September 11, 2001 was the worst day of all of our lives. In
that awful sense, it brought us together in a new way. The
images that haunt me--the doomed woman stretched to her
limit, leaning out of a window above the flames; the dark
shadow that seems to cover the second plane as it races
across the skyline filled with people just like me; the dust-
caked firemen, their eyes dead with fatigue, flashing with
determination; and the cellphones, those voices calling to us
from the very edge of mystery and death. All of those things,
and so much more.
So much more.
But now, as it becomes clear that we have lost on the order
of three thousand or more Americans in these attacks, and
must now face months or years of economic distruption, now
we must ask ourselves, what next?
The model of the world that we have been using since the
Nuremberg trials marked the end of World War II is the so-
called "criminal model," wherein the guilty are found, tried
and punished. Under the criminal model, we investigate
international crimes, sifting through the evidence until we
find who is actually guilty of instigation. Then we take that
person or persons to trial and incarcerate or execute them. If
we are unable to do this, we carry out carefully restrained
military strikes to punish, and hopefully kill, the guilty
parties.
There are three thousand Americans who lie now at our
feet, their burned and brutalized bodies testament to the
effectiveness of this approach.
We need a new approach, and a new way of thinking about
that approach. The military model looks at a problem like
this in a completely different way. First and most important,
it sees the problem as finite, and begins by visualizing, in
the end, that there will be final victory and beyond it,
safety.
The criminal model simply punishes the miscreant, and waits
for the next crime. The criminal model seeks, essentially, to
teach the wrongdoer that his acts are going to endanger him.
It doesn't work in society. New criminals commit new crimes
every day, and they always will. Because we know it doesn't
work, we isolate criminals in prisons.
But we cannot isolate entire societies, and we cannot make
them our friends. A British diplomat I knew years ago once
said to me, 'you Americans always want to be liked. It's a
dangerous desire, in this world, and it weakens you.'
He was right on all counts, and it is time and past time that
we worried about being liked.
The military model is not pretty. But it will keep the mothers
and the daughters, the fathers and the sons safe from these
monstrous crimes that keep being committed against us.
If we do not change to the military model, and right now, I
will tell you what the next terrorist act will be, because it's
perfectly clear: it will involve the detonation of a nuclear
weapon somewhere, probably in Washington. Why am I so
certain of this? Because many tons of fissionable enriched
uranium and plutonium have gone missing on this planet
over the past twenty years, and that missing material has
only one purpose: it is used in the making of bombs.
Why do I think this. Unknowncountry.com ran a story
months
ago about this problem. To read that story,
click
here.
I fear this so much because I had a prophetic vision of it that
I included in my book The Secret School. I would give my
life, happily, for my prophecy to be wrong.
We are in a race right now, a race against the next great
terrorist act, which I fear is going to be nuclear.
When will it come? Who will do it?
The first question matters a great deal. The second one is
the wrong kind of a question to ask, just as the basic
question of the criminal model--who is guilty--is not useful
in the context of war.
We must accept that we are in a war, and it is a war of
survival. We must get beyond statements like the one the
president made last night, "the United States will hunt down
and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts."
That is not where we need to begin. We need to begin by
recognizing who the enemy is, and gaining victory over that
enemy. In this case, the enemy is Iraq, Iran, Lybia, Syria,
Afghanistan, Sudan and the militant elements among the
Palestinians.
However, we do not need to declare war on them all. Rather,
we need to take our cue from the brilliant Roman general
Belisarius, who used the indirect approach to sweep the
barbarians out of Italy and reclaim it for the empire.
The indirect approach targets the key points of resistance
and potential action, and strikes before they can. We don't
need to find the guilty parties, but rather their friends and
supporters. Osama bin Laden today congratulated the
bombers. The government of Afghanistan welcomes him and
supports him. We need to accept that, in a war, you do your
best to identify your enemy, and then you act. It cannot be
a matter of sending in a few cruise missiles the way we did
the last time. It must become impossible for the Afghanistan
of the Taliban to function in the world at all.
We need, at the same time, to batten down the hatches here
at home. Air marshals must be returned to service, so that
terrorists can never know if there will be professional armed
resistance when they try to take over a plane. Cockpit doors
must be bulletproof and bomb proof. Right now, they're
made of paperboard and can be kicked down by a wobbly
drunk.
We need to change the way we gather intelligence. Our
officers must penetrate deep into the enemy's world and his
life, just as spies did in the old days. We need new spies,
people willing to fall in love with the enemy in the peculiar
way of spies, so that all of his secrets will become our own.
Right now, we rely on a vast system of electronic intercepts
to alert us to terrorist acts. This system has been telling us
since the State Department warning of September 7 that
something was up. But it has told us nothing we REALLY
need to know, like who trained the murderers, on which
flight simulators did they learn to pilot jets, or which
airport
personnel belong to the enemy. For that, we need the old
fashioned spy, and we must re-create such a force within the
intelligence community.
It is too easy to defeat electronic surveillance. All it
takes is
a sheet of paper, a pen and a postage stamp. Those simple
weapons will drop you right off America's radar.
The most important thing we can do right now, even more
important than attacking the enemy and his declared
supporters, is to locate that missing nuclear material. We
must do this, and now. If necessary, we must go into
suspect countries and look for it.
We must do everything we can to detect such material
entering our beautiful modern civilization. What if Paris falls
victim, or Venice or Tokyo? Or what if a nuclear hostage
situation develops, and we are asked to surrender our
sovereignity or see Los Angeles or New York or London laid
waste?
This must not be allowed to happen. We of the developed
world are the hope of mankind, and we must have the
courage and the honesty to re-envision ourselves as what we
are: the best educated part of the breed, with a great deal
of wealth, love and essential knowledge to bring to the rest
of the species. If this planet is to be saved, we will save
it. If
human lives are to continue to unfold in happiness, it is
because of the effort of those of us in the countries
that are orderly and functional and just, and the sweat of our
brows, and I don't here mean only first-world countries.
Economic development is not the only measure of will or
courage or ability, and the able everywhere must participate.
We must recognize that we the willing are the crucial edge of
mankind, whose labor brings every human being, no matter
how destitute, how sick or how lost to help, the spark of
promise that he needs to advance his own humanity.
Civilization is about human happiness, and all that is
worthwhile in our lives--our children, our loves, the getting
of wisdom--rests first in the feeling of happiness and
security that is founded in a just state.
Right now, because we have come to imagine that our
enemies are in some way part of our civilization, and thus
accessible to our internal model of crime and punishment,
we have taken a terrible blow, and are on notice that more
and more terrible ones are coming.
On behalf of happiness, America and what is good in this
world, we must again become soldiers, and again fight the
just war.
Where do we go? The military model could not make the
answer more clear. We go where our enemy is beloved, for
there we will find the tender part of him, that is his true
home.
Related Entries:
28-Feb-2007: The 911 Script and the Age of Terror
02-Feb-2006: Was 911 a Hoax?
10-Feb-2003: Official Terror Worse than 'Night and Fog'
28-Oct-2001: Bin Laden's Objective
13-Oct-2001: Conspiracy Theories: Should We Listen Now?
27-Sep-2001: The Terrorism Problem--How We Can Solve It
