Movie Exchange of the Day (“Lord of the Rings,” on the Wound That “Will Never Fully Heal”)

Elrond (played by Hugo Weaving) (on Frodo): “His strength returns.”
Gandalf (played by Ian McKellan): “That wound will never fully heal. He will carry it the rest of his life.”
Elrond: “And yet, to have come so far, still bearing the Ring, the Hobbit has shown extraordinary resilience to its evil.”
Gandalf: “It is a burden he should never have had to bear. We can ask no more of Frodo.”
Elrond: “Gandalf, the enemy is moving. Sauron's forces are massing in the East; his eye is fixed on Rivendell. And Saruman, you tell me, has betrayed us. Our list of allies grows thin.”
Gandalf: “His treachery runs deeper than you know. By foul craft, Saruman has crossed Orcs with goblin men. He's breeding an army in the caverns of Isengard. An army that can move in sunlight and cover great distance at speed. Saruman is coming for the Ring.”
Elrond: “This evil cannot be concealed by the power of the Elves. We do not have the strength to withstand both Mordor and Isengard. Gandalf, the Ring cannot stay here. This evil belongs to all of Middle-Earth. They must decide now how to end it. The time of the Elves is over, my people are leaving these shores. Who will you look to when we've gone? The Dwarves? They toil away in caverns, seeking riches. They care nothing for the troubles of others.”
Gandalf: “It is in Men that we must place our hope.”
Elrond: “Men? Men are weak. The Blood of Numenor is all but spent, its pride and dignity forgotten. It is because of Men the Ring survives. I was there, Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago. I was there the day the strength of Men failed.”—The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), adapted from the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson, directed by Peter Jackson

The Lord of the Rings trilogy may well be the film project that defines the post-9/11 era. No other spells out so vividly the monstrous terror unleashed by evil, the frailty of the human beings summoned to confront it, or the courage necessary ultimately to surmount it. The first installment, The Fellowship of the Ring, opened the week before Christmas 2001. On the day I saw it, news had just broken of the shoe-bomber incident--a catastrophe that, unlike the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings three months earlier, was narrowly averted.

The adaptation of the Tolkien novels retains his tragic awareness of the persistence of evil, the way it returns because “the strength of Men failed.” Like the United States after it was plunged into the War on Terror, Frodo is left to carry his burden with an almost existential dread, as allies abandon the cause and he himself almost falls victim to the temptation of power symbolized by the ring.

I wish I could cheer louder over the death of Osama Bin Laden, but after nearly a decade, as Gandalf notes, “that wound will never fully heal.” It's personal.

I still recall the bewilderment in my office as we peered downtown after the first tower was struck, then the terror when the second plane delivered unmistakeable proof that this was no accident. I remember the chaos of trying to get back home to New Jersey for hours. I remember the flyers with pictures of the missing everywhere I turned for the next week or so; the desolate feeling in my heart hearing "Danny Boy" played in memory of the victims as I walked through the Port Authority Building on 42nd Street; and the clanging fire department bells whose sound made me pray for the next year that more lives were not about to be sacrificed.

Like many in the New York area, I knew personally (or knew of) people who were connected to Ground Zero, either working in the World Trade Center at the time or acting as first responders. One cousin escaped; a brother of a work colleague died; two other people, rushing to the scene, themselves absorbed gases let loose in the air.

It wasn’t so evident in 2001, but there was also a wound to the American body politic that gradually festered. Members of both political parties sought to diminish their respective roles in the train of events that culminated in 9/11 and, to their shame, concentrated more on pointing fingers and posturing than on uniting behind the effort to take out terror, root and branch. In the years since, we often lost our way. The damage to our psyches, our institutions and our way of life was severe, and, we can only hope, not lasting.

And yet…The United States has shown “extraordinary resilience” in the face of evil. The greatest mass murderer in American history will never mastermind another crime, nor enlist others in his twisted enterprise. (And let us hope, if there is a hell, that he was dispatched there immediately, haunted by the cries of those whose lives he was responsible for ending prematurely.)

In the end, there is a value in not giving up. To the many who wish America ill in the world, they surely now know we have more patience in pursuit of justice than they ever gave us credit for.

It is true, as I heard an eloquent priest say on the one-year anniversary of 9/11, that hate started the fires on that awful day, but love put them out.

