TERRORISM'S RIVERS RUN DEEPER THAN WAR AND WEAPONS

WASHINGTON -- Of all the words spoken by leaders and analysts on this first anniversary of 9/11, some of the most profound were those mixing remembrance with warning about this story that is far from finished. "We have to remember that another attack like 9/11 would have tremendous effects on our society," the Rand Corp.'s Brian Jenkins said at a special first-anniversary conference here this week. "It could cause fundamental political change in our society -- and so that question becomes the paramount issue."

What did he mean? I asked Jenkins, one of the country's leading terrorism analysts. What "effects"? What "change"?

His answers -- in part because they were looking ahead instead of backward -- were important and disturbing to contemplate: economic chaos within America, he answered, plus an increase in national ugliness, more abrogations of civil rights and an even further withdrawal from the world. "We should have had a better mixture of stoicism and preparedness," he said finally.

In fact, a distinct sense of disquiet hung over the U.S. Institute of Peace conference here this week on "9/11 a Year On: America's Challenge in a Changed World." There was a feeling among both speakers and questioners, many of them leading journalists, scholars and foreign diplomats, that America is nearly as much adrift and endangered internally as externally.

"Nine-eleven was a wake-up call," Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser to the first President Bush, said in his keynote address, "but now I think that that was not enough to keep us in the fight for the long run.

"We have a wonderful military machine, but it doesn't exactly fit with what we're trying to do in terrorism. This is a war of intelligence ... a war of fundamental complexity in which we don't control all the levers. Phase I is essentially over, yet the administration has not explained the strategy for Phase II, the way it did with the first.

"Wars don't solve problems," he summed up, "they only decide who's going to solve the problems."

In the luncheon speech, Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state, reminisced and wondered at the contradictions of the last year -- and at what may lie ahead. "We had no idea last fall that, out of a movement thousands of miles away and some obscure schools in Pakistan, would come this," he began. "We have unrivaled power in the world today -- and yet we've never been more aware of our vulnerabilities, so we have to ask how to harness our energies to work for peace."

Then he paused and almost repeated the theme. "We have in this past 9/11 period the opportunity to turn our vulnerability into strength," he added.

Finally, L. Paul Bremer, the former State Department head of counterterrorism, analyzed the new elements that came out of 9/11. First, he said, the terrorism of the '90s turned out to be far different from that of the '70s and '80s. The number of attacks went down but the casualties went up as terrorists showed they were not only willing but able to attack directly within the United States, in part due to a globalization that allows individuals and groups to have access to information on weapons of mass destruction.

Second, of the seven states actively supporting terrorism, five now have active weapons-of-mass destruction programs. "If this is not an axis of evil," he said, "it surely is a nexus of evil."

Finally, the United States still must recognize that "we had a catastrophic failure of intelligence before 9/11. So we must ask now, 'What kind of intelligence collection agency does the U.S. need?' We are the only industrialized country without an internal intelligence system."

Still other speakers stressed that, in order to successfully conclude the war on terrorism, America must have multinational and multilateral cooperation ("Leadership is never synonymous with unilateralism," one speaker said). If we are to be successful, we must not see all terrorists as equal; we must see nuances. ("Making all terrorists equal dissipates our ability to concentrate," one speaker said. "We can win the war on terrorism only in the same sense that we can win the war on crime.") And some diplomats in the audience suggested that the "U.S. has replaced the Soviet Union with the Muslim world," a suggestion rejected by most of the speakers.

So where does this wisdom -- coming from many of our most thoughtful and dedicated public servants -- put us at the end of this first year?

We have indeed accomplished a great deal, particularly in Afghanistan, even though that poor country remains in an internally chaotic situation. We have rallied much of the world in the sense of supporting our military forays against al-Qaida. But I would suggest that our leaders could do a great deal more in preparing Americans intellectually and psychologically for the reality of 9/11.

This kind of violence happens to most peoples around the world, not as an aberration but as an expectation. This kind of fear for oneself and one's loved ones and loathing for the perpetrators is something that most people live with as ominous, but real, natural companions.

The most important thing we have to live with -- to truly understand -- is that we have not been singled out but simply included in a very nasty world out there. Understanding that is the only way not to overreact, but to face the challenges frontally, with clarity, so that we can gain true victory without losing ourselves.

Brian Jenkins' words in the opening of this column ring true to me: If there is another attack -- and it is hard to believe that there will not be -- we may find ourselves so emotionally distraught as a people that we will give in to, or even demand, changes in our entire way of life, in what actually defines us. It is there that we must truly confront, and defeat, terrorism.

COPYRIGHT 2002 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE Originally Published on September-06-2002

-- Anonymous, September 07, 2002