ChicagoSunTimes

Editorial: This war must be waged long-term

September 13, 2001

Yesterday's bloody hand forms today's fist. With uncounted bodies, certainly in the thousands, still entombed beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon building, America, with all her military might, her Army and Navy, her hydrogen bombs and aircraft carriers, appears to stand swinging at the wind. But our enemies should not be fooled. Their day of reckoning will come.

President Bush counsels patience. Secretary of State Colin Powell says we must build our case. Those are reasonable positions. And of course the government knows things it can't yet reveal yet, and no one wants the military to telegraph its punches. All this adds up to a process that will seem agonizingly slow to Americans hungry for justice after the worst attack on America in its history. Still, we can see things starting to come together. Bush has asked for the funding necessary to fight back and the leaders of Congress express solidarity to see that he gets the billions he needs. Powell, whose very presence reminds us of the coalition against Iraq that took months to assemble, tells us that he is at work on putting together a coalition that will attack international terrorism at its "root and branch." From Europe, our NATO allies declare that the attack on the United States was an attack on them. One gets the sense of the powerful arm of the West's military coiling to strike.

It will be a different sort of war, one in much-changed global realities. Gone are the days when we could build missile after missile to protect ourselves. Gone are the easy assurances that no one would be so insane or suicidal as to attack a great American population center, no government would ever be so foolish or self-destructive as to connive in such an assault. Gone, too, are the days when we could be satisfied with responding to a terrorist outrage with a raid or two against a Libya, Sudan or Afghanistan. We're in this for the long haul, and as Bush and Powell have made abundantly clear, we're going after the nations that host and nurture terrorists. We have enough experience to know that if we take down only the individual terrorists and not the network that supports them, then no American city or life is safe.

The early stages of the investigation point to a Middle Eastern origin of the terror attack. The suspect passengers have been identified as Saudi and Egyptian nationals, at least one a known supporter of Osama bin Laden. We're going to learn a lot in the days ahead about the Arab nations that call themselves moderate and, like Egypt, are beneficiaries of generous U.S. aid. We hear Arab and Palestinian leaders issuing statements deploring the attack, but the celebrations in the streets of the West Bank and Cairo tell another story, one of officially sanctioned virulent anti-Americanism. Pardon us for suspecting that the Arab nations hope bin Laden, if he indeed is the culprit, never falls into our hands out of fear he will reveal the support he has received from them.

We're starting to hear the sentiment that perhaps the terrible carnage in New York and Washington will produce talks in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That would be the wrong result. It would give the terrorists a unconscionable victory: Look, we kill Americans and they force the Israelis to negotiate. That must not happen. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has laid down the criteria for a resumption of talks. Yasser Arafat must end his violence; let him do that and the Israelis will talk with him. As for the horrors of New York and Washington, that's an issue we must settle separately with our military might.

-- Anonymous, September 13, 2001