New Sense of Vulnerability Puts Americans on Same Historic Page

As the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan roared into their second day, officials from coast to coast Monday braced for the possibility that additional American cities could become terrorist targets.

That parallel sense of vulnerability makes the unfolding war against terrorism virtually unprecedented in U.S. history. From World Wars I and II through Vietnam, Korea and the Gulf War, Americans have almost never feared that a U.S. military strike abroad could provoke a counterattack here at home.

But on Monday, even as U.S. warplanes soared unchallenged over Afghanistan, President Bush symbolized the changed circumstance by formally opening the new Office of Homeland Security with a grave admission: “We’ve learned that America is not immune from attack.”

That grim awareness could make this conflict more intimate and threatening for ordinary Americans in their daily lives than any war the country has fought since the early 19th century. But most analysts believe the prospect of further domestic attacks is unlikely to erode support for a military action that now has virtually unqualified public backing.

Indeed, historic precedents--like the German blitz of London in 1940-41--suggest that additional attacks could reinforce support for the military campaign by underscoring the risk of failing to disable the terrorists.

“If anything, it would heighten the issue,” predicted Ohio State University political scientist John Mueller, an expert on public opinion during wartime. “Because it would mean the only way to stop this [the domestic threat] is to stop” the terrorists.

That’s clearly the initial public impulse, as measured in the first polls gauging U.S. support for the military strikes that began Sunday. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, two-thirds of Americans said it was likely that the bombing campaign would provoke terrorist retaliation. But, strikingly, 89% said they believed that pursuing the terrorists was worth the risk of further attacks inside the United States.

Also, the percentage of Americans supporting military action--about 9 in 10--is higher than it was in the early stages of Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War and Kosovo.

“The will to deal with this is going to be the strongest steel that we have,” said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducted the survey.

Yet the possibility of further violence inside America gave the opening of this conflict a very different feel than the start of the wars in the Persian Gulf and Kosovo. As many observers have noted, most Americans experienced those confrontations almost as video games, watching precision bombs elegantly destroy distant targets on CNN. If anything, the night-scope image that CNN is employing in Afghanistan makes this war look even more abstract: The bombs appear as intermittent flashes of light against a garish green moonscape without recognizable earthly features--a true darkling plain.

That may be the face of modern warfare rapidly becoming familiar to Americans. But the other messages now bombarding the public underscore the unfamiliarity of the terrain ahead. The confidence that Bush and other officials displayed in the success of the U.S. military offensive was matched by an absence of certainty about our ability to prevent retaliation at home.

Constitutional Amendment Proposed

Just moments after telling the nation Monday that the military attack “was executed as planned,” Bush formally appointed former Pennsylvania Gov. Thomas J. Ridge to head a homeland security office, charged with protecting America against counterattacks. Bush’s executive order, chillingly, charged the new office with developing plans not only to “prevent and protect against” terrorist attacks but to “respond to and recover from” them.

Just hours later, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft announced that federal and local officials were now “on the highest level of alert” against the risk of terrorist retaliation. As if to underscore the danger, the White House decided to keep Vice President Dick Cheney away from Ridge’s swearing-in ceremony to reduce the risk that both he and Bush could be simultaneously targeted.

In another measure of the capital’s anxiety, Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) today plans to introduce a constitutional amendment establishing a procedure for governors to replace members of the House if more than a quarter of the lawmakers are killed or disabled at one time. Only a few weeks ago, most people might have considered that a solution in search of a problem.

All of this is unlike anything the United States has experienced since the British sacked Washington in the War of 1812. In World War II, German submarines became enough of a risk off the Atlantic Coast that Washington ordered blackouts in shoreline cities such as Miami (whose bright lights silhouetted vulnerable cargo ships). And one Japanese submarine surfaced off the coast of California in early 1942 and lobbed a few shells onto a ranch in Santa Barbara.

But the actual domestic danger during World War II proved so slight that the Office of Civilian Defense (even under the exuberant leadership of New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia) worried more about public morale than public safety. In Vietnam, the only domestic danger came from domestic protests over the war itself. Now, with Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 hijackings, threatening more attacks, the U.S. faces a very different environment.

“It is the deepest feeling of vulnerability that the country as a whole has ever felt,” says James Chace, a professor of international relations at Bard College and author of “America Invulnerable,” a book on the nation’s quest for “absolute security.”

Political scientists have found that in conflicts such as Vietnam, public support for U.S. military action tends to decline as military casualties rise. Bin Laden seemed to be banking on a similar reaction in his taped statement that was released Sunday, warning that Americans would “not feel safe” until U.S. soldiers are withdrawn from the Mideast.

Attacks Historically Unite Populaces

But Mueller and other analysts believe that further civilian casualties from terrorist attacks would likely have the opposite effect of enraging the public and intensifying its support for retaliation. That’s been the precedent in other terror campaigns, like the Irish Republican Army’s bombing offensives in London, he noted.

Even Germany’s massive terror bombing of London early in World War II--and of German cities later in the war by the Allies--didn’t shatter public support for the war effort in either country, official U.S. and British studies found. As one British historian concluded: “The ability of a great city to soak up punishment and keep on working . . . came as a surprise to both sides.”

Many observers also believe the danger of further civilian casualties in the war on terrorism might increase the public willingness to accept military losses. In the Gulf War and U.S. interventions in Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo, policymakers over the last decade appeared driven above all by a determination to avoid casualties that they feared would bleed public support as in Vietnam, said historian John Milton Cooper of the University of Wisconsin.

Now the dangers at home have placed those military risks in a new perspective--one that could give Bush greater freedom to pursue missions that pose more risks to U.S. troops than other recent administrations would accept. “Frankly, now that we have had so many civilian casualties, I don’t think there is going to be any particular outcry when we take military casualties,” Cooper said.