Dodging a grenade

'President Dick Cheney's response to Hurricane Katrina has been met with harsh criticism, especially regarding the speed of evacuations," The Associated Press reported Sept. 3. Actually, the AP reported no such thing --though it might have if one grenade had exploded.

Tuesday, May 10, 2005. President Bush stands behind a lectern in Tbilisi, Georgia, the seat of the Rose Revolution that overthrew Soviet rule in Georgia and made that nation independent.

"You gathered here armed with nothing but roses and the power of your convictions and you claimed your liberty," Bush tells the cheering crowd of 250,000. It's the last speech of a five-day, four-nation European tour commemorating the 60th anniversary of World War II.

Bush continues, "Because you acted, Georgia is today both sovereign and free and a beacon of liberty for this region and the world."

The masses are packed into Freedom Square to hear Bush. They smile and wave flags at television cameras. Tomorrow, The Washington Post headline will read, "Georgian Crowd Embraces Bush."

But right now, on the afternoon of May 10, Bush speaks of freedom. And while he does, a man wearing black heaves a grenade into the crowd. The grenade is live, its pin removed. It can explode at any moment. Yet it does not.

Instead, the grenade hits a 10-year-old girl in the head and peacefully lands within 65 feet of President Bush. The grenade sits motionless on the ground. The president stands unaware on the stage. If the Georgian government had its way, you'd be unaware, too: hours after the speech, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry calls the existence of the grenade an "absolute lie."

Of course, the following day, the Georgian government has no choice but to confirm the existence of the grenade, and on July 18, Georgia promises $80,000 to anyone who can help locate the man who threw the grenade. Georgia's Interior Ministry also releases the would-be-bomber's picture.

On July 20, the Interior Ministry detains 27-year-old Vladimir Arutyunian after a shootout with police in which one officer is killed and Arutyunian is wounded. The media report that unemployed Arutyunian lives with his widowed mother in an eight-story apartment building outside Tbilisi.

Fast-forward to two weeks ago, when the man in black is indicted by a federal grand jury in Washington on charges of attempted assassination. Already charged with the same crime by Georgia, Arutyunian does not apologize. In fact, he vividly describes his attempted assassination on Georgian television .

"I threw the grenade not directly at where there was bulletproof glass, but toward the heads ... so that the shrapnel would fly behind the bulletproof glass" and hit Bush, Arutyunian says.

The motive?

Arutyunian "believes Bush is interfering in Georgian affairs," his lawyer says.

That's not a defensible rationale, as you already know. But you may not have known how close that rationale came to utterly changing the current global political landscape.

The grenade -- which Arutyunian picked from the large weapons cache in his mother's apartment -- seemed to be perfectly functional when the 27-year-old hurled it. Today, authorities still don't know why it didn't go off. If it had, shrapnel from the grenade could have hit Bush, who at about 20 yards away, was within the explosive's casualty radius.

I do not want to dwell on what would be if the grenade had exploded. But for a very brief moment, just imagine the world we'd be living in if Arutyunian had succeeded. With Cheney as president, who'd be nominated as the next chief justice? How would the federal government have handled Hurricane Katrina? These are two of the many questions that an alternate reality would pose.

Thank God we don't have to answer them. But I bring up such perverse questions because in the past few weeks, terrorism has receded from the public consciousness at an alarming rate. It was only in July that London subways exploded.

Yet this September, the mainstream media have not latched onto the Arutyunian story. The day after he was charged in Washington, The New York Times ran a seven-sentence story buried on page A17.

Perhaps a plaid-covered grenade and a 10-year-old girl, an unrepentant man and a targeted world leader don't fit into the current natural disaster storylines. I'm not suggesting that anything trump coverage of Katrina. But a grenade did land 20 yards from the president. And that is still the world in which we live.

Gabriel Oppenheim is a College freshman from Scarsdale, N.Y. Opp-Ed appears on Fridays.

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