Dates in Infamy
December 7 and September 11.

By Victor Davis Hanson, NRO contributor
December 8-9, 2001

t is already conventional wisdom to see the attacks of September 11, 2001, as something new in our nation's history. After all, our present enemies have no planes or tanks of their own. Indeed, no state claims al Qaeda as its own military arm. Our adversaries wore no uniforms — at least as they went up the ramps of our planes, and before they put on their macabre death headbands — and were seemingly innocuous as they sat among their victims.

In our response to the present surprise attack, we are told also that Americans may not know exactly whom we are fighting, or how we are even to discover when our foes in Afghanistan and elsewhere are vanquished. All these concerns contain an element of truth, but they are hardly the Truth. In fact, the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon share much in common with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor 60 years ago this week — and so explain why the nature of the American response in both cases was remarkably the same.

Both Pearl Harbor and September 11 — for all our enemies' cowardly audacity in murdering unsuspecting Americans in a time of peace — were military blunders of the first order. The Japanese killed over 2,400 Americans, sank 8 battleships, and destroyed 186 planes, but they also found no aircraft carriers, sent no real modern ships to the bottom, left most of the Pacific fleet's critical oil reserves intact, and made no further attempt to disrupt shipping between Hawaii and the West Coast — much less seriously shell and bomb a mostly unprotected and ill-prepared American mainland.

So too it is with the terrorists. After the initial shock, they have been unable to erode further American assets. Al Qaeda has shown no ability to shut down a damaged Pentagon or ruin the cultural, political, and economic life of a scarred New York. While we have suffered a grave defeat — thousands dead, 50 billion in property damage, trillions lost in financial capital, and millions out of work — the ability of the United States to maintain its role as a world power remains unquestioned.

In fact, bin Laden's terrorists, like the Japanese militarists, violated the chief tenet of military science of the ages — one should never attack a militarily superior enemy in a time of peace without inflicting such damage as to cause ruination and thus prevent retaliation. Admiral Nagumo himself later acknowledged that he had "awakened a sleeping giant and filled her with a terrible resolve" — a confession apparently unknown to the supposedly astute bin Laden.

Six months after Pearl Harbor, in June 1942, the United States off Midway sank four Japanese fleet carriers, killed the enemy's most seasoned naval pilots, and prevented the occupation of the atolls. And within a year, Americans were fighting in Japanese waters, and there was no question that any warring — other than at a few frigid outposts in Alaska — would take place close to American shores. Afghanistan is thousands of miles from New York, but the theater of fighting in this war from now on is more likely to be over there than here.

Just as the Japanese — in their fanatical banzai yells; embrace of suicide; and promises of death to weak, corrupt, and soft Westerners — misjudged us, so too the terrorists bragged that we were either too wealthy, too cowardly, or too impotent to retaliate in kind. And just as in the months after Pearl Harbor — at Midway and Guadalcanal — we proved the fanatics wrong on all counts, so too our present-day fascist attackers in Afghanistan are mostly either dead, captured, or hiding in caves. Bin Laden has learned the same lesson as did General Tojo: Shouting, threats, and a brutal and maniacal creed are no substitute for West Point, GM, Caltech, Sears, the U.S. Senate, and the American soldier.

Again, in a mere three weeks the United States is on the verge of annihilating the purportedly elusive and near-invincible al Qaeda network, with plans on the boards for systematic attacks throughout the Middle East against terrorist havens, networks, and sympathetic regimes. In such audacity, our present planners resemble their predecessors of December, 1941, who immediately began to draw up ambitious blueprints not merely to defend America, but to eliminate Japanese, Italian, and German fascism altogether and at once.

Apparently, both our grandfathers and the present generation realized that there is no quarter to be given criminals, whether they be fascist states or murdering fundamentalists. Such is the self-righteous fury of democracies, past and present, when they fall victim to unprovoked attack. A culture that is characteristically slow to anger, shockingly ill-prepared in times of peace, and full of domestic concern with the most trivial of issues suddenly awakes from its slumber, taps it arsenal of free-thinking individuals, and then by consensus and law chooses not merely to defeat but to eradicate its enemies.

