Another Lincoln?
Here's the most striking indication yet of how America's political culture has changed since the Sept. 11 atrocity: Washington Post columnist David Broder, the embodiment of high-minded sobriety, compares President Bush to . . . Abraham Lincoln:

The powerful but simple words in which the 16th president framed the issues of the Civil War have been the model for the 43rd president's depiction of the struggle that divides the civilized world and the terrorist cabals.

Like Lincoln, Bush has tried to make it clear we are not warring on other peoples--not Muslims, not Arabs--but rather on those who threaten the safety of the Union and our God-given freedoms.

One sentence from Thursday's address echoed Lincoln's words at the outset of the bloody struggle that began at Fort Sumter and ended, thousands of lives later, at Appomattox. "The course of this conflict is not known," Bush said, "yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them." . . .

Dissimilar as they are in so many ways, a common thread joins Lincoln, Kennedy and Bush. They came to the presidency after brief and less-than-notable careers in public office, were installed after elections that showed more division than unity in the land and were clearly conscious of the doubts millions of their fellow citizens held about them. But each responded to the forces threatening the citadel of freedom in their own times.

Broder notes another, rather grave similarity: Bush, who authorized military fighters to shoot down stray commercial aircraft on Sept. 11, is "the first president since Lincoln who has given the military an order to fire on fellow Americans." He adds: "A president who will order the deaths of innocent Americans in order to frustrate terrorist designs will not find it difficult to issue ultimatums to nations and groups that harbor and support terrorists."

Big Labor Backs Bush
The war effort is also winning the support of the AFL-CIO, Jonathan Cohn reports in The New Republic:

Mindful of its membership's sentiments--not to mention the police officers, firefighters, and other union workers killed in the attacks--the AFL-CIO not only canceled its planned IMF/World Bank demonstrations, but it also endorsed, in no uncertain terms, military reprisal. "We deplore the assault," said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, "and we stand fully behind the President and the leadership of our nation in this time of national crisis." The AFL-CIO has asked its door-to-door canvassers, initially dispatched to drum up support for the anti-globalization cause, to collect donations on behalf of the terrorism victims instead.

The AFL-CIO Web site has a full array of statements on the terrorist attack from leaders of the nation's labor movement, including Sweeney. Also worth reading is the statement of R. Thomas Buffenbarger, international president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers:

This is personal.

It was our planes that were used as weapons of mass destruction. It was our members who were forced to endure the unimaginable nightmare. It was our members who were among the murdered. . . .

Today, IAM members return to work. They will be prepping the planes that can just as easily carry troops to the farthest reaches of the earth. They will be building the F-15, F-16, F-18 and F-22's that will impose a new reality on those who have dared attack us.

For it is not simply justice we seek. It is vengeance, pure and complete.

Not a Movie
Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung publishes a fascinating analysis of Bush's speech:

[The terrorists] believed that everything would happen the way it is set out in Hollywood's scripts.

According to the script, this is what should have happened after the attack: A government, surrounded by bunkers real and imagined, fearfully and hastily sets in motion a fateful mechanism that engulfs the world in flames. It was hardly coincidence that CNN used the apocalyptic title "The Day After" for its coverage. In Hollywood's imagination, in the 1980s and '90s the attack on the Pentagon alone would have unleashed the big strike.

Whatever the future brings, this much is certain now: It is the U.S. government and not, as European fantasy would have it, concerned world opinion that is urging patience. The U.S. president is not dealing with the crisis sitting in a bunker, as Tom Clancy and Hollywood played it, but by visiting a mosque a few days after the assault. The United States is not forcing conspiracy theories upon the world, taking the big powers into a world war--another stereotype--instead, it is trying to forge an alliance with Russia and China.

In other words, until the destruction of the World Trade Center, that is to say, for as long as the Islamist terrorists had the initiative, everything was running according to a Hollywood script. But only until that point. The Americans are putting an end to the movie. And they are also putting an end to any form of predictability, even by the notoriously anti-American groups in Europe. For the Islamic terrorists, nothing could be more disruptive to strategic planning than this change of script.

Our Friends, the Saudis
In the London Spectator, Stephen Schwartz examines the role Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabi strain on Islam played in the terrorist attacks on America:

The Saudis have played a double game for years, more or less as Stalin did with the West during the second world war. They pretended to be allies in a common struggle against Saddam Hussein while they spread Wahhabi ideology everywhere Muslims are to be found, just as Stalin promoted an "antifascist" coalition with the US while carrying out espionage and subversion on American territory. The motive was the same: the belief that the West was or is decadent and doomed.

