Washington diary: 9/11's legacy

By Matt Frei
BBC News, Washington

9/11 has reshaped the world in ways that few had imagined

I have now covered five anniversaries of 9/11. The first was raw with emotion. The second seemed more detached. The third and fourth were almost ignored.

For some reason, the latest anniversary, the sixth, was particularly poignant. Perhaps because it was a Tuesday, like the original day.

The memories of that day have faded for many Americans, but watching the tears of the bereaved mingle with the rain at Ground Zero brought it all back.

Faces creased by despair. The names of the dead hanging in the damp air. The tinny sound of a single bell at the very moment when the planes struck. The sound of a minute's silence.

The endurance of personal grief is just about the only thing that could have been predicted.

As it turns out, 11 September 2001 has reshaped the world in ways that few had imagined and many still find baffling.

Bin Laden's vanity?

Who could have predicted six years ago that on the sixth anniversary of that day, Osama Bin Laden would not just be alive and free, but broadcasting and honing his public relations skills in cyberspace?

A new videotape from Bin Laden showed him with a darker beard

Who, in their most absurd satirical fantasies, could have prophesied that the world's most wanted man would be sitting somewhere - in a cave, in a TV studio, in a hotel room, we just do not know - calling on Americans to convert to Islam and feeling their pain over the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the slump in the real estate market?

Bin Laden, in a new video message, trying to sound like a personal finance guru on cable TV - what next?

And who really could have imagined that an ascetic creature supposedly focused on jihad and martyrdom would bother with a make-over, and dye his beard black?

"Gotcha! Osama you're vain." That could have been this week's headline. Perhaps they will catch him through his subscription to GQ.

Bin Laden is still out there. Al-Qaeda, the CIA tells us, has regrouped and is itching to launch another attack.

And yet, a senior adviser to President George W Bush recently said that Bin Laden was impotent.

'Warped logic'

When I put this to Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Secretary, in an interview on Tuesday, he virtually agreed and implied that the focus on Bin Laden was misguided, which is a far cry from the initial pledge to "catch him dead or alive".

America is tearing itself apart over a conflict that would probably never have been fought without the events of 9/11 Send us your comments

He also insisted that the war in Iraq had made America safer.

But how, I asked him. What about the training for a whole generation of terrorists? What about the free recruitment provided by the war for al-Qaeda?

None of this seemed to ruffle or trouble the secretary.

It was only when I asked him about the prospect of Iraq becoming a failed state that he conceded the war might have helped the terrorists.

Would he not like to have seen some of the resources spent on Iraq deployed on the hunt for al-Qaeda in Pakistan or Afghanistan? No, he replied.

Iraq has warped the logic of the "war on terror" - that unfortunate phrase that even the White House is beginning to regret.

America is tearing itself apart over a conflict that would probably never have been fought without the events of 9/11.

Stranger than fiction

Who would have thought six years ago that, on the day of the sixth anniversary, a highly respected general so weighed down with medals and expectation that he resembled a Christmas tree, would be fielding aggressive questions on Capitol Hill about a war that seems to have no end in sight?

Gen Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker have asked for patience

General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker gave sterling performances in front of a barrage of senators, some looking for blood and others looking for a swivel chair in the Oval Office.

Summoned from the battlefield of Iraq to the political minefield of Washington, these two genuinely seem to believe that the jaws of defeat are less clenched than the public believes, and that some form of victory can still be snatched from them.

But I seem to remember that their report card this month was billed as definitive.

And now they, too, have asked America to be "strategically patient" and to expect the bulk of troops - some 130,000 or so - to stay on in Iraq well after the president who put them there leaves office, with no set date for withdrawal.

It may be President Bush's war. But it has also become the next president's war, whether that next president is a woman, whether his name rhymes with Osama or whether he was the mayor of New York when the Twin Towers fell.

We do not know, of course, but we can be sure the consequences of 9/11 will continue to unfold in ways that will make fact seem stranger than fiction.

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