AMERICA MUST FIGHT BACK
There is no moral difference between the destruction in America and a bomb in a fish-and-chip shop in the Shankill Road. In intention, the two sets of actions are the same: to cause death and terror. Nor will the havoc in New York mean, as some of the coverage seems to suggest, the end of the world as we know it. The markets will reopen. Capitalism will go on. America will remain the planet's pre-eminent power.
It can be predicted with some confidence that on the site of those mangled remains a new trade centre will rise. It may not be quite as big as the two fallen towers. Or, knowing the American way, the new towers may be even bigger. Either way, the wheels of commerce will turn again.
What makes this tragedy different from other terrorist atrocities — and what makes these events among the most shocking that many readers will be able to remember — is the number of fatalities. As we go to press, thousands of people appear to have been murdered, by the same small group of people, in the financial heart of the world's most important and powerful country. If Mark Steyn is right, it looks as though America lost on Tuesday more lives than at Pearl Harbor and in the War of Independence combined. It is therefore right to construe this as an act of war, which deserves a warlike answer.
Over the last 24 hours it has become conventional to plead with President Bush to show 'restraint'. In so far as they go, those pleas are sensible. Barbarism should not be answered with barbarism. A random swatting of civilian targets would be just the response the terrorists are hoping for. It would seem to vindicate their claims, and allow their supporters to see a false equivalence between America and her enemies.
Nor, however, is there any case for appeasement. People will be tempted to ask themselves what depth of feeling, what passionate hatred, can have driven the hijackers to take their own lives in this way. Surely, they will reason, instinctively, America must have done some great evil to be requited in this evil way.
That logic is false. America is not to blame for what has happened. It makes no sense to blame American foreign policy, any more than it makes sense to blame the lax security at Logan airport, or the outlandish failures of intelligence that allowed four passenger jets to be seized simultaneously. Huge efforts will be made, over the next few weeks, to show that this or that example of American global dominance made the disaster inevitable. Some conservatives may say that this is blowback', the savage consequence of an ill-thought-out American hegemony, and that she should draw in her horns. Liberals will say that America is paying the price for the actions of Israel; and that therefore, after a decent masking interval, she should change tack in the Middle East. All this is to see things the wrong way up.
America is not to blame for the carnage. The culprits are the terrorists, and those states who actively or passively support them. The greatest mistake now would be to show such restraint that it might be taken, by those whose hearts were lightened on Tuesday, as an admission of defeat. America is not to blame for the troubles of the Middle East. She is paying the price for upholding the right to exist of the only democracy in the area. America is not to blame for the bone-headed anticapitalist, anti-Western nonsense that grips the imagination of Muslim hotheads. She suffers for being the supreme exponent of Western business, art, culture and civilisation in general. It is not America's fault that she is the most influential and prosperous country on earth. Those who rage against her are exhibiting the rage of Caliban.
In the face of such mayhem, and after experiencing savagery on such a scale, American retaliation is justified and necessary. Almost any projection of American force overseas, provided it is against military targets and conducted with due care, can be condoned, if it means that there is less chance of a repetition of Tuesday's events. George Bush should waste no time, incidentally, listening to the babble of the liberal media about the 'irrelevance' of National Missile Defence. What this week has shown, surely, are the lengths to which America's enemies will go. If NMD can deprive them of at least one means of attack, so much the better.
Mr Bush would be wise to assemble a Western coalition against those who can be identified as sponsors of this terror. Indeed, it would be useful to call on UN support, since many of its members are complicit in this kind of terrorism. He has not commanded, so far, the kind of authority and respect that is due to a Commander-in-Chief in an hour of national peril. Whatever his security advisers said, he should have been in New York, not Louisiana, on Tuesday. This will be a test of his statesmanship. He must not only talk softly, and carry a big stick. He must use the stick. In so doing, he will deserve full British support.
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