Since September 11

September 11 already seems like a very long time ago. We have absorbed the shock and gotten over our hysteria. Not that the hysteria was unwarranted; it was a perfectly natural reaction.

The 9/11 attacks have been called the most stunning event since Pearl Harbor; but after the passage of nearly half a year, I think we can say quite calmly that they were more stunning than even Pearl Harbor. They occurred in our financial, cultural, and political capitals, not in some remote territory (as Hawaii was in 1941); we witnessed them on television; they had a horror and an immediacy all their own.

Pearl Harbor wasn’t even close. It roused Americans to fight, but it didn’t change the way they regarded themselves in any fundamental way. On September 11 we went in a flash from feeling secure and invulnerable to feeling that no place in America was safe anymore.

We are already beginning to forget how we felt. Suspicion quickly fixed on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Bin Laden at once took on the aura of an evil genius of mysterious depths. There was no telling what he might do next. We anticipated biological, chemical, even nuclear attacks. It was generally agreed that the United States must strike back hard and fast, at him and whoever supported him.

The country rallied behind the president and didn’t ask too many questions. In our craving for protection and revenge against the spooky enemy we were willing to cut the government a lot of slack. Legal and constitutional technicalities seemed unimportant, even annoying, to most people, since they might inhibit the war effort.

It’s a curious fact about Americans that in their most fiercely patriotic moods they are willing to set aside their Constitution, the guarantor of their freedom, in order to prosecute war — yet they insist that the war is for “freedom.” And they accept the curtailment of freedoms as a necessity of security. The attorney general has said that those who make a fuss about civil liberties are aiding and abetting the terrorists.

Neither the purpose of the war nor the enemy was very clearly defined. It was directed first against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but some wanted to widen it to include several countries in the Middle East; the president has even named North Korea as part of an “axis of evil” that must be stopped. All the while, of course, the U.S. Congress has refrained from declaring war.

Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, has been strangely invisible. For a while we believed it was behind the unnerving anthrax mailings last fall, but that has been largely forgotten. There has been no real follow-up on the 9/11 attacks except a goofy attempt to set off a shoe-bomb in an airplane.

We waited through the holiday season, the state of the Union message, the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics, but no new spectacular act of terrorism occurred. From time to time we are warned that a new attack may be imminent, but so far, nothing has happened. Maybe al-Qaeda itself is starting baseless rumors to keep us jumpy.

Was al-Qaeda broken in Afghanistan? Is Osama bin Laden (who hasn’t been heard from lately) still alive? Has the United States already won the war? All these questions remain unanswered, perhaps unanswerable.

There are other questions too. Were certain powerful interests in and around the Bush administration hoping for an excuse to invade the oil-rich region of central Asia even before September 11? The answer to this may also remain hidden.

Beyond that, we should begin asking ourselves what permanent changes the “war on terrorism” will make in American life. Will it prove the last nail in the coffin of constitutional law? Will it confirm the habit of blind obedience to government, proving the truth of the adage that “war is the health of the state”?

Even Franklin Roosevelt, a scheming enemy of the Constitution, found it necessary to get a declaration of war after Pearl Harbor. George W. Bush, who advocates “strict construction” of the Constitution, has skipped that little formality.

Ever since Lincoln, American presidents have assumed dictatorial powers in wartime. Now we are in an undeclared war which, we are warned, may never come to a definitive end.

Joseph Sobran