War on Terror Will Test U.S. in Terrible Ways

Surely no one who was in lower Manhattan last Tuesday will ever forget the sounds: the crash of one jetliner, then incredibly two, into the World Trade Center; the explosion as the planes ignited into consuming balls of flame; the crumbling of metal and concrete as the buildings collapsed; the shrieks of terror, disbelief and pain.

But for most Americans, the most frightening sound of last week’s terrorist attacks may have been the silence. The fanatics who commandeered four jetliners on a single morning made no demands. They issued no political communique. They championed no cause. No one, in fact, even claimed responsibility for the attack.

It was as if the destruction of U.S. lives, and U.S. interests, was its own statement, the only statement necessary. Such intensity of hatred carried Tuesday’s attacks beyond the clash of interests--the conventional political disputes--that inspire most terrorism and even most wars.

The unspeakable hostility that shouted through the silence Tuesday was so vast that it suggested the United States was facing what historian Samuel Huntington has labeled a “clash of civilizations”--an enmity so fundamental that neither threat nor negotiation, nor any of the tools of modern statecraft, can tame it. Which means that our capacity to eliminate this threat is probably far more limited than we’d like to admit today.

Is there a change in U.S. policy that could cause the terrorists to sheathe their weapons? Probably not. The Islamic radicals believed to have organized this attack--and a series of assaults on U.S. interests during the past decade--may indeed rage over American support for Israel. But there is no plausible position America could take in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute that would satisfy them.

Former President Clinton was heavily engaged in trying to broker a Mideast peace, and the terrorists attacked American targets. President Bush has been disengaged, and the terrorists attacked American targets. To the terrorists, America’s real offense may not be what it does but what it is: a symbol of Western freedom, consumerism, willfulness and modernity. More support for a Palestinian state wouldn’t change that equation much.

What about force? On both moral and military grounds, an attack of this magnitude demands retaliation. But it’s probably best not to be overly optimistic about its effect. Israel has been retaliating, efficiently and effectively, against terrorists for decades. Yet Palestinian extremists still find no shortage of young men willing to perforate themselves with nails for the glory of killing innocent Israelis in suicide bombings.

America can expect the same. No one should doubt that even the most successful retaliatory strike may have the inescapable collateral effect of creating another battalion of orphans willing to martyr themselves to strike back at America. That’s not reason enough to ground the bombers; but it is reason to be cautious about whether even emphatic military successes alone can win what Bush last week called this “new kind of war.”

For all these reasons, the most common initial response to the attack presents a misleading comparison. In the first shock, the metaphor of choice was Pearl Harbor. But that attack began a conventional military battle against a clearly identified adversary who could be met on the open sea and island jungles and destroyed by laying waste its homeland. That’s hardly the case today: There is no bunker, no base camp, nor even any city that America could destroy and truly feel it had eradicated this threat.

This struggle against fanatical terrorism may be more like the Cold War--an amorphous, ambiguous, often frustrating conflict fought in many different ways on many fronts for many years. (In that sense, last Tuesday may be the successor to the day the Soviets first tested an atomic weapon--the moment when Americans no longer could feel themselves completely invulnerable.) Success in this conflict will require the same virtues as were needed during the Cold War: patience, proportion and resolve. There was no single route to victory in the Cold War; no single battle that turned its tide. It was as much a test of endurance as a test of strength.

The same is likely to be true here. “It is a transformational event,” noted Bill McInturff, a Republican political consultant. “This country will be marked from before and after [Tuesday]. We will respond; they’ll respond; we are going to be living in a different era.”

In this new test, the hard part will be learning the lessons of the last challenge. America’s worst moments in the Cold War came when its fear of the enemy caused it to forget its own strengths. It’s legitimate to target those in America who may support foreign enemies; after last week, law enforcement may inevitably receive new authority to investigate, infiltrate and wiretap. But maintaining a sense of proportion will be critical.

Just as America stained itself by abusing civil liberties in a feverish hunt for domestic Reds during the Cold War, so too will there be a temptation today to sacrifice too many freedoms in the hunt for terrorists. Dismissing schoolteachers as dangerous subversives in the 1950s because they joined anti-fascist groups during the Depression didn’t win the Cold War; blanket suspicion of Arab Americans or Muslims won’t strengthen America today.

Just as difficult will be to maintain our own moral compass in the fog of such an ambiguous conflict. As several analysts have suggested, it’s more valuable to think of the challenge ahead as a war against an array of targets than as a criminal investigation aimed at a single perpetrator. Wars cannot be fought with surgical precision. But a retaliation that kills a large number of innocent civilians in Afghanistan or Iran or Iraq offers no monument to our own innocent dead.

Eventually, the United States prevailed in its long watch against Soviet expansionism. But only after many reversals, great sacrifice and painful mistakes. It would be naive to expect anything less now. Like the “new generation” John F. Kennedy asked to “pay any price and bear any burden” in the Cold War, Americans today have been presented with our own “long twilight struggle”--a conflict that is likely to test and tear at us in ways we cannot yet imagine.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: www.latimes.com/brownstein.