Life During Wartime

By NANCY GIBBS

Illusions are the truths we live by until we know better. We certainly know what it feels like to watch them explode: this week two years ago we lost for good the sunny sense that our world was safe, that the oceans would protect us, that there were rules even among the hateful against mass slaughter of the innocent. Now a different set of illusions flakes--off about the costs of winning wars and making peace. By the time President Bush asks Congress for more money and the U.N. for more of everything--more peacekeepers and mine clearers and border guards--any illusion that America could spray peace and democracy throughout the Middle East and then quickly fly home will have vanished as well. Even those who opposed taking the battle to Iraq now have to accept that there is no turning back, and those who advanced the battle are forced to admit that true victory will take more time, cost more lives and consume more treasure than they had ever reckoned. Two years on, the global war on terrorism is more global and in some ways more terrifying because the stakes and the cost and the waiting only grow with each passing day.

This year when Americans think about Sept. 11, they don't look back so much as forward. There will be moments of silence and service motorcycle-rally fund raisers in Minnesota, interfaith prayer services in Cleveland, Ohio; panel discussions in Louisville, Ky.; blood drives in Indianapolis, Ind. But there are no network-TV marathons this time, and many victims' families are grateful to be left alone. The event felt enormous at the time, literally unimaginable. But our imaginations have become deeper, perhaps darker, colored by each new terrorism alert and stretched to allow for reasonable people to spend a week last winter buying plastic sheeting and gas masks. New York City turned a summer blackout into a carnival just because our worst fears were not realized: we briefly glimpsed a horror and then danced when we learned it was just an inconvenience.

It has been quiet at home this season, the terrorism alert dozing at code yellow, telling people to be aware but not afraid. You can live on the edge only for so long before you drink the bottled water and use the duct tape for packages and just hope for the best. A CNN/TIME poll last week found people worrying more about the economy than terrorism. Yet more than half of all Americans think things are not back to normal and never will be. It has become easy to wonder whether the President has done too little to protect the country or too much. On the one hand, his Attorney General is making speeches in 16 states to defend the Patriot Act because Congress is trying to repeal it, and more than 150 cities and towns have passed resolutions saying they don't like being spied on. On the other hand, you can read the latest reports about flimsy border security and lethal germs and how easily a man took a 4-in. knife on board a United flight in June and wish that even more money, more muscle, more ingenuity were going into this fight.

If the first year after 9/11 was marked by unity at home and sympathy abroad, the second felt like a nasty fight between old friends. This autumn brings lessons in humility for those who dismissed the U.N. and now solicit it, disbanded the Iraqi army and now try to build a new one from scratch, downplayed the costs of war and now run out of zeros trying to estimate the price of peace. There is not much talk of the U.N.'s irrelevance anymore. There are no spare U.S. Army divisions to send. And if the experiences of peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia and Kosovo are any guide, the force level in Iraq needs to double if there's to be any chance of installing a stable regime. The hope that a people freed from tyranny would be so relieved and grateful that they would briskly go to work rebuilding, policing and reforming their country is another illusion that has gone, along with the promise that the U.S. would be down to 30,000 troops by fall or that somehow enough Iraqi oil would bubble through the pipelines to finance the gazillion needs of a long-broken country.

People will still argue over whether Sept. 11 was the reason for the Iraq war or just the excuse. But most can agree that had 9/11 not rewired our reflexes, no President could have launched a discretionary war against a country that had not attacked us or an ally first. The White House wraps everything into one great battle so that whatever goes wrong each night on the evening news is not the result of bad planning or tissue rejection by the Iraqi people, but the same eternal hatred that propelled the hijackers two years ago.

That hatred is a stubborn enemy too. U.S. soldiers chase the resisters through the streets, but an even deeper and more difficult hunt proceeds as well--one to dig up and cut off terrorism at its roots in all the places where toddlers are taught that glory lies in dying for the cause of killing infidels. In Pakistan, Indonesia, Afghanistan, reverence for Osama bin Laden abides. In London you find lampposts wrapped in stickers extolling "The Magnificent 19" who brought down the towers. And in Saudi Arabia, is the next generation of hijackers and suicide bombers being cultivated or crushed? The attackers, we remember, were privileged sons, educated, aware, inflamed. So what has become of the schools that fed them and the funds that fueled them and the preachers who ignited them? How many more are coming? And what is anyone there doing to stop the next jihad?

The attacks changed America, but the war has changed everything. We see how the consequences of our policies in Afghanistan and especially Iraq will be felt for generations, and we debate whether this experiment in expansive self-defense will go down as a great model or a great blunder. What will it take before the desert begins to bloom and refute those who fear that after the past six months, it is just a place where for years to come American soldiers will go to die?

People will punish a President for many things. Being too hopeful about America's destiny may not be one of them; being too arrogant about America's power may well be, and so the great gamble unfolds.

--With reporting by Matthew Cooper, John F. Dickerson and Viveca Novak/Washington

With reporting by Matthew Cooper, John F. Dickerson and Viveca Novak/Washington