HOW HE SEES IT U.S. debt new tool in terrorists' arsenal

By BILL FERGUSON
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Election Day has come and gone and America has decided that President Bush should remain in office for four more years. Many observers believe that the specter of terrorism, and the widespread belief that Bush was best equipped to take a tough stance against it, was a major reason many swing voters decided to stick with him Nov. 2.
In the days leading up to the election, Bush might have gotten a little boost from a very unexpected source -- an election eve reappearance of the king of terrorists himself, Osama bin Laden. Some observers believe bin Laden's sudden re-emergence served to remind Americans that the world is still a scary and hostile place and may have convinced some still-on-the-fence voters that they needed to keep the tough-talking cowboy from Texas in power so that he could deal with the threats we face.
If you took the time to listen to what bin Laden had to say, it actually seemed as if he was giving an odd sort of back-handed endorsement to Bush. He seemed to suggest that Bush's America is playing right into his grimy, blood-stained hands.
In a videotaped message of apparently recent origin, bin Laden said that the goal of Al-Qaida is to give the United States so many targets to chase around the globe that we push ourselves into bankruptcy in a futile attempt to swat every terrorist gnat with our multi-million-dollar weapon systems and highly trained soldiers. It is a strategy that he says his group employed to great effect against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and he sounded confident of its eventual effectiveness against the United States as well.
"All that we have to do," he said on the tape, "is to send two mujaheddin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'Al-Qaida' in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses, without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
Amoral monster
Although I hate very much to find myself on the same side of any discussion with an amoral monster like bin Laden, from an objective point of view I'd have to say that there are signs that his strategy is working. We have completely shed ourselves of any notion of fiscal responsibility and thrown gasoline onto an already raging fire of national debt in our effort to "kill the terrorists wherever they are hiding."
Our president tells us that he will pursue the terrorists to the end of the earth, no matter the cost, and he pledges that he can do it while keeping our taxes low and the entitlement checks coming. It would seem that the idea that war and sacrifice go together has gone out of style since the Greatest Generation gave way to the Me Generation.
So we spend, and spend, and then we spend some more. Make us safe Mr. President, we seem to be saying, but don't you dare raise our taxes or touch our Social Security checks. Let our children and grandchildren worry about the debt we're running up.
Meanwhile, somewhere in a cave in the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a scraggly bearded man is nodding approvingly at a replica of the U.S. national debt clock ticking off billions more dollars being poured into a river of red ink. And above the clock hangs a banner written in Arabic that reads: "Mission Accomplished."
X Bill Ferguson is a columnist for the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.