The Gist: Red Alert City: Are New Yorkers the President's Sacrificial Lambs

We’re on the brink and, like many, I have a scary vision in my head: Right after the bombs begin dropping over Baghdad, or perhaps in ensuing months and years, as many in the Arab world seethe over the U.S.’s actions, further ferocious terrorist attacks will occur here in New York City. It’s one among many reasons I’ve opposed military action, and certainly without the U.N.—yes, even though the counterargument claims that if we don’t take out Saddam right away, he’ll give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists who will no doubt target Manhattan.

I’ve yet to be convinced that Saddam-connected terrorist attacks will occur if we don’t act this very minute, while I’m quite convinced that acts of terror will occur if we do. It’s a big relief that Osama’s top guys are now being captured; the Bushies are to be commended for that, no matter how long it took. But this invade-and-conquer scheme could undo whatever bit of safety we’ve gained, since there are a lot more Muslim terrorist groups out there beyond al Qaeda. And CIAhead George Tenet has warned of terrorist attacks if the U.S. invades Iraq.

That said, I’ve not bought even one roll of duct tape, nor have I gotten any plastic sheets for the windows. While a lot of crackpots in farmhouses out in the middle of the country are duct-taping every square inch of their homes and building anti-radiation bunkers underground, I don’t believe they’re really afraid, at least not for any rational reasons. For them, terrorism threats make for another obsessive and paranoid hobby, like going on a trek to the Arizona desert to try to find extraterrestrials. I think it’s pretty safe to assume that Al Qaeda is not going to set off a dirty bomb in the middle of the Kansas wheat fields.

No, the fear I have as a resident of New York City is certainly a more grounded one, and in that respect it’s accompanied by the reality that duct tape and plastic sheets aren’t going to do a damn thing. A Newsday/NY1 poll conducted last week showed that in fact I’m among the majority of city residents, who have a markedly different opinion on the war than that of the country as the whole.

Only 19 percent of New Yorkers support a war without U.N. backing (as opposed to nearly half of all Americans in other polls). Another 32 percent support war only with the U.N.’s okay. And 42 percent of all New Yorkers are opposed to any war of any kind against Iraq, period.

In his robotic and monotone primetime press conference last week, George W. Bush sloughed off the North Korea nuclear threat—a "regional" problem, he said—while repeating his Saddam mantras like a wind-up doll. But the one comment that concerned many New Yorkers came in response to a question about potential retaliation attacks by terrorists:

"It’s hard to envision more terror on America than September 11th," Bush said, attempting to connect 9/11 once again to Saddam. (Actually, he attempted to do that about a dozen times in the press conference.)

It was a profoundly, frighteningly arrogant statement. As I recall, on Sept. 11th, the president was whisked off on Air Force One to various places far in the hinterlands while the rest of us who reside in New York and Washington faced the terror head-on. And unlike Bush, the rest of us in the epicenters of terror know that if—when?—it happens again (or just before, maybe even as the bombs begin dropping on Iraq) we and our families won’t be carted off to a safe, undisclosed location like the Bushes, the Cheneys, and the Rumsfelds.

While Bush can’t "envision" more terror, New Yorkers certainly can. How about watching the Empire State Building come down next time? Sarin gas in the subways? Truck bombs on bridges? A radiological device exploding in Times Square?

Those are the cataclysmic events New Yorkers are thinking about with regard to this war against Iraq. And before you say it, the opposition to war against Iraq among New Yorkers can’t be easily chocked up to liberal sympathies. This is a city, after all, with a Republican mayor—the second one in a row—that voted in big numbers for a Republican governor, twice. The folks in Brooklyn and Queens are far from Upper West Side liberals or downtown intellectuals of the "give peace a chance" variety, and Staten Island votes consistently Republican.

More than that, the poll shows quite clearly that a major reason so many New Yorkers oppose the war is their fear of further terrorism. While less than half of New Yorkers—45 percent—believe an attack is inevitable right this minute, 67 percent believe the threat of terrorism increases if the U.S. invades Iraq.

A few months back, Jimmy Breslin wrote a Newsday column claiming that Bush couldn’t care less about the safety of New Yorkers, using Ground Zero as a photo-op while opening us up to further attacks by waging war in the Middle East. As time goes on, his words only ring with more truth.

Most of the opposition, much of it based in part on a fear of further attacks, comes from people in cities and other enclaves in "blue" states—those states that voted for Al Gore in the 2000 election—as opposed to Bush’s "red" states. Most of the terrorist targets that surfaced in the "chatter" the CIA has heard since 9/11—from LAX airport and the Golden Gate Bridge to Manhattan and D.C.—are in blue states or locales Bush wouldn’t have a chance of winning in the next election.

You have to wonder if Bush would have led us down this road if the 9/11 attacks occurred at Dallas and Houston shopping malls instead of in New York and Washington, if the "chatter" showed that Texas was now the primary target of Muslim fundamentalist terrorists and if the polls showed that Texans—and, say, Floridians—were overwhelmingly opposed to the war.

But it’s not that way. It’s this way: He conquers Iraq. He solidifies his support in Texas and his other red states. He uses New York and its tragedy as a backdrop for his re-election campaign, when the Republican convention comes here in 2004.

And meanwhile, we live in constant dread, perhaps more of a target than ever before.

Michelangelo Signorile can be reached at [www.signorile.com](http://www.signorile.com).