Our View: We must think the unthinkable

By: North County Times - Editorial | Saturday, June 19, 2004 8:37 PM PDT ∞

"...Then shall war's signal unto us be given -- to them at sea, by sudden flash of torch, to the ambush, by the cry, 'Come forth the Horse!,' when, unexpecting, sleep the sons of Troy."

--- Odysseus to the Achaeans. Quintus Smyrnaeus, The Fall of Troy 12.25

Searching for individual or departmental responsibility in the after-the-fact happenings in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001 can be a waste of precious time.

Unfortunately, that is how is playing out to the public eye.

For one, the issue is not about the city of New York or Washington, D.C.

For another, it's not about what mix of agencies did or didn't do, or where they were or weren't that Tuesday.

Nor is it about people who did or didn't react or act, right down to the minute and seconds.

All of the above have been cast in shades and shadows of blame this week, stirring presumptions of fault, wrongdoing, censure, condemnation.

Unfortunately, that is the atmosphere evolving with the release of details from the interim report of the independent bipartisan commission investigating the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

This is not to disregard the value and importance of reconstructing the scene of any crime or accident. We need to know all that. And we will, and we will learn. And next time -- heavens forbid there be a next time -- we will better "fight the many phantoms" Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said we encountered in the chaos of 9-11.

The intense focus, at least so far in the hearings, has been on a relative form of minutia, things immediately before and after the first murderous attack in history of the continental United States of America.

All hell erupted on our land that day. What we need to know more fully and faster than anything we learned about this week are the details of meticulous planning and execution that was so utterly transparent to our country during the years up to and through Sept. 10, 2001.

We, by most measures the greatest nation on the planet, got duped.

We were ---- still are ---- the modern world's "unsuspecting sleeping sons of Troy." We awakened too late to a stratagem as cunning as the legendary Trojan Horse that brought down the impenetrable ancient metropolis that was Troy. Our giant buildings collapsed before our eyes in a high concept, low technology, remarkably devised act of war we hadn't imagined possible.

That is what is so worrisome about the news of this week.

Good, after-the-fact analysis can help us learn how to react.

Good, even better before-the-fact investigation and analysis, even to the point of modeling the most horrible of scenarios, ought to be this country's highest priority.

Author Gene Franks, in writing about war, referred on Sept. 16, 2001, to a small book published in 1967, entitled "Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace." It is the work of a select and secret group of 15 trusted minds summoned during the Kennedy administration to tackle the question whether the world could continue without war.

Franks cites what he calls the shocking and disheartening assumption of the report, "...that war is not a function of political systems, but that societies and political entities are formed for the purpose of waging war...that war itself is the basic social system ... which has governed most human societies of record, as it is today."

We are facing an invisible enemy for whom there is no geographic target. Our country must be committed far beyond that which has happened, to relentlessly theorize and conceptualize what could happen.

Because we face an enemy formed for the purpose of waging war.

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