Washington ? Al-Qaida’s attack on America on Sept. 11, 2001, will forever be a national tragedy and a moment of history shifting its gears irrevocably. But 9-11 is becoming something else as well: a consumable product to be packaged and merchandised for use by American politicians, bureaucrats, celebrity-mongers, journalists and others.

Self-serving memoirs, evasive or opaque testimony to a 9-11 investigatory commission, White House media briefings that degenerate into character assassination, and highly selective media coverage of those and other events would not have been among Osama bin Laden’s dreams of shaking America to its core. But the Saudi mass murderer is getting all that and more.

The nation needs to examine the lessons of 9-11 in detail and with great lucidity. Instead, officials from two administrations and interrogators of uneven quality wrapped themselves around the axle of “what if?” last week in public hearings in which deeper meanings were muted or canceled by reinforcing partisanship.

It is no surprise that the Bush campaign is merchandising 9-11. This president has no economic program or success to vaunt. His social policies provoke divisiveness. Without Al Gore to bounce off, Bush’s brash personality has become an irritant to many voters.

But since 9-11, Bush has shown leadership in foreign affairs. You may consider the results disastrous. But it is a leadership that contrasts vividly with the vacillations and vacuums on terrorism policy of Bill Clinton’s last two years, as the hearings demonstrated.

That is why there is now a rapidly developing merchandising of 9-11 as a campaign tool against Bush. It is as partisan and petty as anything the White House offers. Bin Laden can only be cackling in his cave over how he has set Republicans and Democrats, Kerry-bashers and Bush-haters, at each other’s throats.

The defense of Bush’s pre-9-11 nonpolicy on terrorism is a deeply ironic task for a radical president who came to power to wipe the Clintons’ fingerprints off history. There was “stunning continuity” between the Clintonites and Bushites on terrorism, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States last week.

Yeah. But Armitage rushed past the obvious: The continuity consisted of both teams failing egregiously to develop an effective strategy against bin Laden.

Armitage’s job at the hearing was to blunt the stake that his former colleague Richard Clarke was busily driving into the Bush administration’s heart by asserting that the Bushites failed more grievously than the Clintonites.

Clarke is “stunning continuity” in human form. He led White House counterterror teams for both administrations (and others). He in fact had the greatest bureaucratic responsibility of any single individual to prevent 9-11. He now exploits his failure in a brilliant marketing campaign of media synergy: Clarke’s kiss-and-tell memoir is published by the same conglomerate (Viacom) that owns the television network that promoted the book so relentlessly last weekend.

Clarke is an operator. His blanket apology to the families of 9-11 victims at the opening of his testimony did not lead to his accepting responsibility for any specific planning or operational failures that he then identified. These failures unerringly turned out to be the fault of others.

Clarke’s litany led a parade of “what ifs?” and “if onlys” through the hearings. If only the CIA had alerted Clarke that al-Qaida operatives were in America. If only the CIA had armed the Predator drone and taken responsibility for using it earlier.

And so it went as others chipped in: If only Clinton had been clear in saying to George Tenet that he wanted bin Laden killed, now! If only Condoleezza Rice would agree to testify in public. If only the press would not play up missile raids that missed bin Laden and made him “look stronger.” And my favorite: If only the American public would have been alert and informed enough to have supported an invasion of Afghanistan before 9-11 to wipe out al-Qaida.

That is “stunning continuity” from Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Bill Cohen, Don Rumsfeld et al: We understood the danger, we would have acted, but the public (not to mention the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress and the United Nations) would not have supported us.

This is a Brechtian moment in American politics: Neither administration was wrong or responsible; the people were. The government’s leaders lost confidence in the people. Perhaps it is time for a commission of Clintonites and Bushites to dissolve the people and elect another. And let Osama cackle on.