The Associated Press, citing an anonymous Saudi official, reported yesterday that Saudi Arabia "has rejected a U.S. request to use its air bases for an offensive against terrorism." The Israeli daily Ha'aretz also reported yesterday that "the United States fears that the military operation will be delayed because Saudi Arabia refuses to allow the United States army to use the command center on the Prince Sultan Air Base for sending off warplanes to attack Afghanistan."

Crop Dusters
Time magazine reports that "law enforcement officials have found a manual on the operation of cropdusting equipment while searching suspected terrorist hideouts." Officials believe the terrorists may have intended to use the crop dusters to spray chemical or biological weapons in the air. "The discovery resulted in the grounding of all cropdusters nationwide on Sunday Sept. 16th. The dusters have been allowed back up, but are not allowed to take off or land from what traffic controllers refer to as Class B airspace, or the skies around major cities."

ABC News reports that more than a dozen men, including Mohammad Atta, believed to be the ringleader of the Sept. 11 gang, visited a Florida airfield, "asking lots of questions on topics including how many chemicals a crop dusting plane could hold."

The Enemy Within
The Washington Post reports that four or five cells of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda group have been operating in America for several years, but investigators haven't yet connected them to the atrocity of Sept. 11. "Government officials say they do not know why the cells are here, what their purpose is or whether their members are planning attacks. One official even described their presence as 'possibly benign.' "

ABC News reports that 11 of the 19 hijackers lived in or around Paterson, N.J., and the Detroit Free Press reports on the Michigan connection: Nabil Almarabh, "a man with strong Detroit ties and a license to haul hazardous cargo," was arrested Thursday outside Chicago. The Free Press's sources tell the paper Almarabh is "a close associate of Osama bin Laden." Three other men were arrested in Detroit last Monday; Almarabh and two of them "had recently trained to drive tractor-trailer rigs."

Iraqi Connection
London's Sunday Telegraph has a rundown of the Iraqi connection to the terrorist attacks on America, reporting that Saddam Hussein "put his troops on their highest military alert since the Gulf war two weeks before the suicide attacks on America in the strongest indication yet that the Iraqi dictator knew an atrocity was planned." The paper notes that in the past four months "at least three high-ranking Iraqi intelligence officials--among them Hassan Ezba Thalaj, a veteran officer with a reputation for ruthlessness--have visited Pakistan to meet representatives of al-Qaeda," Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. Our Richard Miniter also traces the Iraqi connection in his column today.

Osams Plays the Market--III
There was suspicious activity in both the oil and gold markets in the days before Sept. 11, Ernst Welteke, president of the Bundesbank, tells the Telegraph. "There are ever clearer signs that there were activities on international financial markets that must have been carried out with the necessary expert knowledge."

Osama the Builder
Asia Times reports that some of the money Osama bin Laden uses for his campaign of destruction comes from . . . construction. Bin Laden inherited $60 million in 1968 when his father, the Saudi construction tycoon who founded the Saudi Binladen Group, died. When bin Laden left Saudi Arabia in 1991, "he took with him his expertise in the construction business":

Bin Laden is believed to operate through frontmen and underworld people in construction, including Palestinians in Palestine and the United Arab Emirates, and other associates in the United States and some countries in Europe.

And especially in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, a veritable concrete jungle where the lucrative construction industry is firmly in the hands of the underworld--and in many cases with the blessing of the powerful Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), which has close ties with the Taliban it helped install in Afghanistan.

The ISI, instead of constantly having to finance its contacts from its own secret funds (for the armed struggle in Kashmir, for instance), gives the contacts a free hand to operate in the construction business, where they can make easy money.

According to investigations, in an average commercial project in Karachi, if a businessman invests Rs 10 million ($1.5 million), after two years he can earn a return of as much as Rs 100 million. Often, plots that are earmarked for non-commercial purposes, such as mosques, parks, schools and hospitals and which are available at cheap rates, are illegally purchased and turned into commercial complexes, all with officialdom turning a blind eye under pressure from the ISI.

How To Beat bin Laden
Radek Sikorski, now the deputy foreign minister of Poland, fought alongside the Afghan guerillas against the Russians in the 1980s and has kept in touch ever since. He says air strikes will not suffice against bin Laden and an invasion is too risky. Instead, he suggests American backing for the Northern Alliance, an Afghan group which has been fighting the Taliban:

The Northern Alliance would have to be reorganised into a broad-based government that included most of Afghanistan's myriad ethnic, religious and social groups. It should then be supported with financial and military assistance channelled both through neighbouring countries as well as directly, via an airbridge from US bases in the Middle East and from ships off the Pakistani coast.