Yet it is also true that courage--from the first responders who rushed to the scene that nightmarish Tuesday morning a decade ago, to the Navy Seals who dispatched bin Laden to his richly deserved fate this weekend--undergirds love, giving us hope that, though the wound that opened a decade ago might leave a scar, it will, at some point we can't see now, close.

This Day in CIA History (U.S. Misses Out on Chance to Eliminate bin Laden)

December 20, 1998—In the second of three documented chances from May 1998 to February 1999, U.S. intelligence reported that it had positively identified the whereabouts of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and that the terrorist mastermind could be killed if authorities acted quickly. President Bill Clinton, however, decided to pass, fearful of “collateral damage” – i.e., the number of innocent bystanders who might be killed or wounded--to a nearby mosque.

Following 9/11, the question of responsibility for the disaster became a political football. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats wanted to be tagged as the party responsible for the nearly 3,000 lives lost in the suicide attacks.

But, as Noel Sheppard has noted in the blog “American Thinker”, the 9/11 Commission produced “a purely political report that tap-danced around specifics to protect both presidential Administrations involved from embarrassment. As a result, we ended up with more questions than answers, wasting a lot of time and taxpayer money in the process.”

The Bush administration has rightly come in for criticism for failing to pursue the threat posed by al Qaeda both in the nine months leading up to 9/11 and especially in the 30 last urgent days before the attacks. Hillary Clinton noted that if her husband had received a classified report entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States,” he would have paid it far more urgent attention than the Bush administration did.

One problem, though: Bill Clinton had received an urgent warning in his Presidential Daily Brief on December 4, 1998, entitled: “Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” That report, as well as the Aug. 7, 1998 al Qaeda truck bombings against U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya that killed 247 people and wounded 5,000 more, formed the backdrop to the events of December 20.

One of the principals involved in the planning of the December 20 operation on bin Laden was Michael Scheuer, a 22-year-veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who headed up the bin Laden unit of the Counterterrorism Center from 1996 through 1999. As soon as he received the report that bin Laden would be spending the night at the Haji Habash House, part of the governor’s residence in Kandahar, Afghanistan, he relayed the message to CIA Director George Tenet and his deputy, John Gordon.

A teleconference was immediately arranged to consider the feasibility of a cruise missile strike to take out bin Laden. The principal question that came before the principals in the teleconference was the potential for collateral damage.

A sharp division of opinion developed over this. General Anthony Zinni, who had been busy that month organizing air strikes against Iraq to degrade its weapons of mass destruction program, insisted that collateral damage could amount to more than 200 people, as well as the mosque.

A senior intelligence officer on the Joint Chiefs of Staff thought the mosque wouldn’t be touched and that collateral damage would amount to no more than 100 people. By the end of the meeting, the parties involved agreed to recommend to President Clinton that he not order a strike on this occasion.

Conservative critics of Clinton have seized on the results of this meeting to claim that the President missed a golden opportunity to take out bin Laden. They found some support in Scheuer himself (who, it happens, is a stringent critic of George W. Bush as well as Bill Clinton), who claimed afterward that he could not sleep after the decision.

I don’t think that claim is quite the “slam-dunk” it appears. With the hindsight of 20/20, it may seem obvious that we shouldn’t have passed up the chance to seize the terrorist who was fast becoming a mortal enemy of the U.S. But seven years after the U.S. struck back against the Taliban in Afghanistan, collateral damage remains a controversial issue in the country. General Zinni was rightly worried about the disastrous effect this could have on public opinion in that country.

Passing up three occasions to strike against bin Laden in a nine-month period, however, is excessive. It is, in fact, illustrative of a larger pattern of the past 40 years.

As I argued in a prior post, American authorities had been blind for more than 30 years, dating back to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan, to the grave threat to America posed by Islamic extremism. With each passing year, that threat came closer and closer.

Both parties were distracted in fighting it, their minds consumed by more immediate threats (in the Reagan years, as suicide bombing manifested itself as a serious threat in Lebanon, the Republicans were obsessed by Soviet relations; in December 1998, Clinton and the Democrats were not only juggling bin Laden and the attacks on Iraq, but the impeachment of Clinton—the President had declared his intention to fight his ouster only the day before the urgent teleconference on bin Laden).