HOW HE SEES IT 9/11 commission IDs the enemy

By ZEV CHAFETS
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
The final report of the 9/11 commission is 567 pages long. That's a lot of ink. But, on first reading, three words jump out of the document: "Islamist," "operational" and "imagination."
The commission report asks a disarmingly simple question: Who is the enemy? Then it goes on to answer in plain English.
"The enemy is not just 'terrorism.' It is the threat posed specifically by Islamist terrorism, by (Osama) bin Laden and others who draw on a long tradition of extreme intolerance within a minority strain of Islam that does not distinguish politics from religion, and distorts both."
The Bush administration has tried to obscure this obvious truth behind a smoke screen of rhetoric about a "war on terrorism." This euphemism is intended to mollify Arab oil-producing countries, the Islamic world and to a lesser degree, Muslim-American voters.
The approach is a failure. In the Middle East (where people know the truth about the jihad), the president's unwillingness to say "Islamic" makes him seem cynically dishonest, or stupid. At home, it has confused the public about why the United States is in Iraq.
By introducing the term "operational," the 9/11 commission has helped clarify matters. A month ago, in its preliminary report, it found no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and Al-Qaida. The final report says something different: There was no collaborative operational relationship.
Contacts
The report makes it clear that Saddam Hussein was not involved in 9/11. But it then goes on to describe a large number of contacts between Iraq and Al-Qaida over the years. The report details, for example, the not unreasonable suspicion of Clinton-era anti-terror czar Richard Clarke that Saddam and Bin Laden were in cahoots in Sudan.
Bin Laden and Saddam had their differences. But they lived in the same violent world of "extreme intolerance." They shared a bitter hatred of the United States. Left unchecked, they might very well have joined forces. That's all Bush ever really claimed, and it provided a cogent reason for invading Iraq. In the post-9/11 environment, it is no longer prudent to wait passively for the "operational" stage of a collaborative relationship between an Arab terrorist and an Arab dictator.
The unwillingness to understand the jihad's scope lies at the heart of what the commission calls a "failure of imagination."
Presidents going back to Jimmy Carter have suffered from this failure. From the Iranian hostages to the downing of a jet over Scotland to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, successive administrations chose not to notice that large parts of the Islamic world were at war with the United States. Sept. 11 made it impossible to pretend any longer.
The commission offers remedies for such obtuseness, foremost among them a consolidation of intelligence services under a national intelligence director, to facilitate coordination of security information.
This is a bad proposal, and not just because it would concentrate too much power with one official. Its chief flaw is that it passes the buck. Bureaucrats can gather and present information efficiently, but it is not their job to decide its global significance. The pesident has that responsibility.
Before 9/11, Bush failed to imagine the world correctly. Since then, despite his reluctance to speak about it honestly, he has developed a clear idea of the war America is engaged in. John Kerry, presumably, has a different vision. In a real sense, the November election comes down to the question of who America prefers as its Imaginator-in-Chief.
X Chafets is a columnist for the New York Daily News.