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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Runner who wrote (13044)	12/7/2001 1:56:03 AM
From: maceng2	Respond to of 281500

One Sunday in 1941 America remembers that other bolt from the blue George W. Bush will not be at Pearl Harbor today. He will be on the eastern seaboard at another great naval base, that of Norfolk, Virginia, addressing US forces aboard the USS Enterprise. His speech will deal with the battles at hand, and ahead. He is preparing a commemorative address, but it will be delivered on Tuesday, three months after the terrorist attacks of September 11. Most Americans — even, or perhaps particularly, the elderly survivors of the Japanese attack that laid waste the Pacific Fleet and brought America into the second world war — will understand this deliberate emphasis on the present. Yet Franklin D. Roosevelt’s prediction, after Pearl Harbor, that “always will our nation remember the character of the onslaught against us” is particularly valid today. September 11 has put Americans back in touch with that “date which will live in infamy”. These two devastating attacks, 60 years apart, are not comparable. One was an act of aggression against a military target, on American soil but far from the mainland, by a country which had already invaded China and which, the United States was reluctantly concluding, it would have eventually to confront. September’s slaughter of civilians had no basis in strategic calculation — or miscalculation. Its aim was to humiliate American power, destroy its confidence and set Islam against the West, by showing the world’s mightiest power to be impotent to protect its citizens against tiny bands of fanatical plotters, barely armed other than with the lethal weapon of their readiness to die. But the impact on Americans has been comparable; shock, then anger and a great patriotic determination that an unfamiliar menace must and will be defeated. What these two events have in common is that they have united the nation as no others in its history; America is never stronger than when it feels vulnerable. They have also, to an extent that Osama bin Laden did not bargain for, aligned the rest of the world on America’s side. They have, embarrassingly, one other shared characteristic: they required months of meticulous preparation. America, and its friends and allies, have once again paid heavily for failures to piece together and interpret the available intelligence. Pearl Harbor tipped the scales in a war already raging, giving a reluctant, isolationist US no choice but to take up arms in a struggle that, Roosevelt had told them before Japan struck, was about “freedom from fear”. This struggle is frustrating for civilians because there cannot be a clearcut military victory, and because it is so much less clear what individuals can do. Blood banks have been oversubscribed and so, in gestures that do credit to the American dream, have charity drives. But people are being asked to spend for victory, not dig for it. Then, American children were sent out to collect old household utensils to be melted down as scrap, and mothers who had never worked manned production lines. This does not feel like war. But it is none the less vital to prevail. Now, as then, fear has ranged itself against freedom. thetimes.co.uk