You are driving down North Capitol Street toward downtown Washington, D.C., when you see war on the horizon–and you are heading right into it.
The familiar announcer’s voice on the radio is struggling today, trying to maintain some semblance of journalistic objectivity as he reports on the crash of two hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center.
They did it, you tell yourself. The terrorists finally did it.
You wonder if Pearl Harbor was like this. Our parents talked about what it was like on the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, back in the days before television. Radio, the theater of the mind, grabbed their attention, shocked their sensibilities and inflamed their passions. America stood still. Then it plunged into action.
You are thinking about this when you come over a hill and see this ugly smoke billowing up on the distant horizon behind the Washington Monument. Can it be? Then you hear the confirmation: a fire in the Pentagon. The Pentagon!
Coincidence? You don’t think so. As you reach your office near the White House, the evacuation orders are being ticked off. The White House is closed. Members of Congress are being moved to “a secure location.” Trade is suspended in New York and Chicago.
Across the nation, America is closed. Your cellular phone isn’t working. Nothing but beep-beep-beep when you try to call your family.
Suddenly the faceless terrorists who seemed too incompetent to bomb the World Trade Center don’t seem so incompetent anymore.
Suddenly cuts in defense spending do not sound like such a great idea. America cannot respond in quite the same way that we responded to Pearl Harbor. Military-industrial aggression by the Axis powers called for a massive military-industrial response from the U.S.
Suddenly we are faced with a new national test and new realities.
We need better intelligence. Beefed up search missions and infiltration and, once we’re absolutely certain of whom we are dealing with, retaliation.
Forget missile defense. We have met the new enemy and it is not the intercontinental ballistic missiles as much as it is hijackers who can turn a commercial jetliner into a suicide bomb.
This is Pearl Harbor for the age of terrorism.
In this new age, terrorists do not announce themselves or claim responsibility the way they used to. That invites the sort of retaliation we are contemplating now.
Our intelligence services have thwarted earlier terrorist attempts, they tell us, but such victories are not as dramatic as the defeats.
“Courage and ingenuity rose from the smoldering wreckage to build the world’s most powerful war machine and, in victory’s aftermath, to wage peace with even greater scope and success.”
So it says in my Life “Collector’s Edition” special on Pearl Harbor.
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“A date which will live in infamy,” our parents heard Franklin D. Roosevelt say.
The day the World Trade Center collapsed will live in infamy, too.
President Bush is a man of few words. Poetry does not come easily to him. Yet, in a brief statement, he summons up enough to declare that today our great nation is being “tested.”
Indeed it is. America passed the test posed by our parents’ Pearl Harbor. Their America, weakened by the Great Depression, pulled itself together and won its biggest war. Our nation has enjoyed decades of prosperity. Will we pass the new test?
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