A Certain Idea of America, page 28
Bin Laden himself said he was there, in an audiotape released in February 2003. He boasted of surviving the bombardment. “Warplanes continued to fly over us day and night,” he said. “Planes poured their lava on us.”
There were enough U.S. troops in or near Afghanistan to get him, the report said. It would have been a dangerous fight on treacherous terrain in hostile territory. There would have been casualties, maybe a lot. But commanders on the scene said the reward was worth the risk.
In Washington the White House was already turning its attention to Iraq. Late in November, after the fall of Kabul, President George W. Bush asked Rumsfeld about Iraq war plans. Rumsfeld ordered up an assessment. General Franks was working on air support for Afghan units being assembled to push into the mountains around Tora Bora. Now he was told an Iraq plan would have to be drawn up. The report noted that, for critics of the Bush administration, “the shift in focus just as Franks and his senior aides were literally working on plans for the attacks on Tora Bora represents a dramatic turning point that allowed a sustained victory in Afghanistan to slip through our fingers.”
It changed the course of the war in Afghanistan. The most wanted man in the world, the reason those poor souls jumped from the high floors of the twin towers, the man whose capture was an integral part of the point and mission of the war was allowed to…disappear. The American presence descended into a muddle of shifting strategies, unclear purpose, and annual reviews. The guiding military wisdom in Washington—that too many troops might stir up anti-American sentiment and resistance—was defied by the facts of Tora Bora. The unwillingness to be supple, respond to circumstances, and deploy the troops to get bin Laden “paved the way for exactly what we hoped to avoid—a protracted insurgency.”
Why didn’t Washington move and get him? Maybe it was simply a mistake—“the fog of war.” Maybe leaders were distracted by Iraq. Maybe it was a lack of imagination: They didn’t know what it would mean to people, their own people, to get the bastard. And maybe this: Maybe they consciously or unconsciously knew that if they got the guy who did 9/11, killed him or brought him to justice, that would leave a lot of Americans satisfied that justice had been done. That might take some steam out of the Iraq push. Maybe they concluded it would be better not to get him, or not right away…
Bin Laden was found almost ten years later, in May 2011, and killed in a daring operation ordered by Barack Obama, who was loudly, justly lauded. He made the decision against the counsel of Vice President Joe Biden.
But what if we’d gotten Tora Bora right? Think of what might have followed. Bin Laden and his lieutenants captured or dead, an insult answered. Maybe a few more months in Afghanistan for America while the bad guys were fully, truly broken. Then—time for some historical romance—a message is delivered by a U.S. general, the last general in Afghanistan, who puts the last boot on the last helicopter. “Months ago you wounded a great nation. Your government of mad imbeciles has been removed. Fortresses have been reduced to rubble, your Taliban killed, al Qaeda expunged. Our mission complete, we will now leave. Let me give you some advice: Don’t make us come back. It will be so much worse when we do.”
Human, ragged, and clear. What would have followed? Who knows? But it’s hard to imagine it would be worse than the twenty-year muddle and the troops and treasure lost.
CHAPTER 7
WE CAN HANDLE IT
The old world is gone, a new one emerges, the only way forward is to roll up our sleeves.
ROE V. WADE DISTORTED OUR POLITICS AND ROILED OUR CULTURE
May 5, 2022
Let’s start with true anger and end with honest hope. The alarm many felt at the leaking of an entire draft Supreme Court decision shouldn’t be allowed to dissipate as time passes. Such a thing has never happened. Justice Samuel Alito’s preliminary opinion being taken from the court, without permission or right, and given to the press, was an act of sabotage by a vandal. It hardly matters whether the leaker was of the left or right. It reflected the same spirit as the January 6 Capitol riot—irresponsible destructiveness. As the book has been thrown at the rioters, it should be thrown at the leaker.
The justices can’t sit around and say oh, no, we’re just another victim of the age. If they have to break some teacups to find who did it, break them. Chief Justice John Roberts worries, rightly, about the court’s standing. This is the biggest threat to it since he joined. At the very least it might be good if the justices would issue a joint statement that they are appalled by the publication of the decision, don’t accept it, won’t countenance it.
Apart from the leaker, here is what I always want to say when the issue is abortion.
The vast majority of human beings on both sides are utterly sincere and operating out of their best understanding of life. Yes, there were plenty of people the past fifty years who used “the issue” to accrue money and power. But this long life tells me the overwhelming majority of people held their views for serious reasons. They sincerely saw the prohibition of abortion as a sin against women; they sincerely saw abortion on demand as a sin against life.
You have to respect the opposing view.
And you have to respect that, as a wound, the Roe v. Wade decision never healed, never could. Josh Prager, in his stupendous history of that decision, The Family Roe, noted the singular fact of this ruling: Other high court decisions that liberalized the social order—desegregation of schools, elimination of prayer in the schools, interracial marriage, gay marriage—were followed by public acceptance, even when the rulings were unpopular. Most came to have overwhelming support. But not Roe. That was the exception. It never stopped roiling America. Mr. Prager: “Opposition to Roe became more hostile after its issuance.”
