September 11

Since a proposal to construct a 15-story mosque and community center two blocks from Ground Zero was announced last year, the project has been a focus of widening protests. To be named Cordoba House, the project would require demolition of two buildings at 45-47 Park Place and Broadway that were damaged on 9/11. They would be replaced by a glass and steel 100,000-square-foot structure with a new address, 45-51 Park Place. 

ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, acts of war were unleashed on the United States by a stateless international enemy which we know as al Qaeda. Actually, al Qaeda formally declared war against the United States during the late 1990s, but most of the American public did not pay much attention. That changed, of course, when aircraft slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in western Pennsylvania.

In the hours and days after the air attacks of September 11, several fundamental facts became apparent. First, the enemy deliberately avoided wearing uniforms or declaring itself.

ON SEPTEMBER 14, 2003, "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert asked Vice President Dick Cheney whether Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 attacks. Cheney's answer was characteristically straightforward: "We don't know."

The reaction was furious, even by Washington standards.

I TAKE A BRISK WALK around the neighborhood every morning. I love those walks. They loosen my back and get the blood pumping and on mornings after I've had a few drinks (never more than 20 days a month; well, not never, but rarely; oh, skip it) they clear my head.

Olympian good health, though, is not the only benefit. There's kind of a Jeremiah Johnson-thing that happens when modern man slips into his Nikes and heads off alone into the dawn's early light, The Big Lonesome, just a short, suburban left and right from the 7-Eleven.

IT'S AN OPEN QUESTION as to whether or not a great movie will ever be made about September 11. Historical events don't always lend themselves to good filmmaking. The Holocaust has translated well; Pearl Harbor has never been done justice.

It is a small mercy that no Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer has yet tried to make an epic September 11 movie.

AT THE END of "Gangs of New York," Martin Scorsese inserts a montage of the city across time--from a decrepit nineteenth-century slum to the modern megalopolis of Manhattan. In the last shot, right before the credits roll, two buildings stand out: the twin towers of the World Trade Center. They stand out not just because they are taller than other buildings, but because their presence in the film was a somewhat audacious move, a year and a half after the towers had been erased from the New York skyline.

FOLLOWING HANS BLIX'S devastating report and President Bush's compelling State of the Union address, Saddam Hussein looks more and more like a dead man walking. In all likelihood, Baghdad will be liberated by April. This may turn out to be one of those hinge moments in history--events like the storming of the Bastille or the fall of the Berlin Wall--after which everything is different.

IS THE UNITED STATES about to become midwife to democracy in the Muslim Middle East? President George W. Bush has certainly given unprecedented speeches on the inalienable right of Muslim men and women to be free, and on December 12, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a new $29 million pro-democracy U.S.-Middle East Partnership Initiative. "America wants to align itself with the people of the Middle East," declared Powell, and the initiative places "the United States firmly on the side of change, on the side of reform, . . .

The remarks below were delivered earlier today at the 23rd annual convention of the Assembly of Turkish-American Associations, as part of a panel discussion titled "Reevaluating Democracy and Islam after September 11."--Ed.

I MUST BEGIN by saying that there is nothing I would choose to revise, regarding my prior views of Democracy and Islam, in the aftermath of that terrible day, September 11, 2001.

THE SAUDIS CONTINUE to generate what for them is unwanted news. The urgency for Americans is to place the news in context, and toward that end there is no better guide than Stephen Schwartz, author of the new book "The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Saud from Tradition to Terror."

Consider, for example, the story about Princess Haifa al-Faisal, the wife of Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States. Starting in 1998, the princess gave thousands of dollars to a Jordanian woman living in San Diego whom she said had asked for help with medical bills.

LONDON, DECEMBER 2--It was quite a sight: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of State Marc Grossman, and several others, burrowed away in a pod-like enclosure in the middle of an Air Force C-17, speeding across the Atlantic, preparing for a busy three days. Hours later, these members of a U.S.

THERE IS NO MYSTERY, and there is no need for complicated theorizing, about the scandal that has struck the family of Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abd al-Aziz, the ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Washington. U.S. authorities are investigating a financial link between Prince Bandar's wife, Princess Haifa, and two of the September 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi.