Fighting what may become endless war

Clarence Page

September 19, 2001

WASHINGTON -- This looks like the war I was waiting for.

Like a lot of my fellow draftees during the Vietnam War, I felt cheated. Unlike the war that my father's generation called "the Good War," Vietnam seemed to be a highly questionable, even if nobly motivated, adventure that was far removed from home.

This time, as I gazed with my 12-year-old son at the big hole an American Airlines Boeing 767 made in the Pentagon, there's no question in my mind about our need to fight.

Nor is there any question about my son getting drafted. He's already in it, along with every other potential terror target.

"It's scary," he says, "to have terrorists in your backyard."

Yes, it is scary. Nothing concentrates the mind like a sneak attack in your own country.

My family wears red, white and blue these days on our caps or polo shirts without a hint of irony. The homes in our liberal neighborhood, some of which displayed "peace" banners during the Persian Gulf War, have Old Glory hanging from their porches now.

This time it is not some TV news report from halfway around the world. This time it's up close. This time it's personal.

I knew someone on that flight. You probably heard the story of conservative commentator Barbara Olson. She called twice on her cellphone to describe the hijacking to her husband, U.S. Solicitor Gen. Ted Olson. Then the hijackers slammed the plane into the Pentagon.

I knew her as a fellow pundit on TV and radio talk shows. She was very likeable, especially when we did not talk politics.

To me, her death helps to dramatize the most chilling and tragic aspect of terrorism, its randomness.

Her beliefs did not matter to the hijackers. All that mattered was that she happened to be onboard that plane. Her fate just as easily could have been mine. Or yours.

No, there's no use quibbling about whether this is a war. I know when people are out to kill me. The only unanswered question in my mind is, how do we know when we have won?

Catching Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," as President Bush vows, will do for starters. But unlike the first Bush administration's capture of Panamanian President Manuel Noriega, catching bin Laden is not likely to be a simple manhunt and arrest.

This new war against terrorism is not another World War II. It is not another Vietnam, either. It's not even the Persian Gulf War.

Calls for Bush to bomb Afghanistan (where bin Laden is believed to be hiding) "back into the Stone Age" is not likely to work any better than it did in Vietnam. Afghanistan's remote mountainous region is so war-torn and underdeveloped after years of battling with the old Soviet Union that there's not much left of strategic value for us to bomb. Just as the Vietnamese communists ran back into their tunnels, the Afghanis would run into their endless mountains and caves.

Send in ground troops? Forget it. History tells us that nobody takes Afghanistan. The ancient conquerors tried and failed. So did the British--three times in the 19th Century. So did the Russians, twice in the 19th Century and once, as the Soviet Union, in the 20th Century. If we become the latest in a long line of superpowers to fall into a quagmire in Afghanistan, this is not the war we have been waiting for.

With that in mind, Secretary of State Colin Powell is mixing together an international cocktail of political, diplomatic, intelligence, law enforcement, financial and military actions to target "terrorist sources" and anyone who harbors terrorist groups and activities.

"It's going to change the way we go about our daily life here in the United States," Powell cautioned. No doubt about that. It already has. Yesterday is different from today. Just as airplane hijackings years ago led to the installation and quick acceptance of metal detectors in airports, our lives will not be the same again. We know how to accept change, then get on with our lives.

But even if we do break up the terror networks, kill or capture their leaders, starve their money sources and pressure their supporters, those victories will not be enough for us to sleep comfortably at night.

To win the war against terrorism, we also need to treat the root causes of the violence. Much of this can be found in the resentment and ambivalence many people in the underdeveloped world feel toward the United States.

The world's biggest superpower has world-class obligations to understand what's going on in the rest of the world. We cannot simply impose our will on the weak. We can't simply tell them what we think is good for them.

We also have to take time to see how we look through their eyes. Then we have to show them we are not the enemy bin Laden and his fellow travelers say we are.

How will we know when we have won the war on terrorism? We never will know because it will never be over. We will just have to keep working on it.

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Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. E-mail: cptime@aol.com

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