JIM LEHRER: First, today’s news about this Osama bin Laden tape. What do you make of that and the threat he made for more attacks even worse than the ones we had two years ago?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, the al-Qaida has been put under enormous pressure. A good many of them have been captured or killed. Their ability to function has been significantly affected. They’re still dangerous. No question about that. They can still conduct attacks, but what we’ve seen since we moved them out of Afghanistan and took away the Taliban from Afghanistan, running that country, the pattern has been that every period of months they’ll come out with an audiotape or a videotape. And I’m not an expert on this, and I haven’t seen this particular tape. But the general feeling in the government is that what they’re doing is trying to pretend that they’re functioning well, leave the impression that people should give them money, their financiers, leave the impression that they’re a viable organization and that they should get recruits and just generally give encouragement to their people. Of course, the purpose... they’re terrorists, and the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize. So by using an information operations campaign like this, they are hoping also to terrorize people and frighten them.

JIM LEHRER: It must be awfully galling to you though to think that this guy might be alive out there somewhere.
DONALD RUMSFELD: No.

JIM LEHRER: No?
DONALD RUMSFELD: No, not really, no. If you think about it, it’s very hard to find a single individual. We haven’t found Mullah Omar; we haven’t found Saddam Hussein. Now, we’ve found something like 42 out of the top 55 in Iraq, which is good. And some of them turned themselves in I should point out. But think how long people are on the FBI’s most wanted list. Some are on there ten years, fifteen years.

JIM LEHRER: Now, two questions. Let’s start at the end and work back. Why can’t our forces stop these people, these foreign types from coming into Iraq?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, that’s like asking do you think our borders with Mexico and Canada are sealed or are they porous? Do people move back and forth across them that we don’t know about?

JIM LEHRER: Now Mr. Secretary, you know that’s not a good analogy, the United States and Canada.
DONALD RUMSFELD: The United States and Mexico. I mean it’s a border is a problem.

JIM LEHRER: And they’ve come to cause trouble and to kill people.
DONALD RUMSFELD: Sure. We’ve scooped them up and arrested them and killed them. There’s something in excess of 100 just from one or two countries. And we’ve got that many that have been captured and killed. And some of them have in their... they have money that they’ve been given to do this. They’ve got leaflets that recruited them.
Just like we thought, Rummy’s been keeping score. Just one more:

JIM LEHRER: Rightly or wrongly, Mr. Secretary, I went back and checked the record today, the impression that was given in public statements and all that sort of thing was that when this war ended, this war was going to end, that when Saddam Hussein and his regime, you know, fell, then the rest of it was going to be kind of a mop-up. And I’m just --
DONALD RUMSFELD: Not by me.

When I was a kid I was terrified of the End of the World. Kids heard things; older kids who’d read that ridiculous end-times tract, “The Late Great Planet Earth” said it foretold a struggle between the “bear” and the “eagle” and we all knew what that meant. . .

Now I am resigned, in advance, to the loss of an American city by a nuclear weapon. The End of the World now looks like a comic-book premise, a Heston-movie conceit. We feared it would all be gone in a day, our world upended like an Etch-A-Sketch. What we never considered was a long, slow war, a conflict that burned and sputtered, skittered from one spot on the map to the other. The old wars were simple: the other side had accents, uniforms, nations, cruel habits and urbane sneers. The old wars took years. The old wars were in black and white. The old wars were monophonic, scored by Max Steiner, released by Warner Brothers, and the only proof they really happened at all was the small battered box in the back of Dad’s sock drawer, the box that held some oddly colored metal bars. The next war would be horrible, total, and short.

Two years ago today I was convinced that every presumption I had about the future was wrong. This war, I feared, would be horrible, total, and long.

Two years later I take a certain grim comfort in some people’s disinterest in the war; if you’d told me two years ago that people would be piling on the President and bitching about slow progress in Iraq, I would have known in a second that the nation hadn’t suffered another attack. When the precise location of Madonna’s tongue is big news, you can bet the hospitals aren’t full of smallpox victims. Of course some people are impatient with those who still recall the shock of 9/11; the same people were crowding the message boards of internet sites on the afternoon of the attacks, eager to blame everyone but the hijackers. They hate this nation. In their hearts, they hate humanity. They would rather cheer the perfect devils than come to the aid of a compromised angel. They can talk for hours about how wrong it was to kill babies, busboys, businessmen, receptionists, janitors, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers - and then they lean towards you, eyes wide, and they say the fatal word:

But.

