EIGHTEEN GUYS WHO SHOOK THE WORLD

NEW YORK -- "Power is an illusion," columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote during Watergate. At no time in our lives has that truism been more evident.

The demise of the Soviet Union, we know as surely as we can know anything nowadays, left us Americans in charge of the planet. What we never considered was how little it took to bring down our rival superpower: the CIA (news - web sites) dumping dollars on the floors of Moscow lavatories to destabilize the ruble. A nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl.

Integral to the shaking fists and the flag-waving hysteria and the funerals -- thousands and thousands more of those to come, by the way -- is a rage born of impotence. Conservatives applaud and liberals deplore our expensive governmental monitoring systems -- what would we have argued about had we known that neither the CIA nor the NSA knew what was going to go down Sept. 11? For what does it profit a country to starve its schools if its fattened Pentagon can't even protect its own headquarters from a terrorist attack?

The United States has finally been unmasked as the greatest Potemkin ever conceived -- "great magnificent shapes, castles and kingdoms," in Breslin's words. Or to paraphrase Edward G. Robinson's classic diss of Fred MacMurray in "Double Indemnity": We thought we were smart, but we were wrong. We're just a little bigger.

Air-traffic controllers realized fairly quickly that those four jets had been hijacked. American Flight 11, out of Boston, took 46 minutes to hit Tower One of the World Trade Center. United Flight 175 struck Tower Two 65 minutes after leaving Boston.

Most damning, American Flight 77 was aloft a total of 88 minutes -- nearly an hour and a half -- making it from Washington/Dulles to southern Ohio en route to Los Angeles before turning around. Math: The flight did a 180-degree turn at least 44 minutes away from the Pentagon. Why weren't our F-16s on top of that plane within 10 minutes? Why wasn't it shot down during the next 34 minutes after that? The answer, sheepishly admitted and buried deep amid the assorted tales of horror, was that there is no policy for forcing down a civilian airliner.

Unless, of course, there was. The Air Force denies shooting down United Flight 93, which crashed and burned in Shanksville, Pa., the government's silence certifying called-in media stories of heroic passengers rebelling against their captors. Those accounts, however, are cast into doubt by the government's refusal to release the plane's voice cockpit recorder tapes to the public. It's a safe bet, after all, that a bold struggle for control would at least make it out in transcript form. So it's possible that Bush or other officials made a terrible, yet courageous, decision to act; if so, the need to keep it secret provides ample testimony to the aftermath of last year's election-that-never-was: If Bush is the perfect president for this time, he's the empty-headed embodiment of our national cluelessness.

America's embarrassment of embarrassments continues apace. CIA superspooks admit that their posse of white Mormons from Utah never learned Pashto or Tajik, Afghanistan's two principal languages. The loss of four planes and a few days of airport closures decimate the biggest airline industry in the world, resonating through the economy in the form of the biggest stock-market crash ever. Half a dozen buildings accounting for less than 1 percent of New York City's office space vanish; the national economy plunges decidedly into recession and beyond.

What would we do if we really were at war? How can the richest superpower in the history of mankind have been brought so low by 18 guys?

The United States, it turns out, entered the 21st century atop a crumbling house of cards. When the Soviet Union went away, we lost the ideological and economic competition that had kept us sharp after World War II. We became complacent, smug and arrogant. History, Francis Fukuyama told us in 1993, had ended. Global free-market capitalism, epitomized and led by U.S. corporations, represented the pinnacle of achievement of historical evolution.

A power vacuum opened in Central Asia. Afghanistan disintegrated into civil war, anarchy and religious madness. Surrounding republics -- Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan -- were sucked into a vortex of instability and anti-Western sentiment fueled by clumsy U.S. attempts to suck all the oil out of the region without paying off any of the locals. This, and America's blank check to Israel, inspired tens of thousands of militant Muslims to their facile conclusion: Sometimes the bull in the china shop won't leave voluntarily. That's when you kill it.

Osama and his jihad boys sized us up fairly well. Behind the high-tech metal detectors in our airports were underpaid incompetents. Manning our tactical defenses were dimwitted dolts devoid of imagination. Bolstering our outsized economy was a mountain of debt and an easily spooked securities market. And behind the boast that the World Trade Center could withstand a collision with a jumbo jet was the horrible, awful truth: No amount of bluster can cancel out basic physics. As the cliche goes, we believed our own hype and now we're paying the price.