But there are a variety of other similarities between December 7 and September 11, and not all of them are merely military. The shock of World War I, followed by the boom of the 1920s and the depression of the 1930s, had created a self-absorbed and then apprehensive America, either unwilling or unable to marshal its resolve to destroy incipient fascism in Europe and Asia. So too with us: After setbacks in Vietnam and Somalia — and despite the clear victories of the Gulf and in the Balkans — Americans were still unsure of their real power, and once again had begun to listen more to what our enemies might do to us than to what we most surely could do to them. The earlier recession of 1991, followed by the recent dot-com boom and bust that created millionaires and then paupers — in the same manner as the Roaring Twenties and subsequent Great Crash — fostered insularity and absorption with domestic affairs.

"It's the economy, stupid" in magnitude was hardly similar to the scope of the New Deal, but both Clinton and the early Roosevelt tended to ignore events abroad, in the belief that their political futures hinged on solving problems at home — hoping all the while that the fumes of past American prowess would deter foreign aggression. While the explosive growth in the American population and sophisticated technology of the last half-century suggest that our contemporary recessions and military cuts were not comparable to the more drastic ones of the 1930s, both eras nevertheless shared a psychological affinity with isolationism — and both illusions were shattered by Pearl Harbor and the September 11 bombings.

Politically, September 11 offers the same lessons as did December 7. It really is folly to radically cut one's defenses in times of peace — if for no other reason that enemies appear out of nowhere, and view even moderate disarmament as impotence and an invitation to aggression. Just as we ignored Manchuria until Zeros reached Oahu, so too the bombers in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen were the godfathers of the September terrorists. Appeasement, now and then, is a prescription for disaster. While we may still have plenty of muscle to deal with both Afghanistan and Iraq, let us hope that our taxed and weary carriers in the next six months are not also needed off Palestine, North Korea, China, or Cuba. Since September 11, we have been relearning the depressing lesson of human nature that six decades ago we also rediscovered after Pearl Harbor — in the interval "suffering" what the Roman satirist Juvenal once dubbed "the evils of a long peace."

Landmark events, like Pearl Harbor and the recent attack, do not invent new mentalities so much as return us to the wisdom of the ages — predictably forgotten in the luxury of tranquility and prosperity. Americans woke up from their slumber on December 8, and soon fathomed that prior international agreements on arms-reduction had not stopped the building of the behemoth battleships Yamato and Musashi; that the League of Nations did not save Ethiopia or Manchuria; and that summit talks on the eve of Pearl Harbor led to disaster, not reprieve. So too will we learn once more that most of the Cold War accords on bioweaponry were violated by the former Soviet Union and others, that Saddam Hussein honored few of the 1991 armistice agreements, and that the United Nations can do nothing to prevent terrorism. Utopian internationalism has its uses among squabbling equals during peacetime, but only military preparedness and a willingness to use force can stop aggressors from killing the innocent.

Of course, in a rapidly changing and global culture, there are also many superficial differences between these attacks on America six decades apart. We are interviewing aliens, not interning citizens; our ancestors were asked to sacrifice for the war effort, we to spend our way out of a recession; few then had any qualms about hitting the Japanese back, yet our own cultural elite talk of the moral equivalence between terrorists deliberately killing the innocent in a time of peace, and soldiers consciously avoiding civilians in a time of war.

Yet human nature and democracy are constants through time and space, and so the real lesson of Pearl Harbor teaches us that fanatics, autocrats, and fascists, out of perceived rather than real grievances, will always envy and fear — but eventually hate — a culture of freedom and prosperity. The surprise attacks from such bankrupt cultures will always be encouraged by complacence aided by a dereliction of vigilance — the terrible price of amnesia that affluent and self-absorbed democracies so often pay.

The ultimate verdict — still unfathomable to many of America's cultural elite — likewise is not in doubt. Mr. bin Laden should remember that the wrecks of Battleship Row led to the cinders of Berlin and Tokyo; the fall of the Twin Towers and the firing of the Pentagon will bring al Qaeda and its abettors a similar oblivion. Pearl Harbor set off a chain reaction of mobilization, war production, and national resolve in America, as an energized response at Coral Sea led to Midway to Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima to Okinawa and finally, to Tokyo Bay. Each week, after December 7, we learned that our initial vulnerability was ephemeral, our rejoinder deadly and enduring. And because we are still our grandfathers' children, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, perhaps Mr. Arafat, Assad, and others of their ilk should understand that September 11 was not the end, but the very beginning. We did not want this war and as a people abhor killing, but history teaches us that by God we shall surely end it — and on our terms, not theirs.

— Hanson is author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.

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