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Now that another Sept. 11 has passed and we're starting
the third year of the War on Terrorism,
you have to
wonder where this is going, since there's no clear
definition of victory.
For instance, if the United States goes to war with Iraq, and that country's dictator vanishes and his soldiers melt away, while coalition troops pretty much come and go as they please and an American satrap operates in Baghdad -- it's pretty clear that a military victory has been achieved. Or has it?
Once upon a time, we could define victory. The U.S. was clearly victorious in the Mexican War, World Wars I and II, Grenada, Panama and even the Cold War.
But when our leaders propose war against something other than a geographic polity -- such as a War on Poverty, Drugs, or Terrorism -- how can we know if we've won? Even if al Qaeda were demolished, there are scores of other terrorist groups operating on this planet, from Chechnya to Peru to the Aryan compounds in the backwoods of our own country.
Besides, our definition of terrorist
is often
rather murky, as with the nun-killing contras in Nicaragua
who were once deemed freedom fighters
by the Reagan
administration, or the Afghani freedom fighters
who
became the Taliban.
Add that up, and announcing a War on Terrorism
looks more like declaring perpetual war,
since
there's no way to know when you've won. If years go by
without a terrorist attack, then our leaders can say,
See what we've accomplished, and we need to stay the
course.
And if there are more attacks, then the
warriors can say that we need to expand our efforts.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, I briefly entertained hopes that the Bushites would act quickly and decisively to make America more secure.
Instead of finding ways to bail out the airline industry, for instance, they could have invested in Amtrak to provide reliable and comfortable transportation. While it's possible to imagine some hijackers taking a train and 200 passengers hostage, it's impossible to imagine how the bad guys could steer a train into a building to kill thousands of people.
Further, trains are the most fuel-efficient means of transportation, and for that matter, they don't even have to run on petroleum-based fuels. Reducing America's demand for imported oil would make us less dependent on the vagaries of world politics, especially in the Mideast, and we wouldn't be on the end of a long and vulnerable supply line.
Along that line, the Bushites could have pointed out that most of the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, and could well have been financed by oil money.
Thus it should be every American's patriotic duty to cut petroleum consumption. Fuel-economy standards should be raised, cities would be encouraged to improve their mass transportation, and our towns and neighborhoods would have such assistance and expertise as they needed to become congenial to pedestrians and bicyclists.
Instead of ridiculing the French, our leaders would point to 12-mpg spewts at shopping malls, and point out that these things have their uses, but suburban commuting isn't one of them.
Federal agricultural policies would support small market farms close to town, thus making our food supply less vulnerable to disruption than it is now -- consider the immense transportation system currently required to get a steer from a Gunnison pasture to the Gunnison McDonald's,
Federal energy policies would recognize that the current electric grids, based on big centralized power plants, are vulnerable. So policies would favor co-generation, local wind turbines, solar-cells and small hydro plants. There would be occasional glitches, of course, but they wouldn't paralyze big pieces of the continent.
Americans would be encouraged to practice the traditional American virtues of thrift and self-reliance.
After all, there's a war on, and it shouldn't be just the soldiers and their families who contribute to the cause.
A safer America could have been started two years ago, after we became tragically aware of our real vulnerabilities.
But that's not the course the Bushites took. Instead,
we've chosen to fight terrorism, and thereby we inspire
more fanatical young wannabe freedom fighters
to
join what now appears to be a perpetual war against us.
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