From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
U.S. Is Blessed
To Ponder
Terror at Leisure
Have we forgotten they're trying to kill us?
With the first anniversary of September 11 upon us, one may hope that this country doesn't need to have another several thousand or so Americans die on U.S. soil to understand that the target of terrorism is the rest of us.
When bad things start happening to good people, it is often true that the good people eventually wish the bad things would just go away. Terrorism, a popular word that may not convey the nature of the enemy, isn't going away. For instance, it was hard not to be taken by the details this week of the attack on a Christian missionary school in, for us, faraway Jhika Gali, Pakistan--the four clean-shaven men taking out Kalashnikov rifles and methodically gunning down anyone they saw, failing to kill the school's small children--from the U.S., Europe and Australia--who hid behind well-fortified doors. Leaving the school, the killers walked calmly to a nearby forest where they found a cook and carpenter in a tree. They were shot. A teacher heard one of the killers shout, "God is good!" God is embarrassed.
It is probably hyperbole to wonder whether most Americans need more death on American soil to believe the threat is real, though it is hard to know for sure. It is not so difficult to take the measure of the leadership elites in the U.S., or in Europe. Among these people--the politicians and the press--it is clear that the once undeniable monumentality of September 11 and the anti-Taliban offensive in Afghanistan have now devolved into a mere policy debate, alike in tone to the sometimes arcane, always grave arms-control debates we had during the Cold War.
Instead of congressional hearings on missile "throw-weight," we now have hearings, based on old-fashioned security leaks, about the order of battle in Iraq. And while prominent Senators such as Messrs. Biden and Daschle make clear their "support" for the "basic" thrust of the Bush policy, they also manage to convey their concerns about what is "advisable" on Iraq.
This is not the mood of a country whose people are under mortal threat. This is the mood of a country having a nice, interesting policy debate.
It is also worth noting that our distant friends have already moved on from the imminence of September 11. Speaking this week of any movement into Iraq, the chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schroeder, said: "We're not available for adventures." Not that we thought you'd be available, but Germany is still imagined in many quarters to be run by clear-eyed people. On Monday, former British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd urged Mr. Bush to obtain U.N. approval before moving on Saddam. Meanwhile, our good friends the Saudis said this week that U.S. troops can't use their soil "now that Iraq is moving to implement United Nations resolutions."
There is something to be said for the instinctive soberness of statesmen, for their burden is great. Senator Daschle no doubt feels the burden of his role is great. And how blessed we surely are to be able to debate and finely calibrate our response to terror at leisure and at such a remove in geographic space from the weekly civilian slaughter being experienced by Jews, and now U.S. citizens, in Israel. Without suicide bombers dismembering some of us at any moment in Times Square, Lafayette Park or the Yale University cafeteria, our statesmen are able to ponder at leisure their decisions about how, or whether, to fight. But maybe, in the shadow of the next September 11, a few frank things need to be said:
One, these people are trying to kill us.
They have tried it before and they have done it before. We could start in time with the two 1983 suicide car bombings by radical Muslim groups of our embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut that killed some 300. But let's skip forward 10 years to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which for those of us working across the street that first time, sounded as if all New Jersey had blown up. Only 6 died. But the bombs kept coming. 1995, Saudi Arabia: 7 killed; 1996, Khobar Towers, Saudi Arabia: 19 killed; 1997, Pakistan: 5 U.S. oil-workers murdered; 1998, U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam: 263 killed, 5,000 injured; in 2000, the USS Cole in Yemen: 17 killed. The World Trade Center. They will keep trying.
Two, Saddam Hussein is a dangerous nut. It's too bad such nuts didn't stop gaining control of whole nations in 1946, but alas even within the span of modern, short-term memory we've witnessed--again from a blessed distance--the homicidal megalomania of Pol Pot's Cambodia, Slobodan Milosevic's "Serbia," Kim Il Sung's North Korea, Mohammed Aidid's Somalia, the Hutus' Rwanda and Osama bin Laden's Afghanistan. Saddam shares with them a desire to repeal the norms of civilization and return to the routine political barbarism that hundreds of thousands died to overcome the past 300 years.
But Saddam is different than the other nuts of current history. He possesses weapons of mass destruction based on the intentional perversion of biology, chemistry and nuclear science. In 1987-88, Saddam used mustard gas and the nerve agents Sarin, Tabun and VX to kill 5,000 Kurds in a village called Halabja. Before that he used mustard gas and Tabun against Iran. He is patiently seeking nuclear weapons.
This September 11 is turning into a national day of remembrance and mourning for our dead. That's fine. That is proper. But I think it is in the interest of this nation's national security, the health of the living, to also commemorate the broader truths expressed to us last Sept. 20 by the president of the United States. George Bush said this:
"Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen. . . . What is at stake is not just America's freedom. This is the world's fight. This is civilization's fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom."
All of that Sept. 20 speech is worth re-reading. The word "freedom" appears in it at least 12 times. I would suggest to this White House that these thoughts too are worth revisiting next month. During those September days we will surely prove that we're all good at remembering what was done to us. But some of us are proving to be less good at remembering what we still have to do about it, and why.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
