Not the War We Needed

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I turned on the TV in my hotel room to catch the latest news about the missing intern, Chandra Levy. Maybe that's not what I wanted to see, but it's all I was likely to see on CNN, which had devoted itself almost exclusively to the case since at least July. We'd had O.J., we'd had Tonya Harding and Monica Lewinsky, and now the cable news channels were, as we liked to say that summer, "All Chandra, all the time." So the images of planes crashing into buildings, followed by buildings crashing to the earth, did not, at first, compute. If anyone had a motive, I figured in my post-traumatic stupor, it had to be Gary Condit.

The events of that morning went far beyond anything that could be handled by the usual cliché of a "wake-up call." We Americans had been lazy, willfully ignorant, and self-involved to the point of solipsism. If there was an outside world, we didn't want to know about it, unless the death of a beautiful princess was involved. And now here it was: palpable, in-your-face evidence of the existence of people unlike ourselves, people who were, in fact, murderously hostile to us and clever enough to eclipse even Chandra. We had been following, I now realized, the plot line of innumerable horror films, in which the thoughtless teenagers party hard in some ramshackle, out-of-the-way site until one of the group shows up dead and hideously mutilated. That is the point at which it dawns on them that they are not alone, that there is someone out there -- some incomprehensible Other who wants them dead. But with the beer flowing and the hormones surging, they have no way of organizing against the threat.

Many Americans responded, in those first few months after the attack, in generous and intelligent ways. They sent aid to the victims' families; they bought up books on Islam and learned to distinguish between Arabs and Muslims, moderates and fundamentalists, Sufis and Wahhabists. In some communities, good-hearted people reached out to the Arab-Americans, Sikhs and Hindus who were suddenly facing vengeful harassment from the incorrigibly ignorant. Churches shared Ramadan feasts with mosques; students assembled for teach-ins. We were playing a desperate game of catch-up, trying to comprehend a whole world, that of Islam, we'd dismissed as too musty and backward to bother with.

But now that we were awake, we also needed to respond -- a point that the brave anti-war demonstrators who briefly flourished in the fall of 2001 did not always seem to grasp. When someone declares "death to Americans" -- babies and old people alike, not to mention Jews, Israelis, and possibly Christians -- you've got an enemy, like it or not. I, for one, did not want to earn my frequent flyer miles wrestling with suicide-killers. With great reluctance and foreboding, I had to agree with the Bush administration that America needed to launch a "war on terror," or at least a determined effort to apprehend the terrorists.

How to go about it, though? Terrorists, by definition, lack the obvious targets, like capital cities, government buildings, and uniformed armies. They are warriors without a state or, in this case, even a clear-cut geographical point of concentration. As it soon emerged, the presumptive comrades of the 9/11 suicide-bombers are scattered around the globe -- in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Germany, France, Indonesia, England, Pakistan and the Philippines. An enormous amount of intelligence, in every sense of the word, would be required to flush them out: Cells would have to be infiltrated, prospective defectors courted, investigations launched all over the world. Plus, of course, we'd have to try to understand the roots of their bitterness and the conditions -- of both poverty and thwarted middle class ambitions -- that nourished them. If we wanted a real "war on terror," that is.