And then you realize that the eulogy is just a preface. All that concern for the dead is nothing more than the knuckle-cracking of an organist who’s going to play an E minor chord until we all agree we had it coming.

I’ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world’s good will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out. Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that’s lashing out. Imagine the President in the National Cathedral castigating Islam instead of sitting next to an Imam who’s giving a homily. Mosques burned, oil fields occupied, smart bombs slamming into Syrian palaces. We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn’t. And we won’t.

Which is why this war will be long.

The world will not end. It will roll around in its orbit until Sol expires of famine or indigestion. In the end we’re all ash anyway - but even as ash, we matter. The picture at the top of this page earlier this week - that blue abstract swirl - was a sliver taken from a 9/11 camera feed. It’s the cloud that rolled through lower Manhatttan when the towers fell. Paper, steel, furniture, plastic, people. The man who took the picture inhaled the dust of the dead. Somewhere lodged in the lung of a New Yorker is an atom that once belonged to a man who went to work two years ago and never came back. His widow dreads today, because people will be coming and calling, and she’ll have to insist that she’s okay. It’s hard but last year was harder. The kids will be sad and distant, but they take their cues from her, and they sense that it’s hard - but that last year was harder. But what really kills her, really really kills her, is knowing that the youngest one doesn’t remember daddy at all anymore. And she’s the one who has his eyes.

Two years in; the rest of our lives to go.

This is not an easy enemy to confront. This will not be a matter of great troop movements, of trenches and fleets and squadrons and massed charges. This will be small teams of inconceivably brave men and women, working in strange places, unknown and unacknowledged.

Our world has passed away,
In wantonness o’erthrown.

I TAKE A BRISK WALK around the neighborhood every morning. I love those walks. . . .

. . . then I saw it, parked right on the street, a late '60s MGB convertible. Remember those? . . .

. . . even though I was looking at this little sports car on that particular morning, I wasn?t really seeing it. I was remembering riding in it with Jeff Goldflam and doing sprints at soccer practice with him and the time Leslie Schwartz, who was beautiful, overheard us talking about how beautiful she was, but of course the only really important thing I was remembering was that Jeff worked in the World Trade Center when it came down, and that he was one of the people pulverized.

WHAT DO WE FEEL and how long do we feel it? What have we done, and what should we do?

Most newspapers and TV news outfits have, it seems to me, spent two years subtly saying, "Don?t act, don?t move, let it all be. Sit and wait, and let the image grow smaller and smaller like a gas station in the rearview mirror. Very soon it will be a dot, and eventually it will be gone completely."

But I don?t think I'm going to do that. I don't think I'm going to let it go away. I think I'm going to wade through the shrill self-hate and say, "Go on. Continue on. Clean this up. Win." Because I think that's not only the right way to remember the people who held hands and jumped from those towers, I think it's the right way to remember the soldiers who've died on these first few steps to justice. By the way, it's also the right way to remember every murdered bus rider and every terrified Arab who's spent the last thousand years seeing the sadistic face of the torturer who's about to kill him. They're not his brothers, you know, they?re his oppressors, and we are the best thing that?s ever happened to him.

That's the choice: Stop, or keep going; keep our promises, or forget we made them; be responsible, or irresponsible; face facts, or ignore them. It's easier to stop, you know. Beating these folks will take a very long time. Decades, probably, and that's if we do everything right.

BUT IF WE TURN AWAY, what shall we do when the boiling lava resumes creeping down the hill and destroying the world? Maybe we should just stop looking? That's a plan, isn't it? Just turn our heads every time a murderer does his victory dance? We could do that.

And the years will pass, and we can all get fatter and sit on sofas that are softer and watch TVs that are bigger. We'll just keep pretending we don't see, and the best way, really, is not to go out that much in the first place. Yes, that's it, we'll all just stay inside again today.

And the entire Middle East, including Israel (which will be gone, finally)--and most of Africa and Asia, too--will look like rural Afghanistan, not one brick standing against another, dust blowing lazily, no shops, no food, people with faces so worn and beaten down they will seem to have been bleached of all humanity and expression. Oh, and every hundred miles or so there'll be a solid gold soccer stadium.
Not for playing soccer, but for executing people.

And lots more of us will be dead, too, but we won't have to look at that, either. Until, of course, they can kill all of us.

I HAVEN'T SEEN that MGB again, but maybe I will sometime. Could happen, right? Maybe next year. You know. Right around the week after Labor Day.