....The world will at first disbelieve but it will come to believe...
CNN is now reporting that, according to cellphone reports, the men on Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, voted to overpower the hijackers that took over the plane. Presumably, the resulting struggle caused the plane to crash in an unpopulated area. Whether they decided to do this with the knowledge that they were all going to die anyway will perhaps never be known, but this is the kind of remarkable heroism that explains why America always wins. America is truly worth dying for.
I agree with you about the declaration of war. Though unprecedented and guaranteed to throw legal scholars into uncharted waters, this is the best framework for determining the new rules of engagement for the new type of war against a new type of enemy that does not have the moral courage to distinguish between civilian and military targets.
Let there be no ambiguity, folks, we are at war. This is one that will not be won with simple carpet bombings, but one that will be ultimately won by the human spirit.
Flight 93 flight path - Pennsylvania crash
nytimes.com
Catastrophic Terrorism:
Elements of a National Policy (1998)
ksg.harvard.edu
Foreword: Preventive Defense
Through more than four decades of Cold War, American national security strategy was difficult to implement but easy to understand. America was set on a clear course to contain Soviet expansionism anywhere in the world, all the while building a formidable arsenal of nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union from using military force against it or its allies. Now, with the end of the Cold War, the underlying rationale for that strategy—the threat from the Soviet Union—has disappeared. What strategy should replace it? Much depends on finding the correct answer to this question.
The world survived three global wars this century. The first two resulted in tens of millions of deaths, but the third—the Cold War—would have been even more horrible than the others had deterrence failed. These three wars trace a path that leads to the strategy needed for the post-Cold War era.
At the end of the First World War, the victorious European allies sought revenge and reparations; what they got was a massive depression and another world war. The United States sought "normalcy" and isolation; what it got was total war and leadership in winning it. Because it failed to prevent and then to deter Germany’s aggression, America was forced to mobilize a second time to defeat it.
At the end of the Second World War, America initially chose a strategy based on prevention. Vowing not to repeat the mistakes made after World War I, the Truman administration created the Marshall Plan, which sought to assist the devastated nations of Europe, friends and foes alike, to rebuild. The Marshall Plan and other examples of the preventive defense strategy, aimed at preventing the conditions that would lead to a future world war, were an outstanding success in Western Europe and in Japan.
But the Soviet Union turned down the Marshall Plan and, instead, persisted in a program of expansion, trying to take advantage of the weakened condition of most of the countries of Europe. The resulting security problem was clearly articulated by George Kennan, who forecast that the wartime cooperation with the Soviet Union would be replaced with a struggle for the heart of Europe and that the United States should prepare for a protracted period of confrontation. Kennan’s analysis was accepted by the Truman administration, which then formulated a strategy that would get us through the Cold War: deterring another global war while containing the Soviet Union’s demonstrated expansionist ambitions. Deterrence supplanted prevention: there was no other choice.
Even deterrence was a departure from earlier American military strategy. The United States had twice previously risen to defeat aggression, but it had not maintained the peacetime military establishment or the engagement in the world to deter World Wars I or II. Marshall and other defense leaders around Truman created the peacetime posture and new security institutions required. In time, as George Kennan had forecast, the Soviet Union disintegrated because of the limitations of its political and economic systems. Deterrence worked.
The result is a world today seemingly without a major threat to the United States, and the U.S. is now enjoying a period of peace and influence as never before. But while this situation is to be savored by the public, foreign policy and defense leaders should not be complacent. This period of an absence of threat challenges these leaders to find the vision and foresight to act strategically, even when events and imminent threats do not compel them to do so.
To understand the dangers and opportunities that will define our nation’s strategy in the new era, we must see the post-Cold War world the way George Marshall looked upon Europe after World War II, and return to prevention. In essence, we now have another chance to realize Marshall’s vision: a world not of threats to be deterred, but a world united in peace, freedom, and prosperity. To realize this vision, we should return to Marshall’s strategy of preventive defense.
Preventive Defense is a concept of defense strategy for the United States in the post-Cold War Era. It stresses the need to anticipate security dangers which, if mismanaged, have the potential to re-create Cold War-scale threats to U.S. interests and survival. The foci of Preventive Defense are: proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, catastrophic terrorism, "loose nukes" and other military technology from the former Soviet Union, Russia’s post-Cold War security identity, and the peaceful rise of China.
Preventive Defense is the most important mission of national security leaders and of the defense establishment. They must dedicate themselves to Preventive Defense while they deter lesser but existing threats—in Iraq and North Korea—and conduct peacekeeping and humanitarian missions—in Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda, and so on—where aggression occurs but where American vital interests are not directly threatened........
Conclusion
Our group’s deliberations started from the premise that catastrophic terrorism poses a first-order threat to our nation’s future. We then asked, in effect: if we had a serious national policy to deal with this threat, what would our government be organized and able to do? In 1940 and 1941 the U.S. government imagined what kind of forces it would have in order to wage a global war. The answers were so far beyond existing reality that we can imagine all the wry smiles and shaking heads that must have been seen in Washington offices as the planning papers made their rounds. Similar cycles occurred in the Cold War. For example, the notion of an intelligence system founded on photographic surveillance from the upper atmosphere, or outer space, seemed outrageously far-fetched in 1954, when the U-2 program was born. The films and cameras alone seemed to be an overwhelming hurdle. A few years later the U-2s were flying; six years later satellites were doing the job. Similar stories can be told about the strange and remarkable history of intercontinental missile guidance or about how the U.S. and its allies developed the capability to move more than a half-million troops and thousands of armored fighting vehicles and their supporting infrastructure to the Persian Gulf within a few months, from both Europe and North America.
Our government can deal with new challenges. But first we must imagine success. Then we must organize ourselves to attain it |
