BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

It was eight years ago, and it was yesterday, and it is today, and it will be tomorrow. The planet has turned once more on the sky-blue day of horror, the day everything changed. So we stop in recognition of that which we remember quietly every day, that which we will go on remembering. For remembering is our forever unfinished business. First, there are the people. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, family and friends. And many strangers with whom we are bonded, whose names ring in love and fury, whose names make the printed page a field of tombstones. They are murder victims, almost 3,000 strong, killed by 19 foot soldiers of evil, dispatched by fanatics who burned with the desire to attack America. And burn to come again. Our business in that regard, too, is unfinished. That Osama Bin Laden remains at large is an affront. We take comfort in faith that he will get his. So, also, we can only await the end of his Al Qaeda henchmen imprisoned at Guantanamo, most notab...

The Deniers’ Club What good is the bipartisan commission’s new, last-ditch plan for Iraq if President Bush still has his heart set on victory? One big reason so much of the debate over the war has been reduced to semantics—civil war versus sectarian violence, benchmarks versus timelines versus milestones, withdrawal versus redeployment versus “speeding transfer” to the Iraqis—is that it’s easier to bicker about the meaning of words than it is to argue with conviction for a particular course of action in Iraq. General Abizaid, the U.S. commander for the Middle East, says we can neither decrease nor significantly increase troop levels. The incoming secretary of Defense conceded last week that we aren’t winning—his most positive spin was that we’re “not losing,” either. There are no attractive policy options, a fact that Americans understand: Only small minorities think we ought to pull out right away (16 percent) or send more troops (17 percent). We know we owe it to the Iraqis to keep t...