Just two days after terrorists attacked the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Congress moved to put the United States on the road to war.
In a joint closed-door meeting late Sept. 13 to discuss options, lawmakers on Capitol Hill agreed to authorize the use of force in whatever fashion the Pentagon deems necessary.
The use-of-force authorization from Congress is something less than a formal declaration of war, but it authorizes President Bush to use military force against “nations, organizations or persons” that he determines “planned, committed or aided” the terrorist attacks. Also authorized is the use of military force in pre-emptive strikes to stop future acts of terrorism.
Meanwhile, Bush approved a Pentagon request Sept. 14 to call as many as 50,000 reservists to active duty for port operations, medical, engineer and general civil support, and homeland defense.
Pentagon officials said the first call-ups could come within days. The services identified initial requirements for 35,500 reservists: Army, 10,000; Air Force, 13,000; Navy, 3,000; Marine Corps, 7,500; and Coast Guard, 2,000.
The Sept. 11 attacks — which turned passenger jets into human suicide bombs and killed thousands — could be a galvanizing event for the military as well as for an entire generation of Americans.
U.S. servicemen and women around the world are at the highest state of alert. Military movements now take place in utmost secrecy. Allies are lining up in support. Young Americans are seeking out recruiting stations. Those already in uniform speak angrily in smoky Pentagon corridors of bombing those responsible “back to the Stone Age.”
But national leaders warn that winning this war won’t be easy. Rather than quick strikes with cruise missiles and smart bombs, President Bush and other senior leaders say the military — as well as the rest of the nation and the world — will need to brace for a long, tough campaign against a shadowy enemy that may bring even more casualties.
“They were acts of war,” Bush told the nation the day after suicide terrorists hurled passenger planes into the hearts of New York City and Washington, D.C.
Americans too young to have lived through World War II say this is their generation’s Pearl Harbor. But unlike the Dec. 7, 1941, surprise blitz by Japan, this attack was not accompanied by the president immediately seeking a formal declaration of war from Congress.
The United States does not stand alone. For the first time, NATO has invoked Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty: An attack against one, if proven to be from an outside country, will be considered an attack against all 19 members.
“We are appalled by these barbaric acts and condemn them unconditionally,” said the 46 members of NATO’s Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council in a joint statement.
Robert Hunter, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, called the alliance vote “unprecedented” and said it would set the groundwork for U.S. retaliation by ensuring overflight rights, logistics support and full cooperation from allies.
“It more or less licenses us to do whatever we need to,” Hunter said. “We’ve got to get those suckers. Our credibility depends on it.”
“It’s not just a war against the United States,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sept. 12. “It’s a war against civilization. It’s a war against all nations that believe in democracy.”
Powell, speaking on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” was the first senior administration official to strongly state that the nation was on a warlike footing, even if it had not yet met the legal definition as described in the Constitution.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, meeting Sept. 13 with reporters in a Pentagon that still reeked of smoke, said “the whole civilized world” was siding against those responsible for the attack. He said the Pentagon was laying the groundwork for a sustained military campaign, if required.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also spoke of war. “We are, in a sense, seeing the definition of a new battlefield in the world, a 21st-century battlefield, and it is a different kind of conflict,” he said Sept. 12.
Other nations have had to live with the constant threat of terror, though such fears are, he said, “in a major sense, new for this country.”
Americans have quickly rallied around the flag. In workplaces across the nation, Sept. 14 unofficially was declared America Day and U.S. Pride Day, with citizens urged to wear red, white and blue.
Spontaneous singing of “God Bless America” was common. Americans lined up to give blood — and, in the first day, to buy gas at bootleg prices of up to $5 a gallon before law enforcement officials forced filling stations to return to pre-attack prices. However, the commodities market in New York, where world oil prices are set, was blown up by the terrorists, so the future price of gas remains unclear.
Emotions run hot
Wars, undeclared or not, also bring out an ugliness beyond misshapen body bags and growing casualty lists.
A generation ago, after Pearl Harbor, Asian-Americans were targets of racial hatred, and thousands were thrown into internment camps. A generation before that, it was German-Americans who faced ethnic hate during World War I.
This time, Arab-Americans are reporting widespread threats and acts of vandalism as the FBI homes in on the identities of suspected Arab terrorists.
“Muslims stand with all other Americans who, on this sad day, feel a sense of tremendous grief and loss,” Muslim-American leaders said in an open letter to Bush.
Saudi Arabia, whose government is based on Islamic religious law and which uses the Quran as its constitution, condemned the Sept. 11 attacks in a message issued through the State Department.
Across the world, people feared the attacks could be just the first salvo of a protracted conflict.
“We are at war and we just lost a battle,” said Rep. Charlie Norwood, R-Ga.
Rep. Bob Stump, R-Ariz., the House Armed Services Committee chairman, said the attacks “served notice that the United States is not yet fully prepared to meet the challenges of what must be considered a new era of international vulnerability.”
In a Sept. 12 meeting with his national security team, Bush said a war on terrorism would not be won quickly. “This battle will take time and resolve,” he said. “But make no mistake about it: We will win.”
Americans “need to know that we are facing a different enemy than we have ever faced,” he said. “This enemy hides in shadows and has no regard for human life. But it won’t be able to hide forever.”
Some lawmakers said it is long past time to get serious about terrorism.
“If we had answered the lesser terrorist attacks of recent decades in a more forceful way, we would not be paying this heavy price,” said Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga.
“This act of terrorism may just be the beginning,” said Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, ranking Re-publican on and former chairman of the emerging threats panel of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Roberts noted that terrorism experts have been warning that it was not a matter of if terrorists would attack the United States, but a matter of when.
“When is now,” Roberts said.
Long-standing fears
Terrorism may have been brought home for lawmakers by the Sept. 11 attacks, but the threat has been on the minds of military officials for years.
In May, State Department officials warned a House panel that the American public seemed to have a false sense of security. Terrorist groups, officials said, were getting more unpredictable and less susceptible to international pressure.
Anthony Cordesman, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the threat of massive terrorist attacks on U.S. soil has gone “from theory to practice … in one horrible moment. We now see that such threats are all too real.”
Cordesman, a former adviser to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said an immediate goal should be to identify the culprits and “to launch a devastating retaliation.”
A second step, he said, is to make defense against terrorism a higher priority. “We must act to turn homeland defense from an area of research and study to an effective reality,” he said.
McCain, a Senate Armed Services Committee member, said he hopes the terrorist attacks give emphasis to efforts to move the military from a force primarily shaped to fight large-scale wars overseas to one that addresses more likely threats.
Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said it will take “more than tanks and aircraft carriers to provide our security in the future. Our military must be able to deal with a broader range of threats.”
Conventional military power will not be enough to deter the new threats of the 21st century, he said. “We need to reorganize our federal agencies and armed forces so we are better prepared to deal with the complicated security environment in which we now live,” he said.
Thornberry also wants to create a new federal agency to oversee domestic threats, an idea recommended by the bipartisan Commission on National Security in the 21st Century in a report issued in March.
Another idea, floated by Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., is the deployment of military troops to guard U.S. airports, something she said is done in other countries.
Michele Flournoy, a defense official under President Clinton, noted that El-Al, the Israeli airline, has an undercover military counterterrorist expert on every flight. She conceded that Americans may not be ready for such an “extremist” idea.
But times could be changing. The United States spent the 1990s trying to decide whether to get involved in other peoples’ wars. Now, other peoples’ wars have become our own.
Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., said the United States is embarked on a “gray war against the faceless specter of terrorism.”
“We won World War I, II and the Cold War,” he said. “We will prevail here also.”
