EDITORIAL
Two years later: Focus remains on terrorists
Two years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Americans are still awed by scores of magnificent acts of courageous sacrifice that day in the face of unimaginable horror. For it is these indelible deeds that demonstrate the compassionate and indomitable American spirit.
But the terrorist attacks on U.S. icons of commercial and military power, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, also launched a period of domestic fear and vulnerability in the United States.
Today, we're clearly healing. And with that healing has come the confidence to re-examine some of our earliest reactions to and assumptions about that tragic day.
Although many of us are still horrified by what we saw on the small screen that day, it's clear from today's media that our culture has not changed profoundly, as many predicted.
Amazingly, architect Daniel Libeskind promises for the Twin Towers site multiple spires, with offices, apartments and shopping, in a meeting of minds that seems a breathtaking, almost miraculous phoenix rising from ashes.
Pearl Harbor comparison
The 9-11 attacks invited comparison to another day of infamy, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Two years later, we can still see parallels between the ways our nation reacted in 1941 and 2001, but important and lengthening divergences, too.
Unlike 1941, in terms of Washington's domestic response to 9-11, we're already beginning to chafe under some overreactions. It took us a half-century to take responsibility for the unconscionable wartime internment of Japanese Americans, and we suspect this nation will eventually have amends to make for the way hundreds of domestic Muslims were rounded up and held incommunicado, as too many of us averted our eyes.
Only days after 9-11, Congress passed the Patriot Act, in fact a poorly understood mix of benign and truly radical law enforcement ideas that some senators hope to sunset and others to broaden to the war on drugs.
Most Americans are content to wonder: Is it still necessary to delay airline travel to confiscate fingernail clippers?
No doubt if the next terrorist attack in this country involves hijacked aircraft, we're in far better shape than we were two years ago. Other avenues of vulnerability persist, however, including — important for Hawai'i — our harbors.
From the first day of World War II, Americans had no doubts about who the enemy was and what had to be done to defeat him.
Now we're fighting what President Bush calls the war on terror — an inadequate, confusing name because terror is not an army but a technique, used on occasion by countries for which we have no enmity at all.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey calls this new war World War IV — III having been the Cold War.
"This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I and II," he remarked.
Whatever history finally calls this new war, it has already catapulted military and political planners into a new age. Campaigns can no longer be measured by territory seized or ended by armistice. Just look at our brilliantly rapid victories in Afghanistan and Iraq — but where our soldiers, contrary to expectation, continue to die.
A new videotape appearing yesterday from the missing Osama bin Laden is yet another reminder of unfinished business.
As Americans have regained the confidence to question their leaders, they have begun to grapple with questions of great complexity, having earlier deferred them to the better informed and better prepared military, intelligence community and White House. Homelands preparedness, a tightening of security without undue sacrifice of our hard-won freedoms, and a more nuanced discussion of a way to fight terrorism in a multipolar world are all subjects that require a more informed and involved citizenry.
Even broader powers
In a speech yesterday, President Bush increased the stakes of this discussion by seeking even broader powers to fight terror. Bush appears to have calculated that renewed memories of the Sept. 11 attacks on their second anniversary will outweigh rising concerns over civil liberties.
Adding to the difficulty of pursuing rational and productive discussion of these questions is the approaching election campaign, with its tendency to reduce argument to shrill, simplistic soundbites.
The challenge thus to Americans on this second anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks is to focus our boundless courage and ingenuity on finding a more transparent and internationally acceptable approach to bringing security, prosperity and freedom to our nation and to this shrinking globe — in this way, robbing terrorists of the resentment that fuels them.