Our close-to-the-bone brand of capitalism turned out to be our economic Achilles' heel. Corporations that fill metal tubes with highly combustible fuel and upper-middle-class citizens and propel them eight miles over the surface of the Earth at high speeds ought to be prepared for an occasional mishap, but they're not -- and neither are insurers who are, after all, in the business of risk appraisal. A week of reduced productivity has ruined crops (no crop dusters during the flight ban) and trashed the economies of states dependent on tourism.

This, since George W. Bush and his tax-cutting maniacs have forgotten, is why governments and companies both need savings and surpluses. "It's my money," Republicans like to say, "and I can use it better than the government can." Worst of all, decades of increasing disparity of wealth have made it impossible for ordinary people to help out the only way they really could, by spending discretionary income. Now that we've let them steal all of our money, where are all the jobs rich people are supposed to create? This is the way empires end, with a bang and a whine.

(Ted Rall, a syndicated cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, is author of the new books "2024" and "Search and Destroy.")

This Op-Ed goes to show that even after last night's Address to the Nation speech by our President, there are still worms on the left that are compelled to snipe at Bush. Every man has the right to an opinion in this free nation however, their opinion reveals their true nature. Ted Rall is not a uniter in this time of crisis. He is not a team player when we need to stand together.

Ted Hall is a writer for the Universal Press Syndicate and I will never use their services again.

For what does it profit a country to starve its schools if its fattened Pentagon can't even protect its own headquarters from a terrorist attack?

What???!!! What country does this guy live in? Starving schools???

He is not a team player when we need to stand together.
ja. es ist zutreffend. der feind der regierung ist der feind der leute.

Zeig Heil!

Zeig Heil!

And behind the boast that the World Trade Center could withstand a collision with a jumbo jet was the horrible, awful truth: No amount of bluster can cancel out basic physics.

Actually, the World Trade Center withstood collisions with TWO jumbo jets. It was the bazillion gallons of jet fuel that took the Two Towers down.

Mr. AT,

The point to be made is that the terrorist win if we are broken and divided. We can agree to disagree however this "jouralist" (and I used the term very loosely) does not make the job of uniting our nation in this time of crisis any easier. I DO know the difference between patriotism and groupthink.

I agree we are witnessing the after shocks of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It will be up to us to plug the 'power vacuum' with western influence.

BUMP

Idiots like Rall (for a syndicated cartoonist, draws only slightly better thatn my six-year-old son) never see the irony in the fact that they live in a land so great they can have trash like this protected by the very government they despise. Unsaid between the outright falshoods (starved schools?) is the leader, HIS leader, who brought us down this path for eight years: Bill Clinton. Apperenty, in Rall's mind, President Bush inherited a utopia which he destroyed in eight short months. Were was Rall's editorial on 9/10/01 if this is all so obvious? This "See, I Told You So" crap makes me sick...

It happened to them. Now it's happening to us.

Bull. The reason the Taliban repelled the Soviet Union was because the US was backing them. They were our surrogate. No one will be backing the mere 50,000 member Taliban now. They are toast.

No one said to subvert the First Amendment. He said the guy isn't helping the cause.

The problem with people like you is that you're so sensitive, you interpret any criticism as an attack against your constitutional freedom. This tells me that if you were ever to be placed in power, you would see 'constitutional enemies' everywhere -- and happily throw anyone in jail who dared to verbally disagree with you.

thanks for the psychological workup. btw, the problem with people like you is that your replies have no bearing whatsoever to the posts which apparently sparked them. suggest a clue detection kit for christmas, then a straw man argument eliminator on your next birthday.

It's time to stop pussyfooting around. Some people--including Ted Hall--are actually on the side of the terorists. They are happy this has happened. They are happy that thousands of Americans were killed in this attack. They are not "pro-peace." They are pro-murder.

I never quite thought of it that way. In our current national state of crisis, if you are pro- "peace" and against taking concrete steps to counteract the terrorists, you could be essentially condoning mass murder on truly hideous scale. The fact that there are hundreds if not thousands of people thinking the same way in our country after what happened on September 11th makes me ill.

After thinking about this, I am going to make a point of hugging my wife and telling her I love her. That should be enough to wipe that thought out of my mind for the short term.

God have mercy on us all.

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