 he
United States finally entered the First World War because of the nation's
lingering outrage over a few hundred floating bodies from the sunken
ocean liner Lusitania, which was torpedoed during Germany's
unrestricted submarine warfare. More than two decades later, we declared
war against the Japanese Empire after 2,400 of our sailors were surprised
and killed on a Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor. In the aftermath of
each attack, the United States did not seek the sanction of world
opinion. Instead, it unleashed the dogs of war, precipitously so against
countries that had promised and delivered death to our people.
In the days
after Pearl Harbor, a dazed American public saw newsreels of victorious
Japanese shouting "Banzai!" with arms outstretched on
conquered American outposts. What terrible foes, we thought, to
hate us so — so adroit at surprising us, so successful at killing
despite our defenses.
Yet the generation
of our fathers was not impressed by either images or rhetoric. In
response, a rather innocent and unprepared nation in less than 60
months left both Germany and Japan in smoldering ruins. Both fascism
and Japanese militarism were incinerated and have not plagued the
world for over a half-century.
On September
11, the United States was attacked in a similar way. The only difference
between Pearl Harbor and the assaults on the Pentagon and World
Trade Center is one of magnitude. Ours now is the far greater loss.
No enemy in our past, neither Nazi Germany nor Imperial Japan, killed
so many American civilians and brought such carnage to our shores
as the suicidal hijackers who crashed the very citadels of American
power in our nation's two greatest cities. It may well be that more
Americans died on the 11th than fell at Gettysburg or Antietam,
or in fact on any other single day in American history. Surely,
by any fair measure, we should now be at war.
But are we,
and shall we be?
This generation
of Americans is now at a crossroads. We must decide whether we shall
continue to be the adolescent nation that frets over the trivial
and meaningless while our enemies plot death under our very noses,
or our fathers' children — who accept the old, the sad truth
that "the essence of war is violence, and moderation in war
is imbecility."
The voices
of our therapeutic culture will be heard. Indeed, they already have.
We all know the old litany of inaction and self-loathing. Such seething
hatred is inevitable, we are told, given our world swagger, and
is the bothersome price of global activism. Should not we look inward,
others will remind us, to examine why so many despise us so much?
— as if people who practice neither democracy nor religious
tolerance nor equality are our moral superiors. And are not these
isolated terrorists emissaries of a new war that we do not understand
and for which we are ill equipped? — as if we, the greatest
military power in the history of civilization, cannot fathom the
unchanging and eternal nature of blood and iron. Is not our support
of democratic Israel the source of our calamity? — as if we
should abandon the only democratic island in a sea of fanaticism
and autocracy.
As in the case
of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the Lockerbie airliner downing,
the slaughter of our servicemen in Saudi Arabia, and so on, we know
well the vocabulary of prevarication practiced by our political
and media pundits. We shall "track down and punish" the
terrorists; we must "bring to justice the perpetrators,"
who can "run but not hide"; we will "act swiftly
and deliberately," but of course at all times "soberly
and judiciously." Etc. Then will follow the old nostrums: Europe
must be consulted, moderate Arab states entreated, the U.N. petitioned.
Few will confess that we are in our own outright bloody war against
tyranny, intolerance, and theocracy, an age-old fight against medieval
foes who despise modernity, liberalism, and freedom, and all the
hope that they bring.
But Americans
now must ignore the old lie, because at last they also know the
new truth: Despite the braggadocio of past years, we have in fact
done nothing — and so invited war onto our shores. Worse still,
we have disguised that nothing in the rhetoric of the criminal-justice
system, as if these enemy warriors were local misguided felons to
be handed over to our courts. Our diplomatic experts could keep
us in comfortable stasis with the usual whispers about the consequences
of "polarizing" the Arab world or "radicalizing"
moderate societies — folk perhaps such as the Palestinians
who were celebrating on the 11th in their streets over news that
thousands of bodies lay strewn in ours. Worse even still, after
the launching of a few impotent cruise missiles, we could go on
cloaking that nothing in the immoral vocabulary that we are too
civilized to punish evil, or perhaps too comfortable or too sophisticated
to kill killers.
And so Americans
die; they are forgotten; and we do nothing — hoping that our
enemies will at least do their awful work on our distant ships or
barracks rather than at our doorsteps.
Yes, we are
at a great juncture in American history. We can go to battle, as
we did in the past — hard, long, without guilt, apology, or
respite, until our enemies are no more. It was our fathers who passed
on to us that credo and with it all that we hold dear. And so just
as they once did, we too must confront and annihilate these killers
and the governments that have protected and encouraged them. Only
that way can we honor and avenge our dead and keep faith that they
have not died in vain. Only with evil confronted and crushed can
we ensure that our children might still some day live, as we once
did, in peace and safety.
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