Too Soon? It's Too Late for 'United 93' - New York Times
The New York Times

May 7, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

Too Soon? It's Too Late for 'United 93'
By
FRANK RICH

DON'T feel guilty if you, like most Americans, have not run or even walked
to see "United 93." The movie that has been almost unanimously acclaimed as
a
rite of patriotism second only to singing the national anthem in English is
clinical to the point of absurdity: it reduces the doomed and brave
Americans
on board to nameless stick figures with less personality than the passengers
in "Airport." Rather than deepening our knowledge of them or their heroism,
the movie caps an hour of air-controller nail-biting with a tasteful
re-enactment of the grisly end.

But it's not a total waste. The debate that preceded the film's arrival
actually does tell us something about the war on terror. The two irrelevant
questions
that were asked over and over - Does "United 93" exploit the tragedy? Was it
made too soon? - reveal just how adrift we are from reality as we head
toward
the fifth anniversary of the attacks.

The answer to the first question is yes, of course "United 93" exploits
9/11. It's a Hollywood entertainment marketed to make a profit, with a
smoking World
Trade Center on its poster as a gratuitous selling tool and a trailer
cunningly deployed to drum up pre-premiere controversy (a k a publicity) by
ambushing
Manhattan audiences. The project's unappetizing commercialism is not
mitigated by Universal Pictures' donation of 10 percent of the opening
weekend's so-so
proceeds to a memorial at the site of the crash in Shanksville, Pa. Roughly
50 times that sum is needed to build the memorial (and its cost is peanuts
next to the planned $1 billion extravaganza in New York).

Still, a movie that exploits 9/11 is business as usual. This is America, for
heaven's sake. "United 93" is merely the latest in a long line of such
products
and relatively restrained at that. This film doesn't use documentary images
of shrouded remains being borne from ground zero, as the Bush-Cheney
campaign
ads did two years ago. And it isn't cheesy like the first fictional 9/11
movie, Showtime's "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," in 2003. That dog, produced
with
White House cooperation and larded with twin-tower money shots, starred
Timothy Bottoms as a derring-do President Bush given to pronouncements like
"If
some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come get me!" It's amazing that
it hasn't found an honored place beside "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" as
a campy midnight perennial.

As for the second question in the "United 93" debate, it's disturbing that
it was asked at all. Is this movie too soon? Hardly: it's already been
preceded
by two TV movies about the same flight. The question we should be asking
instead is if its message comes too late.

Whatever the movie's other failings, that message is clear and essential:
the identity of the enemy. The film opens with the four hijackers praying to
Allah
and, in keeping with the cockpit voice recording played at the Zacarias
Moussaoui trial, portrays them as prayerful right until they murder 40
innocent
people. Such are the Islamic radicals who struck us on 9/11 and whose
brethren have only multiplied since.

Yet how fleeting has been their fame. Thanks to the administration's
deliberate post-9/11 decision to make the enemy who attacked us
interchangeable with
the secular fascists of Iraq who did not, the original war on terrorism has
been diluted in its execution and robbed of its support from the American
public.
Brian Williams seemed to be hinting as much when, in effusively
editorializing about "United 93" on NBC (a sister company of Universal), he
suggested that
"it just may be a badly needed reminder for some that we are a nation at war
because of what happened in New York and Washington and in this case in a
field in Pennsylvania." But he stopped short of specifying exactly what war
he meant, and that's symptomatic of our confusion. When Americans think
about
war now, they don't think about the war prompted by what happened on 9/11 so
much as the war in Iraq, and when they think about Iraq, they don't say,
"Let's
roll!," they say, "Let's leave!"

The administration's blurring of the distinction between Al Qaeda and Saddam
threatens to throw out the baby that must survive, the war against Islamic
terrorists, with the Iraqi quagmire. Last fall a Pew Research Center survey
found that Iraq had driven isolationist sentiment in the United States to
its
post-Vietnam 1970's high. In a CBS News poll released last week, the
percentage of Americans who name terrorism as the nation's "most important
problem"
fell to three. Every day we spend in Iraq erodes the war against those who
attacked us on 9/11.

