A Moment That Changed a War, and a World
Confronted with a shock to the body, the mind wheels, seeking parallels, analogues, and in the embrace of the familiar, reassurance. Thus it is with nations, but the comfort offered is often fleeting and, sometimes, downright misleading. Five years ago, the images of burning buildings and bodies tumbling through a perfect sky sent a nation desperate for an understandable parallel back fully six decades, and thus was Pearl Harbor bookended with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Five years on, however, mention was barely made of the fact that the long-awaited report of a blue-ribbon panel on Iraq was delivered almost right on the anniversary of the Japanese attack.
It may well be because, for all of the Bush administration's sedulous efforts to paint Iraq as "the central front in the war on terror," most Americans understand that this is not the case, even as they see the necessity of finding a solution there that would not allow its sectarian strife to ignite into a wider regional conflagration. That so few saw any possibility of drawing meaning from the coincidence of the historic anniversary with what surely will stand as one of President Bush's most chastening days underscores perhaps the real long-term cost of the tragic misadventure in Iraq: There was, in short, no "Vandenberg Moment." Not long after the USS Arizona slipped beneath the oil-slicked waves, the Senate's most ardent isolationist, the Michigan Republican Arthur Vandenberg, announced a profound change of heart. The surprise Japanese attack, he said, "drove most of us to the irresistible conclusion that world peace is indivisible." Vandenberg's insistence on a fair and clear-eyed bipartisan management of the nation's foreign affairs would prevail for three decades.
After 9/11, America and the world experienced a Vandenberg Moment: Suddenly, it was the civilized world versus the terrorists. Today, the toll of Iraq continues to climb, daily and hourly. Its greatest cost in the end, however, may be that it expunged the exquisite promise of that terrible moment and replaced it with a vista almost irretrievably bleak.
This story appears in the December 18, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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