Why? Because all the other decisions were about how to live, and Roe was about death. Justice Alito seems to echo this thought in his draft opinion, which would turn the questions of legality and illegality over to each state. This is not a solution to the issue, it is a way of managing it—democratically.
Some states, New York and California, for instance, have already passed their own liberal abortion laws. Some states, such as Texas and Utah, will ban most or all abortions within their boundaries. It will be uneven, a jumble. But the liberal states will have their liberal decision, the conservative states their conservative ones, and that is as close to resolving the dilemma as we, as human beings in a huge and varied nation, will get.
I respect and agree with the Alito draft, didn’t think Roe was correct or even logical, and came to see the decision as largely a product of human vanity. Of all the liberal jurists who have faulted it, the one who sticks in the mind was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who after questioning Roe’s reasoning said, in 1985, that it appeared “to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.” It did.
I am pro-life for the most essential reason: That’s a baby in there, a human child. We cannot accept as a society—we really can’t bear the weight of this fact, which is why we keep fighting—that we have decided that we can extinguish the lives of our young. Another reason, and maybe it veers on mysticism, is that I believe the fact of abortion, that it exists throughout the country, that we endlessly talk about it, that the children grow up hearing this and absorbing it and thinking, “We end the life within the mother here,” “It’s just some cells”—that all of this has released a kind of poison into the air, that we breathed it in for fifty years and it damaged everything. Including of course our politics.
It left both parties less healthy. The Democrats locked into abortion as party orthodoxy, let dissenters know they were unwelcome, pushed ever more extreme measures to please their activists, and survived on huge campaign donations from the abortion industry itself. Republican politicians were often insincere on the issue, and when sincere almost never tried to explain their thinking and persuade anyone. They took for granted and secretly disrespected their pro-life groups, which consultants regularly shook down for campaign cash. They ticked off the “I’m pro-life” box in speeches, got applause, and went on to talk about the deficit. They were forgiven a great deal because of their so-called stand, and this contributed, the past twenty-five years, to the party’s drift.
Abortion distorted both parties.
Advice now, especially for Republican men, if Roe indeed is struck down: Do not be your ignorant selves. Do not, as large dumb misogynists, start waxing on about how if a woman gets an illegal abortion she can be jailed. Don’t fail to embrace compromise because you can make money on keeping the abortion issue alive. I want to say, “Just shut your mouths,” but my assignment is more rigorous. It is to have a heart. Use the moment to come forward as human beings who care about women and want to give families the help they need. Align with national legislation that helps single mothers to survive. Support women, including with child-care credits that come in cash and don’t immediately go to child care, to help mothers stay at home with babies. Shelters, classes in parenting skills and life skills. All these exist in various forms: Make them better, broader, bigger.
This is an opportunity to change your party’s reputation.
Democrats, too. You have been given a gift and don’t know it. You think, “Yes, we get a hot new issue for 2022!” But you always aggress more than you think. The gift is that if, as a national matter, the abortion issue is removed, you could be a normal party again. You have no idea, because you don’t respect outsiders, how many people would feel free to join your party with the poison cloud dispersed. You could be something like the party you were before Roe: liberal on spending and taxation, self-consciously the champion of working men and women, for peace and not war. As you were in 1970.
Or, absent the emotionally cohering issue of abortion, you can choose to further align with extremes within the culture, and remain abnormal.
But the end of Roe could be a historic gift for both parties, a chance to become their better selves.
And if Roe is indeed overturned, God bless our country that can make such a terrible, coldhearted mistake and yet, half a century later, redress it, right it, turn it around. Only a thinking nation could do that. Only a feeling nation could do that. We’re not dead yet, there are still big things going on here.
WHAT PRO-LIFERS SHOULD LEARN FROM KANSAS
August 4, 2022
I found myself unshocked by this week’s abortion vote in Kansas, and I don’t understand the shock of others. America has come to poll consistently in favor of abortion in the first trimester with support declining in the second and cratering in the third. The people of Kansas were asked if they’d like to remove any right to abortion from their state constitution and allow their legislators to fashion new laws and limits. They said no by 59 percent to 41 percent.
The margin, in a conservative state, might have been surprising, but not the outcome. The proposal would have looked to voters radical and extreme: We’re going to sweep it away, immediately? It’s all or nothing? And we’re going to hand all our trust to legislators in hopes they’ll be wise? I have never met an American who confused his state representative with a philosopher king.
In Kansas, pro-lifers asked for too much. People don’t like big swerves and lurches, there’s enough anxiety in life. They want to absorb, find a way to trust. Dobbs was decided only six weeks ago.
And those six weeks have been confusing and chaotic. Nationally, the pro-life movement spent fifty years fighting for something and then, once it won, its leaders seemed to go silent or sound defensive. It’s possible they were attempting to be tactful as opposed to triumphalist, but it left a void and foolish people filled it.
