, and not dwell on what FDR knew when. You see, back then the highest priority was to win a war, not win an election. That’s what made them “The Greatest Generation.”

I realize that many well-meaning Americans see the hearings as “democracy in action.” Years ago, when I was teaching political science, I probably would have had my class watching it live on television and using that very phrase with them. There are also the not-so-well-meaning political operatives who see these hearings as an opportunity to “score cheap points.” Then, there are the Media Meddlers who see this as “great theater” that can be played out on the evening news and on endless talk shows for a week or more.

Congressional hearings have long been one of Washington’s most entertaining pastimes. Joe McCarthy. Watergate. Iran Contra. They all kept us glued to the TV, and made for conversation around the water coolers and arguments over a beer at the corner pub. A Congressional hearing in Washington, D.C. is the ultimate aphrodisiac for political groupies and partisan punks. But, it’s not the groupies, punks and television-sotted American public that I’m worried about. This latter crowd can get excited and divided over just about anything. Whether it’s some off-key wanna-be dreaming of being the American Idol, or what brainless bimbo The Bachelor or Average Joe will choose or who will Donald Trump fire next week.

No, it is the real enemies of America that I’m concerned about. These evil killers who right now, right now are gleefully watching the shrill partisan finger pointing of these hearings and grinning like a mule eating briars. They see this as a major split within the Great Satan America. They see anger, they see division, instability, bickering, peevishness and dissension. They see the President of the United States hammered unmercifully. They see all this and they are greatly, greatly encouraged.

We should not be doing anything to encourage our enemies in this battle between good and evil. Yet, these hearings, in my opinion, are doing just that. We are playing with fire. We’re playing directly into the hands of our enemy by allowing these hearings to become the great divider they have become. Dick Clarke’s book and its release coinciding with these hearings have done this country a tremendous disservice, and someday we will reap its whirlwind. Long ago, Sir Walter Scott observed that revenge is “the sweetest morsel that ever was cooked in hell.” The vindictive Clarke has now had his revenge, but what kind of hell has he, his CBS publisher and his axe-to-grind advocates unleashed?

These hearings, coming on the heels of the election the terrorists influenced in Spain, bolster and energize our evil enemies as they have not been energized since 9/11. Chances are very good that these evil enemies of America will attempt to influence our 2004 election in a similar dramatic way as they did Spain’s. And to think that could never be in this country is to stick your head in the sand. That is why the sooner we stop this endless bickering over the past and join together to prepare for the future, the better off this country will be. There are some things - whether this city believes it or not - that are just more important than political campaigns. The recent past is so ripe for political second-guessing “gotcha” and Monday morning quarter-backing. And it is so tempting in an election year. We should not allow ourselves to indulge that temptation. We should put our country first. Every administration from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush bears some of the blame. Dick Clarke bears a big heap of it because it was he who was in the catbird’s seat to do something about it for more than a decade. Tragically, it was the decade in which we did the least. We did nothing after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six and injuring more than 1,000 Americans. We did nothing in 1996 when sixteen U.S. servicemen were killed in the bombing of the Khobar Towers. When our embassies were attacked in 1998, killing 263 people, our only response was to fire a few missiles on an empty tent.

Is it any wonder? Is it any wonder that after that decade of weak-willed responses to that murderous terror, our enemies thought we would never fight back? In the 1990’s is when Dick Clarke should have resigned. In the 1990’s is when he should have apologized. That is when he should have written his book. That is, if he really had America’s best interest at heart.

Some will say, “We owe it to the families” to get more information about what happened in the past and I can understand that. But no amount of finger-pointing will bring our victims back. So, now we owe it to future families and all of America now in jeopardy not to encourage more terrorists, resulting in even more grieving families, perhaps many more over the ones of 9/11.

It’s obvious to me that this country is rapidly dividing itself into two camps: the wimps and the warriors. The ones who want to argue and assess and appease, and the ones who want to carry this fight to our enemies and kill him them before they kill us. And, in case you haven’t figured it out, I proudly belong to the latter. This is a time like no other in the history of this country, and this country is being crippled with petty partisan politics of the worst possible kind. In time of war, it is not just unpatriotic; it is stupid, and it is criminal.

