[iwar] [fc:World-War,-Cold-War-Won.-Now,-The-Gray-War]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-12 15:30:15
Next message: Tony Bartoletti: "Re: [iwar] Cyber conflict intensifying"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:To-War,-Not-To-Court]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
Message-Id: <200109122230.PAA05125@big.all.net>
To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List)
Organization: I'm not allowed to say
From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com
Precedence: bulk
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 15:30:15 -0700 (PDT)
Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [iwar] [fc:World-War,-Cold-War-Won.-Now,-The-Gray-War]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Washington Post
September 12, 2001
News Analysis
World War, Cold War Won. Now, The Gray War
By David Von Drehle, Washington Post Staff Writer
Sudden, stealthy and brutal, the terrorist strikes in New York and
Washington -- possibly the bloodiest assaults on American soil since the
Civil War -- inevitably brought up the memory of Pearl Harbor. But the
comparison, while potent, is imperfect.
The Japanese sneak attack on the U.S. fleet felt like something new 60 years
ago, but in fact it was quite traditional: a clash of nations and an attempt
to project political power, waged by warriors against warriors.
Yesterday, September 11, 2001 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the
United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by a
faceless, stateless enemy apparently lacking any conventional political
objective. The United States was brought to a warlike state of emergency --
the president operating from secure military bases, all national air traffic
grounded, financial markets closed, offices across the country emptied,
lower Manhattan a sealed disaster zone -- but by evening, no one had taken
responsibility for the attack or connected it to any particular demand or
purpose.
"It is clear now, as it was on Dec. 7, 1941, that the United States is at
war," said former CIA director R. James Woolsey in a televised interview.
"The question is: with whom?"
This is a new kind of war. Yesterday's attack is, however, a sort of
descendant of Pearl Harbor, which pulled the United States into World War
II. That was the last global war, a seeming culmination of conventional
warfare. What began on Dec. 7, 1941, ended with the bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. The atomic age brought along its own new kind of war, the Cold
War.
The United States won that fight after 40 long years. Having prevailed in
the great "hot" and "cold" wars, the bloody muse of history now gives us the
Gray War, a war without fronts, without armies, without rules, in which the
weapon can be any commercial jet and the target any building anywhere.
"We've witnessed a turn in history," said retired ambassador Morton
Abramowitz, former head of intelligence and research at the State
Department, "and in the way the United States will look at the world for a
long time to come."
The 1993 truck bomb attack on the World Trade Center was an opening
skirmish, said Daniel Benjamin, a leading anti-terrorism expert for the
Clinton administration. That bombing, which killed six people, was a failed
attempt to do what yesterday was catastrophically achieved.
"In this new era, the threat is more explicitly religious. There is a desire
to create mass casualties among Americans," he said. A particular strand of
radical Islamic thinking influences certain terrorists, who believe that the
United States is "the corrupting influence in the universe." The point, for
these enemies, is not "to score a political point or to raise the political
influence of one group or country," Benjamin explained. It is to kill
Americans and undermine Americanism.
This, too, feels new. Terrorism has long been the weapon of the weak against
the strong. But the weak had a worldly agenda. John Brown raided Harper's
Ferry to end slavery. The Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914 to
drive the Austro-Hungarian empire out of Serbia. Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin of Israel was shot in 1995 to defeat the Oslo peace process. The
current terror bombings in the Middle East are designed to drive Israel out
of contested territory.
The goals of the new enemy appear to be almost rhetorical, a terror founded
on corpses, but shaped by symbolism. Government officials said yesterday
they suspect that Osama bin Laden was a guiding or sponsoring figure behind
the attack. Bin Laden is known to loathe and resent American influence
around the world.
Yesterday's targets were powerful symbols of that influence. The twin towers
of the World Trade Center represented the financial supremacy of Wall
Street, while the Pentagon is the center of America's world-dominating
military. By damaging, even obliterating, these symbols, the attackers seek
to explode the whole idea of American authority.