Just how much so was dramatized by an annual report on terrorism issued by
the State Department on the same day that "United 93" opened nationwide. The
number of terrorist attacks was up by a factor of nearly four in 2005. While
Al Qaeda is scattered, it has been replaced by what Richard Clarke, the
former
counterterrorism czar, describes as "a many-headed hydra that is just as
deadly and far harder to slay." Osama bin Laden, no longer an operational
leader,
retains, in the State Department's language, "the capability to influence
events, and inspire actual and potential terrorists."

We remain unprepared should they once again strike here. Like Hurricane
Katrina before it, the Dubai Ports tsunami proved yet another indictment of
our
inept homeland security. While the country hyperventilated about the
prospect of turning over our ports to a rare Arab ally, every expert on the
subject,
the former 9/11 commissioners included, was condemning our inability to
check cargo at any point of entry, whether by sea or land, even if the
Sopranos
ran the show. Congress's Government Accountability Office reported that in a
test conducted last year, undercover investigators smuggled enough
radioactive
material past our border inspectors to fuel two dirty bombs.

To add insult to this potential nuclear Armageddon, Afghanistan is falling
back into the hands of religious fanatics; not even the country's
American-backed
president, Hamid Karzai, dared to publicly intervene in the trial of a man
facing execution for converting from Islam to Christianity. "The Taliban and
Al Qaeda are everywhere" is how a shopkeeper described the situation to the
American commander in Afghanistan, The Times reported last week. These were
the conditions that spawned the hijackers of "United 93" - all four of them
trained in Qaeda camps in Afghanistan under Taliban rule. At this rate, we
are in danger of marking the next anniversary of 9/11 with a reboot of the
Afghanistan war we were supposed to have won more than four years ago.

Our level of denial about these setbacks is embedded not just in the White
House, which blithely keeps telling us "we're winning" the war on terror,
but
also in the culture. The decision of most major networks and newspapers
(including this one) to avoid showing the inflammatory Danish Muhammad
cartoons
attests less to our heightened religious sensitivities (we've all run
reproductions of art Christians and Jews find blasphemous) than to our
deep-seated
fear of the terrorists' unimpeded power to strike back. The cheers that
greet the long-awaited start of construction at ground zero are all the
louder
to drown out the unsettling truth that no major private tenant has bet on
the Freedom Tower's security by signing a lease.

We also practice denial by manufacturing vicarious and symbolic victories at
home to compensate for those we are not winning abroad. Two major liberties
taken with the known facts in "United 93" - sequences suggesting that
passengers thrashed and possibly killed two of the hijackers and succeeded
in entering
the cockpit - are highly cathartic but unsupported by the evidence. In its
way, the Moussaoui prosecution conducted its own Hollywood rewrite by
exaggerating
the stature of the only person to go to trial for the crimes of 9/11. The
larger this marginal creep loomed, the better the proxy he'd be for those we
let get away (starting with bin Laden). Perhaps we might even be tempted to
forget that F.B.I. incompetence had kept us from squeezing Moussaoui (or his
computer) for information that might have saved lives during the weeks he
languished in jail before 9/11.

Two of the F.B.I. bosses who repeatedly squelched Moussaoui search warrants
in August 2001 remained at the F.B.I. as he went to trial. The genuinely
significant
9/11 figures in American custody, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, cannot be
prosecuted because their firsthand accounts of our "interrogation
techniques"
at Guantánamo and our "black sites" are bound to incite more terrorists.
Meanwhile, the American leaders who devote every waking moment to defending
their
indefensible decisions in Iraq have squandered the energy, the armed forces
and the international good will needed to fight the war that began on 9/11
and that, in our own State Department's words, is "still in the first
phase."

That's the scenario before us now. Next to it, "United 93" may in time look
as escapist as the Robin Williams vehicle that outgrossed it last weekend,
"RV."

Posted by Miriam V.