Legacies

Richard Cohen of the Washington Post has a dyspeptic editorial up this morning, A Hole in Which Hopes Are Buried, in which he expresses general outrage at everything George W. Bush.

Cohen starts his rant at Ground Zero:

President Bush is starting to look beyond his presidency. His focus is on his legacy, which he is sure will vindicate his decision to go to war in Iraq. But his most fitting memorial is likely to be where I was Sunday: the immense gash in Lower Manhattan known as Ground Zero. More than 4 1/2 years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the hole has yet to be filled.

Tourists come and look. The selling of souvenirs is prohibited at the site itself, but around the corner, on Vesey Street, peddlers hug the shadows. The proper souvenir to take away from this place, though, is the memory of its immense emptiness. It's a hole filled with broken promises and silly rhetoric, an inverted monument to the Bush administration's unfathomable failure even to capture Osama bin Laden.

Cohen attempts to affix the failure to rebuild the WTC site as Bush's legacy, as if urban commercial architect were among the many mythical powers he has assumed in his imagined “imperial presidency.” But Bush is not to blame for the failure to rebuild at Ground Zero. Rounds of ensuing site designs have been brought forth, shot down, and slowed down because of politics, lawsuits wrangling over insurance monies, and safety concerns, all local issues.

He then chastises the President for not yet getting Osama bin Laden. I once thought more of Richard Cohen, but he seems unable to grasp the simple fact that Osama is a figurehead, a symbolic leader whose operational capabilities have steadily declined in every nation as al Qaeda cells are picked off one-by-one around the world. But then, Cohen isn't really interested in bin Laden. Were Bush to call a joint session of Congress and have bin Laden's head literally brought out on a silver platter, Cohen would assuredly be among the first to quote the Dali Llama saying that the death of bin Laden would just create ten more.

What Richard Cohen will not do, is face the brutal fact that the man he so openly admires, William Jefferson Clinton, through inaction in the Sudan and repeated hesitancy in Afghanistan, allowed bin Laden to live to see the horrors his disciples would create.

The two felled Towers and the 2,792 souls taken in their collapse are a legacy to Clinton's inaction, not Bush's bravado. Ground Zero is the hole that Bill built.

Cohen rails about President bush's supposed incompetence in waging war, yet fails to account for President Clinton's abject failure in waging peace that led us to where we are today. If Bush's legacy is a void, Bill Clinton's legacy is a blackened September sky.