This is Jay Bookman's article in the Atlanta Journal today. Everyone should read it. Don't give up before the last few paragraphs. It is all important. In fact click on the links and read his other recent articles too. They are all revealing, and true.

Published on: 06/30/05

Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser and deputy chief of staff, had himself a little fun a week ago.

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war," Rove said in a New York speech. "Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."

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That's a harsh indictment of a substantial portion of the American people. It's also patently untrue.

The reality is that in the wake of Sept. 11, distinctions such as liberal and conservative meant nothing. We were all Americans and were almost unanimous in our anger and determination to punish those who had brought the towers down upon thousands of our fellow citizens.

That unity is history, of course, and we now face other challenges, such as trying to extricate ourselves from Iraq without leaving behind an absolute mess.

But since Rove is one of our nation's most influential leaders, and since he apparently believes it would be useful to review events in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, it would only be patriotic to indulge him.

As you recall, it became clear pretty quickly that the perpetrators had been members of the al-Qaida terror group, led by Osama bin Laden. The subsequent decision to invade bin Laden's refuge in Afghanistan was embraced by Americans of every political bent. Congress passed a war resolution with only one dissenting vote, reflecting polls that found only minuscule public opposition — 5 percent to 7 percent. Interestingly, more than 60 percent of Americans said they would consider the invasion a failure if it failed to kill or capture bin Laden.

Already, though, President Bush, Rove and others had secretly decided to betray that consensus by withholding troops and resources from the assault on bin Laden. Their intention, unknown at the time to the rest of us, was to reserve those troops for a later invasion of Iraq, a nation that had played no role in the attacks of Sept. 11 and little role in international terrorism.

We will never know for sure whether things would have turned out differently had we invaded Afghanistan in force as we should have, instead of leaving the bulk of the fighting to local warlords hired for the purpose. But we do know that almost four years after those towers tumbled, bin Laden remains at large. That gnawing failure would be easier to accept if we could tell ourselves that at least we gave it our best shot. We didn't because our leaders had other goals.

In his speech, Rove also pounced on the controversial remarks of Sen. Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois. After reading an FBI agent's description of illegal interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay, Durbin noted that they didn't sound like something Americans would do. It sounded more like something you'd find in the old Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.

"Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year?" Rove asked. "Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."

The wisdom of Durbin's remarks aside, the charge that he and others hope to get U.S. troops killed is an outrageous and remarkably ugly piece of business. Yet the White House defended Rove, and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said the remarks weren't slander, they were the truth.

Fair enough, I say. Let's play Rove's game by Rove's rules.

If someone really did want to get U.S. troops killed, or if you didn't particularly care one way or the other, you would start by getting us involved in an unnecessary war that diverted us from our real purpose. Then you would ignore the advice of military officers and force our troops to fight that war with insufficient manpower and equipment, under incompetent civilian leadership that paid little or no attention to the aftermath. That way, you could ensure that withdrawal from that war would become impossible and that it would slog on month after bloody month.

Of course, nobody would ever be foolish enough to start such a war. But if they did, you could probably get at least 1,700 Americans killed, don't you think?

Now, is that analysis brutal, harsh and unfair? Yup. But it's no more harsh than Rove's crass attempt at bullying, and it has the added virtue of being accurate.

Because when you're savagely attacked out of the blue, you don't offer your attackers therapy. You fight back hard.

Right, Karl?

— Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Thursdays and Mondays.