A zealot by temperament, a millionaire by inheritance, bin Laden is in one
sense the sort of menace-without-a-country that figured, cartoonishly, in
old James Bond movies. If he was, in fact, the author of the attack, he has
a deeply cinematic imagination. Images wrought by the attack in New York
yesterday were right out of a big-budget Hollywood production, and made the
reality almost impossible to believe.
But real it was, and awful even beyond the jaded sensibility of news
junkies, and remorselessly cold. As far as we know there was not a word
spoken in justification of the attacks. Without negotiation or pity, the
jets smashed with their doomed passengers into their targets.
President Bush spoke of "thousands" dead, meaning that Sept. 11 can compare
with only a few days in American history. At Pearl Harbor, 2,403 people were
killed and 1,178 wounded; of the dead, only 68 were civilians, most of them
killed in Honolulu by errant bombs. On April 17, 1862 -- the nation's worst
day of carnage -- some 23,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed,
wounded or went missing at the Battle of Antietam.
There are some clear, immediate lessons in the twisted symbols the day.
Distance has been conquered, for example. While this idea has been talked
about in glowing terms in recent years -- how the cellphone and the Internet
and the fax machine and the jet have all shrunk the world and lowered its
boundaries -- yesterday's attacks are the dark face of a small world. The
two oceans and the safe borders that gave the United States nearly two
centuries of fortress security mean nothing to the nation's Gray War
enemies.
Or another, even more jarring: We are all soldiers now. Anyone can be
awarded a Purple Heart in this war, or be killed in action. The new warfare
moves the military even further to the periphery and takes the battle to the
civilians.
If the World Trade Center is a symbol, then so can a small-town City Hall be
a symbol -- of American complacency or vulnerability. A person can be killed
for being on a particular airplane, or for being a New York City
firefighter, or for working in a skyscraper. As the president put it in his
speech last night: "The victims were in airplanes or in their offices --
secretaries, business men and women, military and federal workers, moms and
dads, friends and neighbors."
Put these these two facts together, and you might conclude that fighting
this war will be a grim business, minus the clear-cut heroism of the hot
wars or the gadgetry of the cold.
On a street corner in New York yesterday, Justin Hudnall, 20, a student at
New York University, puffed a cigarette and indulged a Greatest Generation
notion. "I don't think the draft would have been a possibility for [my]
generation in this country before today," he said. "But now, the natural
response is to do something. I'd like to be lifting something or doing
something."
However, Benjamin, having spent several years inside the White House
weighing the realities of this new warfare, believes the sacrifices involved
this time may be quite different. This war cannot be fought antiseptically
with lasers or satellites. Instead, the familiar inconvenience of air travel
is likely to become much, much worse; the entrenched surroundings of public
buildings even more forbidding.
"There is likely to be a complete change in the posture of police and
national security authorities," he predicted. By which he means more
surveillance, more covert operations, more walks on the shady side, in
general, a response likely "to strike a lot of people as an unacceptable
assault on civil liberties. There will be strong constituencies on both
sides," he said.
In other words, this war may renew an old American battle, citizen against
citizen: What We Stand For versus What It Takes.
Many commentators -- politicians, diplomats, historians -- said yesterday
that the nation will long remember Sept. 11 with an intensity reserved for
only a few essential shocks: the Kennedy assassination, Pearl Harbor, such
as these. If this is true, it will be because these attacks truly were the
first step down a very dark and dangerous alley. This will have been the day
that the country deeply understood the maxim of Leon Trotsky, the Russian
revolutionary.
There are no bystanders, there is no neutrality, when it comes to war. "You
may not be interested in war," Trotsky said. "But war is interested in you."

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Secure your servers with 128-bit SSL encryption! Grab your copy of VeriSign's FREE Guide: "Securing Your Web Site for Business." Get it Now!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/n7RbFC/zhwCAA/yigFAA/kgFolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

------------------
http://all.net/ 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Next message: Tony Bartoletti: "Re: [iwar] Cyber conflict intensifying"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:To-War,-Not-To-Court]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2001-09-29 21:08:42 PDT