Against Cruise Missiles
Excuses for not taking serious action against our enemies.

September 12, 2001 6:00 p.m.

hat will be one quick way to determine whether the American response to yesterday's outrage is adequate?

Whether it primarily involves cruise missiles or not.

Cruise missiles are a very nice weapon in the abstract, and even have important uses in this instance — primarily, I would think, as an instrument of assassination.

But, in general, over the years cruise missile attacks have become synonymous with symbolic pinprick strikes that are an excuse for not taking serious action against our enemies.

They have been made a tool of the sort of carefully calibrated warmaking that should have been forever discredited by Vietnam.

They have become a way to avoid ever-incurring American casualties in foreign engagements, even a way to avoid incurring casualties among our enemies — the perfect weapon with which to inflict deadly damage on empty warehouses in the dead of night.

Cruise missiles, in short, were the weapon of choice during America's long vacation from the imperatives of blood and steel that ended yesterday.

You can't turn on the TV without hearing some expert say that our enemies in the current conflict are elusive, that finding targets to punish and bomb and raze will be difficult or impossible. Nonsense.

We know the states that harbor our enemies. If only Osama bin Laden and his 50 closest advisers and followers die in the next couple of weeks, President Bush will have failed in a great military and moral challenge of his presidency.

The American response should be closer to something along these lines: identifying the one or two nations most closely associated with our enemies, giving them 24-hours notice to evacuate their capitals (in keeping with our desire to wage war as morally as possible), then systematically destroying every significant piece of military, financial, and political infrastructure in those cities.

Today in Manhattan, if you open your windows, you can smell the smoke from downtown, ever so slightly burning your eyes and your throat. People in the nations that empower our enemies should get a big whiff of such smoke.

Two of the greatest American warriors ever, William Sherman and George Patton, understood, as Victor Davis Hanson points out in his excellent book The Soul of Battle, that war could not just be waged against an enemy's army.

It had to waged against his infrastructure, his culture, and his will, it had to make the populace feel the pinch of the aggression it cheered from the sidelines — and this lesson is as applicable to southern belles in the Civil War as it is to the "Arab street" today.

So, by all means annihilate Osama bin Laden. But the task is much larger than that, and cruise missiles alone won't be equal to it.