Given the volatility of Afghani politics, it could probably wrest control over the country from the Taliban in a matter of months. In return, the Northern Alliance can provide the intelligence, the guides and the support on the ground that America will need to find and seize bin Laden and his men.

The Northern Alliance has a remarkably sophisticated Web site, Afgha.com.

'The Most Delightful Boys'
Ananova.com picks up a report in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Osama bin Laden vacationed in Sweden as a teenager three decades ago. Translating from the Aftonbladet article, Ananova quotes a Swedish hotelier: "He and his brother were just the most delightful boys. I recognised his photo in the newspapers immediately. The only bizarre thing was that they ate all their meals in their room, and didn't often emerge."

He's Back
We hate to bring this up, but remember Gary Condit? When last we heard from him, he was quickly losing support from his fellow Democrats for stonewalling questions about the disappearance of intern Chandra Levy. Now that we're at war, and thousands of parents, spouses and children are going through the same anguish as the Levy family, the Condit story has faded from view, and properly so.

But Condit still sits on the House Intelligence Committee, although House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt had made noises about replacing him with another Democrat. What's more, Sacramento's KXTV reports Condit has been named to the Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security. "His first move was to send a letter to law enforcement agencies to ask their thoughts on improving homeland security." How about removing this potentially blackmailable congressman from a position that gives him access to classified information?

A Heartbreaking List
Bloomberg News has a partial but still very long list of the dead and missing of Sept. 11. As we looked over the list, two pairs of names struck us as particular heart-rending: "Robert Gaillard Jr., 43, Marsh & McLennan Cos." and "Ariana Gaillard, 13," and "Mailene Braker, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co." and "Mya Braker, 6."

London's Times carries a report on Mya Braker:

Mya's father, Alan Braker, tears running down his cheeks, told last night of his horror when he learnt that a hijacked airliner had crashed into the building after his wife and daughter had taken the lift to the top.

"The moment that I heard the news about the attacks I knew that they were in there," Mr Braker, 41, said at his home in the New Jersey commuter town of East Orange.

"I was terrified. Very, very afraid for Mya. I tried to call her mother, who was about to start working in the tower and had gone in for the day to show our daughter the building. I remembered Mya saying something to me the night before about going up to the top floor to see the wonderful view before her mum started working there.

"I tried calling the building incessantly but I couldn't get through to anyone, so I left my office immediately and drove as close to New York as I could. I was stopped at the Lincoln Tunnel by police who were refusing to allow anyone into Manhattan, and the thought of Mya and Mailene being in there broke my heart.

'A Level Playing Field'
Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters, the British wire service, has ordered his scribes not to use the word terror to refer to the Sept. 11 atrocity, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reports (second item). "We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist," Jukes writes in an internal memo. "To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack."

Jukes tells Kurtz: "We're trying to treat everyone on a level playing field." Tell that to Alan Braker.

Michael Moore's Epiphany
Out of a morbid fascination, we've been following the commentaries of left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore on the events of Sept. 11. As we've noted before, Moore's first reaction was to sneer at those Americans he views as his enemies: President Bush, Republicans, people who work in the financial industry. We're pleased to report, though, that his latest dispatch--written in New York City after finishing a drive across the country--is improved in tone, a lot less smirky. Proximity to the horror seems to have shocked him into recognizing reality. He even manages to say something thoughtful, about the movie he was working on when he traveled across the country:

This started out as a documentary on gun violence in America, but the largest mass murder in our history was just committed--without the use of a single gun! Not a single bullet fired! No bomb was set off, no missile was fired, no weapon (i.e., a device that was solely and specifically manufactured to kill humans) was used. A boxcutter!--I can't stop thinking about this. A thousand gun control laws would not have prevented this massacre. What am I doing?

Mayor Malaprop
Agence France-Presse reports the mayor of Apatzingan, a small town in Mexico, has written a letter to President Bush: "Mr. President Bush, I swear by what I hold dearest, which is my political career, that Apatzingan never had any active or moral role in the bloody events at the twin towers and the Pentagon," wrote Mayor Jorge Luis Castaneda. Aides later told him the likely target of U.S. military action was Afghanistan, not Apatzingan. Said the mayor: "Well, I did send it off, just in case."