Seven years on, al Qaeda's catastrophic attacks on the United States go a long way to defining this year's White House race even as Barack Obama and John McCain put on a veneer of unity to commemorate Thursday's anniversary.
The Democratic and Republican White House contenders plan to pay their respects together at the site of the fallen World Trade Center in New York, in a rare truce to their bad-tempered battle for the November 4 election. If the faltering US economy dominates voters' concerns this year, the aftermath of the September 11 carnage still reverberates as a pivotal test of leadership credentials at a time of war on two fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I believe that foreign policy may still be the top issue in the race - not because it is automatically the most important, given the state of the economy, but because national security is an area where voters realise the centrality of the role played by the president, and also is the area where McCain and Obama have many of their sharpest differences of opinion," Michael O'Hanlon, a national security expert at Washington's Brookings Institution, told AFP.
"And of course, 9/11 is still one of the most important defining images/moments in the American national security debate, and most other key debates can be related to it in one way or another," he said. On the shocking day that hijacked jets slammed into Manhattan's Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and into a Pennsylvania field after a passenger uprising, Obama was a little-known state senator in Illinois.
The Democrat says Iraq was a "dumb war" that distracted US attention from the true crucible of the terror threat in Afghanistan, and as president would redeploy the military from Iraq to the lawless nation on Pakistan's border.
A week after the attacks, Obama wrote in Chicago's Hyde Park Herald that the immediate focus must lie on strengthened domestic security, improved intelligence and dismantling the extremists' "organisations of destruction." "We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness," Obama wrote, long before he vaulted onto the national stage with an electrifying speech at the 2004 Democratic convention.
McCain, a prime agitator for the military "surge" in Iraq belatedly enacted by President George W. Bush, says withdrawal now would hand victory to al Qaeda just as Islamic extremism is finally on the run. McCain, from the start, was pugnacious in calling for the United States to go on a war footing against the "transcendent evil" of Islamic extremism wherever its threat was felt - and that, he said, included Iraq.
But while vowing to pursue al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden to the "gates of hell," the Arizona senator has decried Obama's demand for US strikes on terror cells inside Pakistan if the Islamabad government is unwilling to act. In Senator Joseph Biden, Obama has selected a vice presidential running mate who adds foreign-policy heft to his own relative inexperience, someone who has long argued for US policy to engage Pakistan and Afghanistan more effectively.
McCain, a Vietnam War hero with long experience of his own in national security, has gone a different route in his choice of the relatively unknown Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to join his ticket. The two Republicans bill themselves as "original mavericks" who are unafraid to subvert their own party's orthodoxy - and Palin has been quick to savage Obama for opposing the Iraq surge.
"I guess when you turn out to be profoundly wrong on a vital national security issue, maybe it's comforting to pretend that everyone else was wrong, too," she said with McCain on the campaign trail at the weekend. But for now, the differences will be put aside as the presidential contenders suspend their campaigns on Thursday for their visit to the vast building site where the World Trade Center once stood in lower Manhattan.
"All of us came together on 9/11 - not as Democrats or Republicans - but as Americans. In smoke-filled corridors and on the steps of the Capitol; at blood banks and at vigils - we were united as one American family," they said in a joint statement.
"We will also give thanks for the fire-fighters, police, and emergency responders who set a heroic example of selfless service, and for the men and women who serve today in defence of the freedom and security that came under attack in New York City, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania."
Comments
Comments are closed.