Everyone has an opinion about Israel’s tactics in its Catch-22 fight against terrorists. But American Jews might more effectively press their opinions about the American war on essentially the same terrorist network, which cows more moderate Arabs, and may well determine the outcome of Israel’s war. The American war is in some trouble, the nature of which is revealed by looking at differences between the war that began on 9/11 and the war that began on 12/7, 60 years before.
The struggle into which America was thrust on Dec. 7, 1941 ultimately defeated Hitler, saved our civilization and gave rise to Israel. The war that began with another sneak attack on Sept. 11, 2001 promised to save our civilization from another mad sector of the world — and to help Israel survive. But some of us who were here on 12/7 (I had finished my infantry training two days earlier) are worried about the nature of the differences.
Six months after 12/7, meat, butter and gas were coupon-rationed, the entire crop of California wine grapes was diverted to the production of raisins, Major League Baseball was about to go into eclipse and soldiers were training with wooden guns because of the scarcity of arms. Certainly, that is not the scene today. But those differences are not important in themselves; many simply result from the fact that 9/11 was preceded by a long period of unprecedented prosperity, not a deep economic depression.
Far more significant are the revolutionary advances in military technology. So far, America has been able to fight this war with a lot of smart bombs and a few well-trained volunteer warriors. However, these technological advances have a more sinister side. For more than half a century, we have gone without a world war partly because we were under the shadow of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. Weapons of mass destruction were in the hands of relatively responsible governments that at least did not want their nations to commit suicide, and therefore muted their conflicts with each other. Now those weapons are becoming available to terrorist groups and rogue governments contemptuous of human life as well as human rights. That is the nub of this war’s urgency for America, just as Hitler’s successful sweep across most of Europe provided the urgency for World War II.
But most troubling is an apparent difference in America’s prevalent state of mind about this war. After 12/7, there were no well-known “semi-apologists,” as there are now, proclaiming that our enemies are naughty but their actions understandable because of America’s bad behavior. No one after 12/7 was publicly saying that global multiculturalism required us to respect Hitler’s domestic values. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that we were not just in the business of avenging 12/7, but had an opportunity to reclaim and extend the democratic world, Americans largely understood and vowed to stay the course. Today, at best, few seem to be listening when President Bush says we have an opportunity not just to avenge 9/11 but also to extend democracy and stability in a new sphere of the world — if we stay the course.
About nine out of 10 Americans still say they want us to finish the job in Afghanistan, but far fewer say we should go back in the future to root out terrorists that have regrouped. Fewer still are enthusiastic about our taking action to pull the claws of a few ill-intentioned rogue states in the Middle East that produce weapons of mass destruction and will continue to spawn terrorist groups. The San Francisco Chronicle headlined a recent column “Anti-terrorism War Borders on Imperialism.”
Too many Americans don’t understand this war, along with too many European states and too many American Jews. To state it plainly, this is not just a war against Al Qaida but against those sectors of radical and rogue Islamism that threaten all Muslim states, all universal standards of human rights and all possibilities of world peace. It is against those who have rejected all negotiation of differences that were offered in good faith.
Jews are reluctant to countenance war, but they have done so.
One biblical prophet called for Jews to beat their swords into plowshares; another biblical prophet — in a different situation — called for Jews to beat their plowshares into swords. As Golda Meier pointed out, our pursuit of peace stops at the point of suicide. Israelis have absorbed that lesson, as did Americans after 12/7. But many have apparently not absorbed it thoroughly enough after 9/11. Perhaps we will have to wait for some catastrophe more awakening than the attack on the Twin Towers. And then it may be too late.