At Ground Zero, Iraq Is ‘a Totally Different Thing’

Emerge from the subway station at City Hall. Pass through the tight back streets of a Lower Manhattan shopping district, decorated for the season with lighted angels. It’s bitterly cold, and the shoppers waddle about like happy mummies in their heavy coats, mufflers, woolen hats.

Duck into the Century 21 department store by way of a side door. Climb the stairs from men’s shoes to the main floor and enter a scene of frantic wonder.

New Yorkers on lunch break and tourists alike jam the aisles, picking through racks of leather jackets and piles of children’s slippers, lining up five deep at the cash registers.

The P.A. system pipes in a perky “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” the music interrupted every few bars: “Could I please have a luggage associate to the leather complex. Could I please have a linen associate to the housewear complex.”

It’s loud, warm, festive and, in a chaotic sort of way, peaceful, but the time has come to push through the main entrance, through two sets of glass doors covered in ornate metal grilles. They open onto Church Street.

Here, at once, the carols stop and the cold returns like a slap and the shoppers lose their mirth. Even those who know what to expect seem startled, blinking eyes, swallowing smiles.

Directly across the street from these doors is a hole in the ground, four blocks wide, three blocks deep, seven stories down. It is the hole where the World Trade Center once stood, the hole known as ground zero.

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I came to ground zero -- which is stripped of debris, sanitized and surrounded now by tidy steel fence work -- to ask people who live and work around it about Iraq, about the possibility of war. It seemed logical enough.

In pressing for “regime change” in Iraq, the Bush administration and other advocates have made repeated references to this hole in the ground and all that it represents. They see ground zero and the showdown with Iraq as points on the same line, part of a general “war on terror” that had in 9/11 its Pearl Harbor.

In a speech Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney put it this way: “Confronting the threat posed by Iraq is not a distraction from the war on terror. It is absolutely crucial to winning the war on terror.”

Not all the New Yorkers I bumped into, though, could follow such logic. Some failed to see -- beyond the rhetoric of politics -- any connective tissue between the hell unleashed here on Sept. 11 and the case for taking on Hussein.

“I think they are trying to blame it on that,” said Eva Hansson, who works at a jewelry store two blocks from ground zero. “It’s scary to think that what happened here would be used as a reason to go to war in Iraq. I mean, we already went into Afghanistan, right? It should be even.”

As for war talk, she had heard more on a recent vacation to Sweden than she does in Lower Manhattan: “New Yorkers don’t have time for war. We are always on a schedule, rushing around, trying to make ends meet in order to get enough money to pay the high rents.”

Sgt. Augustin Castillo, a 25-year-old Marine seated behind a desk in a second-story recruiting station across from City Hall, was puzzled at first to be asked about Iraq and 9/11 in the same breath.

“I’m not sure I understand your question,” he said. “I feel like it is a totally different thing. What happened here was one thing. Iraq is another. We were involved in Iraq before what happened here.”

Castillo had been at this desk on Sept. 11, 2001, had watched the events unfold two blocks away from the street below, had spent that long day shepherding the injured to a nearby hospital. And when the recruiting station reopened a few days later, he and his colleagues were swamped with volunteers raring to go.

“We got a lot of calls from 55-year-old vets,” he said. “They were saying, ‘We’re still in shape and we want to come back and do something.’ ” That initial flurry passed, and the recruiting pace at the station has long since returned to what it was before Sept. 11, about a dozen or so recruits a month.

Do they mention Iraq when they sign up, Castillo was asked.

“No,” he said, “It doesn’t come up much.”

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On the Church Street sidewalk, a block or two from the department store doors, B.L. Parkinson stood at a folding table, one in a row of vendors hawking “souvenirs” to a small but steady stream of ground zero tourists.

She sells American flags with the names of all the 9/11 dead printed across the stars and stripes. Called “the flag of heroes,” it goes for $20. A portion of the money, Parkinson said, goes to one of the 9/11 charities. Business was slow this day, which she blamed on the cold.

A kind, soft-spoken woman in her mid-50s, wearing a pink fuzzy hat and scarf to match her lipstick, Parkinson said she had worked on the 65th floor of the south tower, as an assistant to an attorney, but was downsized a month before the attacks.

She pointed her mitten at a place high in the bright sky over the hole.

“My office used to be right there,” she said.

Now, she said, the economic fallout from the trade center collapse and the stalled economy in general were making things tough: “If you told me a year ago I’d be out on the street, selling flags on the corner of Church and Vesey, I’d have thought you were crazy.”

As for going to war with Iraq, she believed she had a better idea:

“Instead of spending billions to go bomb Iraq, they should take that money and invest it here, in the city. Charity begins at home. That’s the way it seems to me. We have people here who have lost their jobs, who need to be fed, clothed.

“Go ahead. Go after the terrorists, contain Iraq with sanctions and diplomacy, but don’t go to war. It doesn’t make any sense. There is a disconnect. I am sorry, there is. There is a major disconnect between what happened here and what is happening in Iraq.”

No connection? “None.

“No.

“Absolutely not.”

She was, of course, but one New Yorker, speaking her mind as only New Yorkers can. And here might be the place to remember that there are 3,000 people who won’t be given a chance to participate in the great war debate. Their names can be found on the flags this woman sells, across the street from a 17-acre hole in the ground.