No compelling leader has emerged as a new voice. National energies haven’t been scaled down to state activity. Pro-choice forces, galvanized when the Dobbs draft leaked in May, raised money, spent it shrewdly, drew in talent, and were pushed by a Democratic Party that thought it finally had a game-changing issue. Pro-lifers didn’t have an overarching strategy. But everything we know about abortion tells us that when you turn it into a question of all or nothing, you’ll likely get nothing. Thoughtful, humane legislation has to be crafted in the states, put forward, argued for.
The pro-life advocates who filled the rhetorical void competed over who could be most hard-line: There should be no exceptions for rape, if it even was rape. There should be no exceptions for the life of the mother, that gives dishonest doctors room to make false claims. Maybe we can jail women for getting abortions.
It was gross, ignorant, and extreme. It excited their followers but hurt the cause they supposedly care about. There was an air of misogyny, of hostility to women. It was, unlike the most thoughtful pro-life arguments of the past fifty years, unloving, unprotective, and punitive.
People heard it and thought, No, that’s not what we want.
Moderate, reasoned, balanced approaches will appeal to the vast middle. Arguments over whether women should be prosecuted for crossing state lines to get an abortion won’t.
The public face of the pro-life movement looks at the moment loony and vicious. Last Saturday in Florida, Matt Gaetz, the Republican congressman and famous idiot, spoke at a student event and said overweight and unappealing women don’t need to fear pregnancy: “Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb.” A nineteen-year-old pro-choice activist then drew his mockery by responding on Twitter, and NPR reports that she cannily used the confrontation to raise more than $700,000 for pro-choice causes.
We live in a democracy. The pro-life side rightly asked for a democratic solution to a gnawing national problem. To succeed, they need baseline political skills. You persuade people as to the rightness of your vision. You act and speak in good faith so they trust you. You anticipate mischievous and dishonest representations of where you stand. You highlight them and face them. There has in fact been a lot of misrepresentation of where pro-lifers stand and why, and what their proposals will achieve. You have to clear the air. You can win a lot with candor and good faith. You can impress by being prepared and ready.
Most important, there is a political tradition in democracy that consists of these words: “That’s asking too much.” Don’t ask people for more than they can give. Don’t go too far, don’t lose by asking for a sweeping decision when people will be willing to go step by step. Ask for as much as they can give, pull them toward your vision, but don’t be afraid of going slow and steady, be afraid of overloading the grid. That’s part of what happened in Kansas: They were asked to take a step they thought extreme, and they don’t like extreme.
You have to be clear in explaining how society will arrange itself if you get the measure you asked for. In this case, the pro-life cause, conservatives, and the Republican Party have the chance to speak of, laud, and increase state and private help for women bearing children in difficult circumstances. The antiabortion movement will never really succeed unless it is paired in the public mind with compassion for the struggling. The Republican Party had the chance to align itself with women. Has it taken it? Or is it too busy talking about “impregnating” those you find unattractive?
Finally, if you are going to be in politics you had better know what your own people are thinking. NBC’s Steve Kornacki noted the morning after the vote that turnout in Kansas was high—276,000 Democrats, 464,000 Republicans, and 169,000 unaffiliated voters. The number of votes against the abortion amendment was more than 543,000. That means a lot of Republicans voted no. A lot who identify as conservative and live in deep red areas voted no. You have to know where your own people are and build policy and strategy around it.
Because this is a democracy. Policy is decided by votes. Every loss contains the seeds of victory, every victory the seeds of loss. Nothing is permanent.
This is America working it out. Some states will be extreme in one direction, some in the other. It’s going to be ugly for a while. Sweet reason has seldom been a dominant characteristic of combatants in this fight. Too bad, because in the vast middle there’s a lot of it.
A lot of state decisions will likely come down along lines of where national polling has been—fifteen-week bans, exceptions for rape and the mother’s life. In the end we may wind up where Chief Justice John Roberts would have put us. The idea in his concurring opinion in Dobbs was to maintain a federal right to abortion while finally granting states broad authority in establishing laws and limits that had previously been prohibited by Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. This approach may have restrained the worst excesses of both sides, removed a sense of alarm, and helped ease the country into fewer abortions in a post-Roe, post-Casey world.
The Dobbs decision, though, requires something more immediate: true adults in legislatures of all levels, and activists who are serious and have a sense of democratic give. All who fight for life must think about this and be our best selves. Or we will wind up having won all, and lost all.
JOHN PAUL II’S PRESCIENT 1995 LETTER TO WOMEN
November 30, 2017
Sometimes you have to take a step back, remove yourself from the moment, and try to ground yourself in what is true, elevated, even eternal.
The week has lent itself to a feeling of instability. The president has deliberately added to the rancor and tension of his nation’s daily life, lurching in his tweets from mischief to malice to a kind of psychopathology—personal attacks, insinuations, videos from a group labeled racist by the British government. You always want to say he has reached peak crazy, but you know there’s a higher peak on the horizon. What will Everest look like? He has no idea how to be president.
