On Saturday, the third anniversary of 9/11, my area newspaper ran the editorial below. I'm not typically a letter-to-the-editor writer, but I wrote them a pretty angry letter in response. They opted not to print it. So I'm posting both the editorial and my response at my blog. So, kiss my bloggin' butt, Roanoke Times:

Less Safe After 9/11
Three years after 9/11, the U.S.-led war on terror is disastrously off-track, bogged down in a needless war in Iraq that has diverted the nation's attention and resources away from the enemy that vows to attack again.

Al-Qaida and its leaders have not been obliterated. Long before that job was done, a Bush administration obsessed with the evil of Saddam Hussein was busily shifting America's response from Afghanistan - and al-Qaida - to Iraq.

Iraq had no role in 9/11. Yet today, Saddam is gone from power. Osama bin Laden is not.

Worse, unlike immediately after 9/11, if bin Laden were captured or killed today, the threat he represents would not lessen.

By shorting U.S. forces in Afghanistan, whose ruling Taliban sheltered al-Qaida training camps, to attack Iraq, where the only suspected al-Qaida camps lay in territory the Saddam regime did not control, the Bush administration handed bin Laden a political victory.

Bush transformed a retaliatory attack that all the world supported into an invasion that looked to much of the world like a war of aggression, and to Muslims like a religious crusade.

Bin Laden's claims seemed to be confirmed: that the United States would attack Muslim lands, occupy its holy sites and take control of the oil. His followers grew in number and, with or without him, a protracted war of terror against the West was assured.

Afghanistan, meanwhile, was left unreconstructed and open to terrorists again. Iran and North Korea, emboldened by limits on a U.S. military stuck in Iraq, accelerated nuclear weapons programs. In America, homeland security remains alarmingly underfunded, and $150 billion already appropriated for Iraq grows by about $5 billion each month.

A depressing assessment of the Iraq invasion's impact on the war on terror appears in October's Atlantic magazine. Writer James Fallows, having talked over many months with people "at the working level of America's antiterrorism efforts," reports:

"As a political matter, whether the United States is now safer or more vulnerable is of course ferociously controversial.... But among national-security professionals there is surprisingly little controversy. Except for those in government and in the opinion industries whose job it is to defend the administration's record, they tend to see America's response to 9/11 as a catastrophe."

One the president should not be allowed to worsen - or repeat.

To which I responded:

Dear Editor,

The editorial entitled "Less Safe After 9/11," published on the third anniversary of that awful day, represents terribly irresponsible political posturing on the writer's part. I have to wonder if the writer's intention was to illicit angry responses from conservatives. If so, count me among those who took the bait.

The writer insists that Iraq had no role in 9/11. How confident and definitive! However, the 9/11 commission's report certainly doesn't back up that assertion. The report finds that top al-Qaeda operatives met with Iraq's government in 1998, and that in 1999, Saddam offered safe haven to bin Laden. Would the writer have us believe that the relationship between Saddam's government and al-Qaeda was innocuous?

The writer further calls the US invasion of Iraq a "political victory for bin Laden." In 1993, President Clinton treated al-Qaeda's first attack on the world trade center as an isolated crime rather than an act of war. Had Clinton pursued bin Laden and those who gave him safe haven as tenaciously as President Bush has, 9/11 may never have happened. We'll never know. However, we do know that Clinton handed bin Laden the only real political victory he's ever claimed over a US president, and that three years ago he capitalized on that victory with an act of terrible violence.

The writer also says that Moslems see Bush's invasion of Iraq as a religious crusade. That's dumbfounding. In reality, the Islamic fascists who threaten this country and the rest of the free world have declared a religious crusade against us. They did so long before we invaded Iraq. To even imply that Bush introduced dogma to this war is idiotic. In doing so, the writer reveals his own distaste for Bush's faith, and nothing more.

Finally, the writer quotes James Fallows, who asserts that certain unnamed National Security professionals see America's response to 9/11 as a catastrophe. If I were sympathetic to the writer's agenda, I'd still insist that this is unreliable, anecdotal, and proves nothing. Since I'm not sympathetic, I can call this assertion what it is: a barefaced political ploy. Again, the writer reveals his own predispositions, but nothing about national security.

In 2004, the way elite leftist intellectuals reaffirm their standing with one and other is by bashing the president, even at the expense of common sense and scruples. I'm sure the editorial writer enjoyed the accolades of his contemporaries upon publication of Saturday's piece. Nonetheless, from the rest of us, he should expect rebukes such as this one, or simple, silent contempt.

Sincerely,
Darrell