So, I pray that all this time, all this energy, all this talk and all this attention could be focused on the future instead of the past. I pray we would stop pointing fingers, assigning blame and wringing our hands about what happened on that day David McCullogh has called “the worst day in our history” more than two years ago. And instead, pour all of our energy into how we can kill these terrorists before they kill us - again. For make no mistake about it. They watch these hearings. They are scheming and smiling about the distraction and the divisiveness they see in America. And while they may not know who said it years ago in America, they know instinctively that a house divided cannot stand.

There is one other group that we should remember is listening to all of this - our troops. I was in Iraq in January and one day when I was meeting with the 1st Armored Division, a unit with a proud history known as Old Ironsides, we were discussing troop morale, and the Commanding General said it was top notch. And I turned to the Division’s Sergeant Major, the top enlisted man in the division, a big, burly, 6-foot-3, 240 pound African American and I said, “That’s good, but how do you sustain that kind of morale?” Without hesitation he narrowed his eyes, and he looked at me and said “The morale will stay high just as long as these troops know the people back home support us.”

Just as long as the people back home support us. What kind of message are these hearings and the outrageously political speeches on the floor of the Senate yesterday sending to those marvelous young Americans in the uniform of our country? I say Unite America! Before it is too late! Put aside these petty partisan differences when it comes to the protection of our people. Argue and argue and argue and debate and debate and debate over all the other things – jobs and education and the deficit and the environment – but please, please do not use the lives of Americans and the security of this country as a cheap-shot political talking point.

.... The United States can bolster [U.N. representative Lakhdar] Brahimi’s limited leverage by saying in advance that we will support any plan he proposes that gains the support of Iraqi leaders. Moving forward, the administration must make the United Nations a full partner responsible for developing Iraq’s transition to a new constitution and government. We also need to renew our effort to attract international support in the form of boots on the ground to create a climate of security in Iraq. We need more troops and more people who can train Iraqi troops and assist Iraqi police.

We should urge NATO to create a new out-of-area operation for Iraq under the lead of a U.S. commander. This would help us obtain more troops from major powers. The events of the past week will make foreign governments extremely reluctant to put their citizens at risk. That is why international acceptance of responsibility for stabilizing Iraq must be matched by international authority for managing the remainder of the Iraqi transition.

The United Nations, not the United States, should be the primary civilian partner in working with Iraqi leaders to hold elections, restore government services, rebuild the economy, and re-create a sense of hope and optimism among the Iraqi people. The primary responsibility for security must remain with the U.S. military, preferably helped by NATO until we have an Iraqi security force fully prepared to take responsibility. ...

Here is how the imperialist plot in Iraq was proceeding until recently. The Shiite Muslim pilgrimages to Najaf and Karbala and the Sunni pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina had been recommenced after a state ban that had lasted for years and been enforced in blood. A new dinar had been minted, without the face of the dictator, and was on its way to becoming convertible. (Indeed, recent heists at the Beirut and Baghdad airports suggested that the Iraqi currency was at last worth stealing.) The deliberately parched and scorched wetlands of the south were being re-flooded. At the end of June, the American headquarters was to be converted into an embassy. At that point, almost $100 billion was to become available for the reconstitution of the Iraqi state and society. By the end of the year, campaigning would be under way for the first open election in Iraqi memory, and the only such election in the region (unless you count Israel).

There are those—not conspicuous for their bravery under a less indulgent regime—who would prefer not to give this process a chance to breathe. For them, it is nobler to take hostages and dismember prisoners and to conceal explosives in the bodies of dead dogs. When confronted with those who were brave under the previous regime, they tend to back away. (I don’t see Muqtada Sadr taking on the Kurdish peshmerga any time soon, and I’d be fascinated to see what happened if he did. He has said that "Kurdistan is the enemy of God.")

