Commentary –

‘Pearl Harbor’ Means Understanding It’s War

By Chris Powell

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, pushing the United States into World War II, 2,403 Americans were killed. Ten times as many Americans may have been killed in Tuesday’s terrorist attacks on New York and Washington with hijacked jetliners. Some members of Congress called it another Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor was a mortification of the American government and particularly its military; the Pacific Fleet was asleep despite the most compelling reason to be ready. The destruction of the World Trade Center towers and the attempt to destroy the Pentagon may be somewhat less a mortification, since so many of the targets were civilians, who inevitably will be undefended, and since the use of hijacked civilian airliners as weapons of mass destruction is a new extreme of barbarity.

But America can’t say it wasn’t warned. The World Trade Center was the target of a conventional bombing in 1993, in which six people were killed and a thousand injured. And the United States long has identified a half dozen or so nations that sponsor terrorism or harbor terrorists, nations that more or less wage war against the United States. President Reagan sent jet fighters to drop a few bombs on Libya, and President Clinton sent cruise missiles into Sudan and Iraq, without much result. For the most part, the US government has countered the terrorist threat with intelligence work. Good as that work often has been, it failed Tuesday.

The question now may be whether the country is prepared at last to recognize the war that long has been waged against it. Lashing out in retaliation against the usual suspects with a few more cruise missiles may be tempting, but this too is not likely to have much effect while the governments that sponsor terror are left standing, as the United States has left them standing in Tripoli, Baghdad, and Damascus when they easily might have been removed. Pearl Harbor mobilized a nation that clung to the pitiful hope that it could separate itself from a cruel and demented world. Maybe this second Pearl Harbor will destroy similar illusions.

But one such illusion was quickly in full bloom Tuesday, as so many responsible people declared that the perpetrators must be “brought to justice.” Nothing could be less effective. For the perpetrators of terrorism, typically religious or ethnic fanatics, do not care any more for their own lives than they care about the lives of their victims. Tuesday’s hijackers were ready to die in pursuit of mass murder, and they did. And of course the perpetrators of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center were convicted and imprisoned.

No, the country may be protected only insofar as terrorists are deprived of their support and their bases.

But there are a few big questions here quite apart from foreign policy.

First, long before the age of terrorism, in which they have become targets, mammoth office buildings like the World Trade Center towers were exceptionally vulnerable to ordinary disasters like fire, earthquake, and storm. The Empire State Building, uptown from the World Trade Center, was only 14 years old when, in 1945, its 79th floor was struck by a military plane lost in fog. Such buildings, often monuments to human vanity, are themselves disasters waiting to happen.

Second, something may be terribly wrong with US airport security if four jetliners can be hijacked within minutes of each other, on a schedule of terror. Some of these hijackings well may have involved inside help and the planting of weapons on the airplanes before passengers were boarded. If so, air passenger travel now must be understood to be completely exposed.

And third, America’s borders are utterly porous and undefended. Terrorists can slip in and out of the country at will, as can everyone else. But, amazingly, President Bush has just proposed making them even more porous with another massive amnesty for illegal immigration, essentially a declaration that the United States will not even define itself, much less defend itself.

America’s enemies here are not really powerful; terrorism is the weapon of the weak. But America’s enemies have calculated America’s weaknesses far better than America itself has.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of The Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)