NYPost

THE OTHER BLOWBACK October 16, 2001 --

MANHATTAN has now been attacked twice - once on Sept. 11 and once with the NBC anthrax. This choice of target may have been a gross miscalculation on the part of the al Qaeda terror network, because Osama bin Laden has turned a city with an anti-war tradition going back more than a century into a nest of bloodthirsty hawks.

The same miscalculation may have been at work in the decision to send anthrax through the mails to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

Since the mid 1960s, Washington's Democrats have been chronically suspicious of the global projection of American military power. Being a hawk really doesn't come naturally to Daschle, even though he has been absolutely stellar since Sept. 11.

There was some reason to believe that if the going got tough in the war on terrorism, Daschle might head for the hills.

Not any more.

Somebody just tried to kill Daschle, and it was his personal staff that got exposed.

When Tom Brokaw was interviewed on Friday night about the anthrax sent to him, he said the hardest thing about the incident was knowing that the infected woman only got sick because she worked for him.

There were tears in Brokaw's eyes - but they were tears of rage, not of grief.

The Brokaw incident suggests yet another miscalculation.

In the wake of Vietnam, the media have been very much like Washington's Democrats - suspicious of or downright hostile to the use of force by the United States.

But now the media (a term that describes both NBC and American Media, which publishes supermarket tabloids) are under a very specific threat. And the only way to end the threat is to do what President Bush says must be done: Smoke them out of their holes from Trenton to Kabul.

There's an old saying: A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged. Well, a hawk is a liberal who's been targeted for death by al Qaeda.

It happened last year in Israel, after the Palestinians rejected then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak's dangerously generous offer for a homeland and then launched a new intifada: The Israeli peace movement fell apart due to the unambiguous nature of the threat against every Jewish life.

Three comparable centers of American wobbliness - New York City, the mainstream media and the Senate Democratic leadership - may now become the centers of a forthright 21st-century American aggressiveness toward terrorism.

New Yorkers and media types have often seemed to hold themselves apart from the rest of the country - indeed, to consider ourselves superior to the yahoos beyond the Hudson (and, for Washingtonians, beyond the Beltway). Well, now we know that no matter how cosmopolitan we think we are, we are Americans first and foremost.

Indeed, in the eyes of those who want to destroy America, we are the most representative of Americans.

We affluent New Yorkers and media types aren't sitting in comfort while the children of the working class go off to war, the way our elders did during Vietnam. This time, we are ourselves on the front lines.

We are living in an atmosphere of steady anxiety not entirely dissimilar to the clammy fear felt (so I am told) by military men. Only, unlike those in the military, we have not been through basic training.

We have no mindless and comforting rituals to practice to help us through the fear. We are not divided into platoons, we have no shipmates. We're struggling our way through as best we can.

In the weeks following the Sept. 11 attacks, a few isolationist e-mail correspondents asked me churlishly whether I thought the news coverage would have been as comprehensive if the terrorists had struck Kansas. The question speaks to the bitterness felt by heartland Americans about the way they feel ignored by the media.

But the terrorists didn't crash planes into Kansas office buildings. If they had, far fewer people would have died. New York and Washington are the primary battlefields of this war, fought by plane bombs and poison in the mails and God knows what else is coming next.

-- Anonymous, October 16, 2001