With the urgency of war
Even though the American people on September 11 witnessed the horror of terrorism up close, at home, over and over again on television, they still seem to underestimate this new threat. Our most senior officials tell us that attacks using weapons of mass destruction are inevitable. Not if, but when. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it, terrorist networks "are aggressively trying to get nuclear weapons . . . and they would not hesitate one minute in using them." Staying calm in the face of such warnings is an admirable quality of character, but when calmness verges on complacency, we are at risk of disproportionate panic when the next shock comes. It's troubling that only a minority of Americans are worried that they or a family member might become a victim of terrorism. A poll taken by CNN/USA Today/Gallup on May 28-29 showed 22 percent "not worried at all," 37 percent "not too worried." Against that sanguine 59 percent, only 9 percent are "very worried" and 31 percent "somewhat worried."
We are less worried than we were during the Cold War, yet the United States may be seriously more vulnerable today. During such East-West standoffs as the Cuban missile crisis, the threat of invasion or nuclear assault was visible, and it was contained by the deterrent power of our own nuclear and military forces. Soviet leadership was rational enough to understand that millions of their own people would die if they launched an attack. This time, however, the threat comes from a shadow army of terrorist networks whose basic purpose is to kill as many American civilians as possible--not to take over our land but to destroy our way of life. Since these terrorists, in civilian garb, can blend into a polyglot American population, the strategic doctrine of containment cannot work, and the strategic doctrine of deterrence, based as it is on an aversion to dying, has no relevance. In short, the historic invulnerability of the U.S. homeland to catastrophic terrorism has ended.
Get them first. The president was right to propose a program to reshuffle the government agencies and those dealing with domestic security into one agency and to reconstitute this agency as a cabinet-level branch of the government. Our homeland security director, Tom Ridge, controlled too little money and too few personnel to produce the coordinated action that was needed for defense. Defense, of course, is not enough. The president in his speech this month at West Point articulated another principle--pre-emption: namely, that we must get them before they get us. We cannot rely on the fact that no major attack has occurred since 9/11. Al Qaeda has on a regular basis spaced its major terrorist actions by one to two years, and right now it's quite plausible that it will need more time to plan, given the disruption wreaked by our military actions in Afghanistan. Perhaps one should not read too much into it, but the day after President Bush spoke, an Arabic paper called Al-Hayat said it had received a warning from an al Qaeda terrorist called Suleiman Abu Ghaith promising another large-scale attack on America. The intention, no doubt, is to scare us, so we have to perform the double act of keeping our nerve but building up our defenses at the same time.
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