HoustonChron

Sept. 13, 2001, 6:13PM

Memo to U.S.: Forget rules in this war

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

JERUSALEM -- As I restlessly lay awake early Wednesday, with CNN on my TV and dawn breaking over the holy places of Jerusalem, my ear somehow latched onto a statement made by the U.S. transportation secretary, Norman Mineta, about the new precautions that would be put in place at U.S. airports in the wake of Tuesday's unspeakable terrorist attacks: There will be no more curbside check-in, he said. I suddenly imagined a group of terrorists somewhere here in the Middle East, sipping coffee, also watching CNN and laughing hysterically: "Hey boss, did you hear that? We just blew up Wall Street and the Pentagon and their response is no more curbside check-in?"

Does my country really understand that this is World War III? And if this attack was the Pearl Harbor of World War III, it means there is a long, long war ahead.

And this Third World War does not pit us against another superpower. It pits us -- the world's only superpower and quintessential symbol of liberal, free-market, Western values -- against all the super-empowered angry men and women out there. Many of these super-empowered angry people hail from failing states in the Muslim and Third World. They do not share our values, they resent America's influence over their lives, politics and children, not to mention our support for Israel, and they often blame America for the failure of their societies to master modernity.

What makes them super-empowered, though, is their genius at using the networked world, the Internet and the very high technology they hate to attack us. So what is required to fight a war against such people in such a world? To start with, we as Americans will never be able to penetrate such small groups, often based on family ties, who live in places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan or Lebanon's wild Bekaa Valley. The only people who can penetrate these shadowy and ever-mutating groups, and deter them, are their own societies. And even they can't do it consistently. So give the CIA a break.

Israeli officials will tell you that the only time they have had real quiet and real control over the suicide bombers and radical Palestinian groups, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, is when Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority tracked them, jailed them or deterred them.

So then the question becomes: What does it take for us to get the societies that host terrorist groups to truly act against them?

First we have to prove that we are serious, and that we understand that many of these terrorists hate our existence, not just our policies.

The people who planned Tuesday's bombings combined world-class evil with world-class genius to devastating effect. And unless we are ready to put our best minds to work combating them -- the World War III Manhattan project -- in an equally daring, unconventional and unremitting fashion, we're in trouble. Because while this may have been the first major battle of World War III, it may be the last one that involves only conventional, non-nuclear weapons.

Second, we have been allowing a double game to go on with our Middle East allies for years, and that has to stop. A country like Syria has to decide: Does it want a Hezbollah embassy in Damascus or an American one? If it wants a U.S. embassy, then it cannot play host to a rogue's gallery of terrorist groups.

Third, we need to have a serious and respectful dialogue with the Muslim world and its political leaders about why many of its people are falling behind. The fact is, no region in the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, has fewer freely elected governments than the Arab-Muslim world, which has none. Why?

These are some of the issues we will have to address as we fight World War III. It will be a long war against a brilliant and motivated foe. When I remarked to an Israeli military official what an amazing technological feat it was for the terrorists to hijack the planes and then fly them directly into the most vulnerable spot in each building, he pooh-poohed me.

"It's not that difficult to learn how to fly a plane once it's up in the air," he said. "And remember, they never had to learn how to land."

No, they didn't. They only had to destroy. We, by contrast, have to fight in a way that is effective without destroying the very open society we are trying to protect. We have to fight hard and land safely. We have to fight the terrorists as if there were no rules and preserve our open society as if there were no terrorists. It won't be easy. It will require our best strategists, our most creative diplomats and our bravest soldiers.

Semper Fi.

Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.

-- Anonymous, September 14, 2001

Answers

Frankly, bombing those areas back to the stone age seems the easiest solution.

Let them remain goat herders, if they can find any goats after we're done...

I say we give up trying to deal with those types of people. Yank the phone lines from them, stop all technology from getting there, and put up a wall around them so no one gets in or out.

If there is anyone left in after we're done...

I refuse to apologize to anyone for being American. The rest of the world is just going to have to get used to the fact that we are here and we don't want to be f--ked with.

No doubt of that, after we're done...

-- Anonymous, September 14, 2001

I'm seriously considering taking out citizenship after all these years. Don't push me, though! Need to be absolutely sure first.

-- Anonymous, September 14, 2001