Posted on: Saturday, December 7, 2002

Pearl Harbor memories still can teach us today

This time a year ago, the 60th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was still in shock following the deadly Sept. 11 attacks.

Considerable ink and wind was expended on debating whether 9/11 was "another Pearl Harbor."

Yes and no, we reflected.

"While Sept. 11 was a largely unexpected and seemingly symbolic terror attack on unknowing civilians," we wrote, "the Pearl Harbor attack was a carefully planned, forewarned and — in some quarters, at least — anticipated attack on strategic military targets."

Today, there's budding evidence that the nation was at least as forewarned as it was in 1941.

Last year, we felt the two attacks were alike "in their impact on the American psyche and in their implications for the future of American national policy, both at home and abroad."

Today we're not so sure.

With the elusive Osama bin Laden still at large, the focus of the American response has shifted to Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Psychologically, there's little of the home-front self-sacrifice that pervaded the early 1940s.

The lessons that Pearl Harbor continues to offer revolve around the American spirit of resilience and courage; that confidence (call it Yankee defiance, if you wish) that allowed them to bounce back after the events of Dec. 7, 1941.

There's no evidence that spirit is in any way lacking 61 years later.

What has changed is a precise notion of who the enemy is and how we'll know when he, or they, are defeated unconditionally.