This could have and should have been an era of unprecedented national -- indeed, international -- unity against a common enemy. President Bush could have gone to the other nations of the world and made a case for a new age of international cooperation against terrorism and fundamentalism. That cooperation, and that fight, would have been aimed squarely at the Taliban and at the House of Saud, and, to a lesser extent, at the smaller terrorist networks that operate in the Middle East. To be sure, this wouldn't have been easy. There would have been (as there are) vast disagreements between the United States and nations of Europe over how to deal with the Palestinian question and what to do about Saudi Arabia. But a historical process would have begun, and the United States would clearly and unambiguously have occupied the moral high ground in such a case. That United States would have been proposing a new and forward-looking framework for foreign policy, much as the "Wise Men" of the post-World War II period did.

Yes, the post-World War II framework wasn't without its downsides, which became more and more apparent as the years went on. ... But it's important to remember that the framework did plenty of good, too -- the creation of the United Nations and the Marshall Plan, the stabilization of Israel, the rescue of Greece from a probable communist government. Whatever its flaws, it was a framework that recognized that we had entered uncharted historical territory that demanded new institutions and responses. On balance, the Wise Men rose to their historic occasion.

The Bush administration, by contrast, has sunk to its. It has not created a new framework of any sort. It has done exactly the opposite. It has used the occasion of the new era as cover for implementing some very old ideas, ideas the neoconservatives have been kicking around for at least a decade and perhaps since the late 1970s. ...

There were and have always been good reasons for removing Saddam Hussein from power. But this excursion was retailed to us on false pretenses by a bunch of used-car salesmen, and now the deceptions and obfuscations have piled up. Iraq is the center of terrorism, as Bush asserted in his speech Sunday night? Well, if it wasn't it sure is now, as fundamentalists flock to Iraq to have a bash at the Great Satan.

It all could have been very different. We could have had an administration that responded to September 11 by saying, "Let's think about the best way to unite the civilized world in this fight." Instead, we have one that responded by saying, "Now's our chance to do all the things we've been wanting to do for 20 years! And better still, now we can just label everyone who disagrees with us as unpatriotic!" Not very inspiring, and not much of a tribute to those 3,100 people who were forced two years ago today to look terror in the face in their final moments on earth.