Even if the rational arguments in favor of the plan are logical, the representations of apocalypse colonize the debate towards pressure for fast invasion and warmongering

Opponents of the Democratic Party argued the risks of war, but their pragmatic policy challenges did not grab sufficient traction to slow the unreeling web of justification. Of course, there was little denial that the war would create more terrorists, generate a lower threshold for intervention, receive weak international support, and in the end leave the dangerous business of Afghanistan unfinished. But the Democrats became entangled in reflexive posturing about the effects of the debate itself—the importance of "message sending" to the United Nations and "consensus" backing for the president as negotiator-in-chief. With 9/11 not far behind, "tough" messages appeared to provide a much desired supplement to boost confidence, while pragmatism, caution, and planning took a back seat. Presidential hopefuls cut loose from this morass and took advantage of Republican-offered political cover. Republicans did appear to benefit from tough war rhetoric in the immediate election aftermath, enabling Bush to run successfully in 2004 as a wartime president. As WMD continued not to turn up, the intervention dragged on, costs mounted, political fortunes reversed—although the entanglements remained and remain. [End Page 87] The debate of 2002 found that a systematic presidential campaign—when bolstered by cherry-picked evidence—can be particularly powerful, especially when administration supporters in Congress veer shamelessly from long-held positions on policy and the leadership of the opposing party takes shelter in offered political cover. Further, the debate illustrates how the events that should prompt policy debate become colonized, in this case making common sense difficult to muster because the network imaginary laces a web of associative fears with compensatory toughness. On the whole, the debates were not the nation's finest hour. The debate of 2002 strove to convert a traumatic national event into a conservative-articulated, Republican-captured, presidentially initiated rise in power, and ended by setting the stage for congressional investigation, the rise of the Democrats, reassertion of congressional power, and a new presidency committed to public diplomacy. WMD were at the heart of the six-year-long controversy. It was hardly remembered that [WMD] weapons of mass destruction were not deployed by terrorists on September 11th. Rather, fast, anonymous, networked, modern systems of circulation were turned, through ingenuity, into first-strike weapons. Seen with fresh militancy, 9/11 suggests that the modern world remains vulnerable to mutating events that change, shock, and command attention, actions that attain expanding scope and influence by virtue of a network imaginary, where such moments self-organize and multiply in varied directions. The development of policy studies as rhetoric, then, calls attention to the disruptive events as these become situated in the restricted focus of national debate and recovered, through critique, as an unfinished metapolitics, which demands rethinking of the taken-for-granted grounds and alliances upon which post-event consensus became fabricated. In its time, the "War on Terror" was framed as a "clash of civilizations" and a new Munich. In retrospect, 9/11 should be understood as signaling a much closer, changing, entangled, future world where the complications of security spread and interlock to haunt twenty-first-century network imaginaries.