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10.03.2001
Awaiting a forceful response,
but calibrated, to terrorism
By Brian Dickinson
TELEVISION cameras showed the familiar
twin towers of the World Trade Center, which for 30 years had loomed above the
skyline of lower Manhattan. One of the towers had some sort of a fire in it.
Then the wide-angle shot showed what appeared to be a small airplane headed
directly for one of the towers. It was only when one saw a close-up shot from
a different angle that one saw that the plane was a large jetliner. It penetrated
the tower, then burst into a gargantuan fireball.
As the images multiplied beyond reason - first
the Trade Center, then a third plane crashing into the Pentagon, a fourth into
open country near Pittsburgh — one was welded to the TV screen. The parade of
stark images, each more searing than the last, held one spellbound, improbably,
for days. The fascination seemed to grip one despite (or perhaps because of)
the brutal, appalling reality that the images conveyed.
Nothing anywhere near this magnitude had ever
happened in this country. One felt fury as the dreadful reality began to sink
in, then tears as the stupendous number of missing became known. By noon, on
the day of the calamity, New York City's firefighters, police officers, and
emergency workers of all description were swarming like angry hornets around
the disaster site. By nightfall, the entire nation had begun to grieve, not
alone for the countless victims of the horrific attack but for the nation itself,
because its cherished web of security from the world's most malignant evils
had been ripped loose, like a gauze scrim on a stage set.
Years of somber warnings by serious people had
gone for naught. Some enemy of America, an enemy with considerable money and
organization, had delivered a horrific attack on the American homeland.
But who was this enemy? Suspicion fell on Osama
bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi who has been linked to several terror attacks against
the United States from his redoubt in the mountains of Afghanistan. Bin Laden
controls a network of Islamic extremists bent on attacking the West, particularly
the United States.
In the first days after the attacks in New York
and Washington, President Bush said repeatedly that the United States would
mount a major military campaign to bring bin Laden to justice. This pledge was
followed shortly by the deployment of elite Army Special Forces units and hundreds
of combat aircraft to bases near Afghanistan. The president presumably has some
idea for putting those forces to use, but a tight-lipped Pentagon was dropping
no hints.
This silence, however justifiable as an element
of military planning, fed disquiet across South Asia. Pakistan, Afghanistan's
neighbor that Washington had persuaded to ally itself with any U.S. campaign
inside Afghanistan, stirred alarm in India, its longtime enemy. If a U.S. expeditionary
force were to be established in the region, it took little imagination to envision
a flare-up in the decades-old disputes over the mountainous territory of Kashmir.
Pakistan, unstable under military rule, could find its own government toppling
if U.S. forces settled in for a long haul.
Such long-term strategic concerns seemed far
away from the melancholy task of digging out the rubble of the World Trade Center.
But the suicide hijackers, who did such immense harm on Sept. 11, forced America
to accept an ugly reality that a succession of U.S. governments had chosen to
duck for years. Terrorism has inflicted such pain on the United States that
a forceful response is inevitable.
It is now up to the young Bush administration
to keep that response carefully calibrated and under control.
Brian Dickinson
is The Journal's editorial columnist.
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