Righteous Fury

Righteous Fury


Last week, American and British commanders made it clear that the war on terrorism will not be taking time off for Ramadan, which will just probably ruin Osama bin Laden's holiday plans.

If this was ever even a remotely serious consideration, we need an attitude adjustment in this country. Seven weeks ago we were attacked. It was the most successful surprise attack in this country's history, and it left more Americans dead in a single day than the attack on Pearl Harbor, the invasion of Normandy, or the Civil War's Battle of Antietam - the previous record.

The death toll is bad enough, but the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington have had profound repercussions on our economy. If a group of heroic passengers on United Flight 93 had not brought down a fourth plane in Pennsylvania, and if one of the hijackers had been able to see Pennsylvania Avenue clearly through the late-summer trees, America might have taken deadly hits to both the White House and Capitol.

Since then, somebody has been sending lethal anthrax through our mails, killing and infecting ordinary Americans at random and undermining trust in our country's most vital and long-standing communications systems.

We are at war. A skillful, determined enemy is not just at our door, he's in our house. Right now, in small groups spread out all over the world, he is planning further acts of mass murder and mayhem.

And we are worrying about offending Muslim sensibilities? We are worried about the implications of racial or ethnic profiling? We are worried about the civil liberties of illegal immigrants who have been detained out of suspicion of being involved with terrorist cells? And we are worried enough about accidental victims of stray bombs that we would consider curbing the bombing campaign in Afghanistan?

God bless America. We are the world's first touchy-feely superpower. This is a country where everybody gets his say, and where every cockeyed opinion under the sun gets to compete vigorously with the wisdom of the ages. But the essential skill in a country of free-flowing information is judgment. So let's exercise a bit of judgment here.

Our house is on fire.

We should be pursuing and attacking our enemies with the same ferocity and unhesitating courage of the passengers on Flight 93. And I'm not just talking about the Taliban, which is in its last days. We ought to encourage the supporters of the cruel medieval regime who live in Pakistan and elsewhere to speed their way to Afghanistan for the jihad. It is good to have all your enemies in one place.

We should not just be freezing the assets of the terrorist networks' financiers and bankers, we should be finding and killing them. We should be gearing up to crush the regime of Saddam Hussein once and for all. We can deal with the wounded sensibilities of the region later. The world cannot become too dangerous for those who plan and enable mass murder and whose goal is to destroy Western society and the modern world.

This means suspending some of our more humane and noble national instincts, even at the cost of making people mad at us. Small cost, when one considers how murderously angry our enemies are already. Extraordinary times demand extraordinary remedies.

Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in the first month of the Civil War. He authorized the arbitrary arrest of anyone "guilty of any disloyal practice, affording aid and comfort to Rebels." Lincoln was not without a finely tuned appreciation for the basic values of our nation, and he was well aware that he had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution. But he was a man who understood special circumstances.

Lincoln knew that temporary measures to ensure public safety in a time of crisis did not mean - in his words - that the American people would lose such safeguards "throughout the indefinite peaceful future, which I trust lies before them, any more than I am able to believe that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness as to persist in feeding upon them during the remainder of his healthful life."

We are in no danger of being overthrown, and I'm not suggesting revoking habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights, but the danger we face is real and present. Our concern for civil liberties and human rights is admirable, but life comes before liberty. Anthrax trumps the pursuit of happiness. This war is about preventing attacks that could kill thousands, maybe even millions of Americans.

The concern for the poor innocents who become victims of stray U.S. bombs in Afghanistan is laudable. Their deaths are tragic. Would that our bombs always hit the correct targets. Would that we did not have to drop bombs on anyone, anywhere, ever. We did not choose this conflict. But those who complain the loudest about errant air strikes are those who support al-Qaeda, an organization that designs attacks on innocent civilians, and schemes to kill as many of them as it can.

This is going to be a long war. When the larger history of it is written, the current conflict in Afghanistan, which attracts the bulk of our attention, will prove to have played a relatively minor part. Our goal there is to serve notice to states around the world of the price they will pay for nurturing these assassins. The more important task will be finding the assassins themselves. To do that, we must start taking apart these international terrorist networks worldwide. We ought to use whatever methods work, whether or not they jibe with our ideals or make some people angry.

It doesn't matter if our enemies are angry, so long as they are afraid.



Mark Bowden's e-mail address is mbowden [at] phillynews.com.