Dan Kaplan: Two years later, the future looks bleak for peace and safety

It's always strange and fascinating and sad to watch the links as a chain of cause and effect uncoils: The plane banks, collapses its nose into Tower 2 and sends liquefied metal, limbs and teeth out in a fireball through the opposite side. All the paper in the adjacent offices ignites; the temperatures approach 1000 degrees.

Dressed in their business casual, men and women experience loudspeaker warnings instructing them to remain calm and behind their desks. Others flock to the roof and wave their hands at helicopters.

The floor grumbles.

Some people, trapped and burning, get the idea and take a head start. On TV, we see their flailing bodies and fluttering clothes drift down the buildings, casting shadows against the facades. The air above the ground reverberates with thuds.

And then down go the towers, trailing suspended puffs of smoke, and we all gasp. Some of us cry, some of us scream. Others, like me, are too stunned to make noise.

Trucks with cameras respond, and the people who fill them stand in front or behind these cameras and recite their morbid facts and unoriginal thoughts.

Posters of the dead fill walls in Manhattan; everywhere are smiling women, children and their dogs. Some ask if we've seen this person; others have accepted that we haven't, won't.

At Ground Zero that November, my girlfriend places her palm on one of these and for the first time since the 11th , she cries about everything. I comment on the tour buses and American flags that seem to be everywhere, and the industrious Asian women selling pins.

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Two years later and here we are. The temporary security fences hastily erected around landmarks have hardened into pylons, and these are cemented into the ground. Official-looking men with machine guns no longer surprise me; neither do the German Shepherds they've trained to sniff bombs.

These two years have felt like forever and nothing.

It seems so long since war made its way to our town.

This is not going to last.

I feel it, have become paranoid, convinced myself that too many people are willing to die to kill us, and that we are doing too much to multiply their support.

The people at the Pew Global Attitudes Project have made the rationality of the fears that cripple me vividly clear. Since Bush's election, and especially since we moved into Iraq, the number of people who hate us has skyrocketed, especially in the Muslim world.

I am not going to pretend to know or understand the subtleties behind this unfortunate rise (decline?) or to know all of the reasons that fuel it, and only idiots and reactionaries would blame our president for it all.

But likewise, only greater fools would let him off the hook.

The logic is uncomplicated and chilling, and hard to argue convincingly against: probability.

In a guest column last year, I made the case that the nature of weapons technology and its tendency to spread and evolve made an eventual WMD attack on America an unfortunate simple matter of time: once the technologies exist, keeping them out of the hands of those who would employ them to murder us becomes, to put it gently, real fucking tough.

And policies that increase the incentive to proliferate said technologies (see: Missile Shield) or make them easier to acquire (see also: refusing to strengthen the international Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, etc.) really do not help.

In other words, President George W. Bush is not helping.

We should be grateful that most people do not want large numbers of us to die horrible, mutilating deaths. Unfortunately, there are some who do. Most unfortunately, the Bush team's foreign policy is swelling the ranks of column B.

You can see where probability comes in: the more people who are willing to die to kill us, the more likely it becomes that one (or many) will. And the more available the devastating technologies, the more likely it becomes that one will make its debut in downtown New York.

One could certainly make a strong case that this ground-spring of anti-American ill will inevitably flowed from our necessary self-defensive actions in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

But I don't buy it. Much, much more could have been done to take a stronger position in this dead-serious game of PR. Anthropologists with a deep understanding of the cultures could have been consulted. We didn't have to alienate our allies. We could have been honest (and far more convincing) about Iraq. We could have spent at least half as much on effective propaganda as we did on bombs.

So, no, this is not to argue that removing Saddam or taking a more active role in the Middle East was a bad idea. It is to argue that both of these have been horrendously mishandled. It is to argue that the Bush-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld ideology -- with its remarkable incapacity to win foreign hearts, manage alliances, foresee contingencies or envision the long term -- is going to cost huge numbers of American civilians their lives, take away what's left of their sense of security and give the argument for a society without totally invasive surveillance one less leg to stand on.

It is, in other words, going to get ugly.

Dan Kaplan is a senior History major from New York City.

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