Six Years After

How secure are you?

Petraeus' empty words and the real terror threat.

Plus: Larry Craig's libidinal misstep is ground in modern male sexuality.

By Camille Paglia ~Salon.com

Sept. 12, 2007 | Six years after the attack on the World Trade Center, what is the state of national security in the U.S.?

The Bush administration assures us that, thanks to its invisible hand, we are far safer than we would have been with a bleeding-heart Democrat at the helm. I suspect this is true: The lack of scruple about constitutional guarantees that has been openly flaunted by Vice President Dick Cheney might well have nipped nascent conspiracies in the bud -- though at the price of the massive surveillance and targeting of innocent citizens.

Should there be another major attack on U.S. soil, even Democrats suspicious of Republican hype would snap into survivalist mode, where defense of hearth and home is an elemental instinct. What Bush and company puff as the "war on terror" is no mirage: radical jihadism, exacerbated by the arrogant stupidity of our invasion of Iraq, does indeed threaten the very existence of Western civilization, whose peace and prosperity depend on a complex infrastructure and communications system vulnerable to catastrophic disruption by small bands of ruthless saboteurs.

But if some Democrats too facilely dismiss the gravity of the threat, Republicans have not helped their cause by their propagandistic conflation of shadowy al-Qaida with the authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein, who held Iraq together, as his fascist forebears in Assyria and Babylon had done, through brutal repression. Some conservatives can go off the deep end: earlier this year, for example, I heard New York radio host Steve Malzberg deride Barack Obama's cautious caveat that, after another attack, we would need to learn "whose fingerprints are on the bomb." Malzberg flatly proclaimed, "If we're hit again with a dirty bomb, we should immediately tactically nuke Tehran and Damascus." Welcome to World War III.

-cont.