Off With Their Heads

9/11 should have changed everything.

On 9/12, all -- or almost all -- Americans joined to fight terror and ban this appalling species of warfare from our planet. But as the Bush administration proceeded to act on this mandate, more and more people dragged their feet, attempting to slow the process down or hinder it from achieving its vital goals.

What happened to the unity that so blessed America after 9/11? Where did our sense of determination go? When did our focus on battling terrorism become blurred?

In the days and weeks immediately after 9/11, there was notably little dissent. As we invaded Afghanistan to take down the evil Taliban regime, virtually the entire nation supported our troops and hailed their every difficult, treacherous step through the mountains in search of those who had scarred our souls.

But then, it seemed, some of us began to lose our way. They became convinced that President Bush had "hijacked our grief," that he had "manipulated" us for his own political ends. Some began to feel that the weekly vicissitudes of the economy, and the scandals that gripped Wall Street, should be treated more urgently than stopping future acts of terror. Many demanded a miraculous settlement of the intractable Arab-Israeli conflict, even when becoming mired in yet another round of shuttle diplomacy was likely to erode the impetus for fighting the war on terror. When a settlement of the West Bank dispute proved elusive, tens of millions of Americans dissented from President Bush's decision to disarm and remove Iraq's dictator from power.

Peace marches started, as if our current troubles were somehow comparable to Vietnam. In some quarters, George W. Bush was more reviled than Saddam Hussein. We became a nation divided.

Demonstrators, who might have better spent their time outside the Iraqi embassy demanding disarmament, flocked instead to march in front of the U.S. embassy, begging for inaction.

This book is about those political, journalistic, and cultural leaders who have mounted a campaign to oppose and impede the war on terror that seemed so vital in the rare moment of clarity we shared after 9/11. As a New Yorker, I find 9/11 is still very fresh in my mind. I feel the absence of the missing towers of the World Trade Center like I would molars extracted from the back of my own mouth. In the moments after the terrorist attack, almost all of us silently vowed to do what we could to stop this slaughter from happening again. As some have lost sight of that commitment -- or forsworn it altogether -- our momentum in battling terror has slowed.

As the days have unfolded since 9/11, the forces that cast obstacles in our path have proliferated; those who are working to carry through the resolutions we made on that horrific day are at risk of becoming overwhelmed, outnumbered, and outmaneuvered. This book represents an effort to expose the distortions, obfuscations, and sleights of hand with which opponents of this war on terror seek to mislead us all.