September 11, 2001

As I write this, no one has yet given even an informal estimate of the death toll in today's terror attack, save that it will be horriffic, as it surely well be - certainly in the thousands; we'll be lucky if it is less than ten thousand.  Nor has anyone given any more than unofficial suggestions of who did it - suspicion focusing, no surprise, on Osama bin Ladin.  It is well to be cautious; we all initially assumed Middle Eastern terrorists in the Oklahoma City attack, which turned out to be our own home-grown neonazis.

That said, every likelihood right now seems to be that it was indeed bin Ladin - it has the hallmarks of his operations.  Someone on television described it aptly as "low-tech but high-concept," and a friend equally aptly described it as audacious.

I will not spend more time on the horror of this, or the grotesqueness of the ideology that makes war by these methods against these targets.  Those things are obvious.  If done in the name of Islam (as at the moment I presume along with everyone else) they have done no service to God or to any prophet. 

Instead I will say what may seem offensive, but friends I talked to today - including one in New York City - said the same thing:  We must respect this enemy for his ability, even as we shudder in horror at his use of that ability.  This attack was very well thought out, carefully planned in every dimension to maximize shock and devastation.  The airliners took off within minutes of each other, and were hijacked only when all were in the air.  All were on transcontinental flights - maximizing the fuel load aboard, while avoiding the somewhat greater security measures that might have been taken for overseas flights.  Three of the four were directed successfully to their targets.  The two that hit the World Trade Center towers probably achieved a level of carnage that is only the barest half-step below that of a nuclear attack.

Apparently the planes were hijacked using only knives.  This we learned from the late Barbara Olson, frequent TV talking head and wife of Solicitor General Olson, who was a passenger aboard the plane that hit the Pentagon.  She was not one of my favorite people, but at the end I must credit her with great presence of mind for calling her husband by cell phone from the doomed plane, providing information that will be useful in hunting down the perpetrators.  Requiscat in pace.

Knives, to turn civilian airliners into flying bombs.  That is about as low-tech as it gets, but also about as effective as it gets.  In the abstract I think we all knew that this bad-novel scenario - a jetliner full of people slammed deliberately into a target packed with thousands - was possible, but it was not something we really believed in.  I know I didn't.  And I certainly never thought of something like this being so well coordinated, involving multiple planes directed at carefully chosen targets.  We are not dealing with small-timers here, but with the first 21st-century war, directed by a brilliant and resourceful general.

At that the perpetrators have miscalculated and overstepped - not the first time that mad geniuses have done so; the last century offered a couple of notable examples.  The mass murder of a hundred people evokes shock and horror: disarming responses, and precisely the responses on which terror thrives.  The mass murder (probably) of thousands evokes, however, a response that goes beyond simple shock and horror.  There is first a kind of blinking disbelief at the sheer enormity of what has been done.  But as the reality sinks in, there is something more: the terrible calm realization that is the seedbed of resolve.

I sense that already in the American people's response to today.  You could see the beginning of it even in the televised scenes of New Yorkers streaming away from Lower Manhattan in their thousands, curiously calm because this was and is so serious that nothing short of calm is an adequate response.  We have been hit hard - hard enough to grasp intuitively that it calls for a serious response. 

Such a response will be forthcoming.  I hope both swift and sure, but most importantly sure.

Okay, my emotional impulse (probably like yours) is to flatten Kabul, or Baghdad, or wherever, into crater glass.  But we already know in head and heart that that is not the response called for.  It does no particular good to visit martyrdom, even en masse, on all those young men so without hope that martyrdom already looks good to them.

The ones to visit martyrdom upon are the leaders, who never expect or intended martyrdom for themselves - only for others.  Identifying them, tracking them down, and bringing them to justice - or, as need may be, sending them to a higher justice - may take time.  We have plenty of time.  We can, should, will take as much of it as we need. 

This sort of fanaticism has appeared before in the history of the world, and sad to say it will appear again.  The only long term solution has always been to outlive and outlast it.  We must and will do so - and we will still be here, when the authors of today's horror are footnotes in history.

-- Rick Robinson

Last revised 11/07/2006 ... by RM Robinson

Email me: Lyonesse@compuserve.com

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