Of what does this confrontation remind you? Why, of Vietnam, says Sen. Edward Kennedy. No, more like Lebanon in 1982, says the New York Times. The usually admirable Colbert King, in the Washington Post, asking how we got ourselves into this, compares pro-American Iraqis to the Uncle Toms on whom liberal opinion used to rely for advice about the black ghetto. And Thomas Friedman, never more than an inch away from a liberal panic of his own, has decided that it is Kurdish arrogance—in asking to keep what they already have—that has provoked theocratic incendiarism.

If the United States were the nation that its enemies think it is, it could quite well afford to Balkanize Iraq, let the various factions take a chunk each, and make a divide-and-rule bargain with the rump. The effort continues, though, to try and create something that is simultaneously federal and democratic. Short of that, if one absolutely has to fall short, the effort must continue to deny Iraq to demagogues and murderers and charlatans. I can’t see how this compares to the attempt to partition and subjugate Vietnam, bomb its cities, drench its forests in Agent Orange, and hand over its southern region to a succession of brutal military proxies. For one thing, Vietnam even at its most Stalinist never invaded and occupied neighboring countries (or not until it took on the Khmer Rouge), never employed weapons of genocide inside or outside its own borders, and never sponsored gangs of roving nihilist terrorists. If not all its best nationalists were Communists, all its best Communists were nationalists, and their combination of regular and irregular forces had beaten the Japanese and French empires long before the United States even set foot in the country, let alone before the other Kennedy brothers started assassinating the very puppets they had installed there.

As for Lebanon: Gen. Sharon in 1982 set out to "solve" the Palestinian problem by installing a fascist-minded Phalange Party, itself a minority of the Christian minority, in Beirut. (To watch American policy in Iraq, you would never even know that there was a 6 percent Christian minority there.) And Sharon invaded a country that already had a large population of Palestinian refugees, a country that had committed no offense against international law except to shelter those Palestinians—against their will and that of Lebanon—to begin with.

Colbert King is actually nearer the mark than he knows. Those Arab Iraqis who take a pro-American line do have a tendency to be secular, educated, and multicultural. They also, often, have had to spend time in exile (as 4 million Iraqis have been compelled to do), and many of them have barely had time to come home and start over. Then there is a potential majority, according even to the most depressing opinion polls, who want to be given time to think. The above qualifications don’t apply so much to Iraqi Kurdistan, which did its own fighting and doesn’t suffer so much from that elusive feeling of "humiliation," and where the "street" is pro-American. This does force us to face the fact that there is no pro-Western militia, with ready-made slogans of religion and nationalism and "martyrdom" and Kalashnikovs to spare. And facing that fact means asking whether we will abandon the nascent Iraqi civil society to those who do have those things.

The scenes in Fallujah and Kut and elsewhere are prefigurations of what a transfer of power would have looked like, unedited, in the absence of coalition forces. This is the Iraq that had been prepared for us by more than a decade of sanctions-plus-Saddam, with a new lumpen class of impoverished, disenfranchised, and paranoid people, with bullying, Khomeini-style, Wahhabi-style and Baath-style forces to compete for their loyalty. Such was the future we faced anyway. This is implicitly admitted by those antiwar forces who asked, "Why not Zimbabwe?" or, "Why not Rwanda?"

I could give a list of mistakes that I think the Bremer administration has made, but none that would have justified theocratic barbarism. I don’t feel I should give free advice to officers in the field, but if the locations seized by Sadr or his Sunni counterparts had been left to their own devices for a few days, there is some reason to think that the local population would have gotten a glimpse of that future and rejected it. A few days rule by the inflamed Party of God. 
 Or what about a quarter-century of it, as the Iranian people have just had to endure?

Here is the reason that it is idle to make half-baked comparisons to Vietnam. The Vietnamese were not our enemy, let alone the enemy of the whole civilized world, whereas the forces of jihad are our enemy and the enemy of civilization. There were some Vietnamese, even after the whole ghastly business, who were sorry to see the Americans leave. There were no Lebanese who were sad to see the Israelis leave. There would be many, many Iraqis who would be devastated in more than one way if there was another Somalian scuttle in their country. In any case, there never was any question of allowing a nation of this importance to become the property of Clockwork Orange holy warriors.