<

ANALYSIS: 'With Us or Against Us' Campaign Enlisted Friends, Made Enemies
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
(12:26 PM ET)
By Charles J. Hanley
AP Special Correspondent

A wider war was what bin Laden wanted. After the bombs began falling on Afghanistan, the terrorist leader broadcast a statement telling Muslims that America had divided the world into two parts -- "one of faith ... and another of infidelity." With his summons to "jihad," he clearly hoped to plunge the planet into religious turmoil. But his call to war narrowed the focus, too, to bin Laden's personal jihad, in his Saudi Arabian homeland.

The soul-searing spectacle of a September morning changed the way America looks at the world. Now a year of war, of ultimatum, of overwhelming power is changing the way the world sees America.

"Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," President Bush told other governments in the first days of national shock a year ago, when Congress rushed through $40 billion for a war on terrorism and the U.S. military soon embarked, in Afghanistan, on its longest combat engagement since wading ashore in Vietnam almost four decades earlier.

For America, the counterstrike to Sept. 11 shattered old barriers and opened dangerous new horizons.

It landed U.S. forces in former Soviet territory for the first time, as a U.S.-Russian partnership grew stronger. It put American military teams into unfamiliar combat zones on the fringes of the Islamic world. And it produced a sharper U.S. tilt toward Israel, even as George Bush held out the promise of an independent Palestine.

Along the way, the forceful U.S. moves made enemies and complicated the support of friends. A wider war would mean still deeper complications.

"By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem. We reveal a problem," Bush told graduating West Point cadets nine months after Sept. 11.
(More: The News & Observer Publishing Company News Source)
2002 © The Associated Press.

Dan