What kind of 'war'?: A journalist, a diplomat, a foreign-policy expert, and a theologian contemplate our future.
Steinfels, Peter
WHAT KIND OF 'WAR'? Four responses Peter Steinfels The phone rang. "What do you think we should do? Stay here or leave?" my daughter asked. She was calling from the forty-first floor of an...
...And weren't we already fighting a war against terrorism...
...Now she reports the lights are flickering, now there's talk of gas leaks, now first one, then the other tower collapses...
...She was calling from the forty-first floor of an apartment building four blocks from the Word Trade Center minutes after she had seen the second plane fly into its target...
...I am not a pacifist...
...The Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan, Israel's war in the Middle East, Britain's war in Northern Ireland...
...Why will it succeed...
...Unknown...
...Who will be the victims...
...Think, think, the mind says...
...What do we put on hold in the meantime...
...How will sacrifices be shared...
...Is it self-protection against all the heartbreaking stories...
...Of course, such questions can never be answered fully, but so far I sense that Washington is simply saying "Oh, those are good questions," and then moving ahead without answering them, at least publicly, at all...
...The war on drugs...
...What will be done differently...
...Now she decides to leave—she and her twenty-one-month-old son and a babysitter—and now they can't leave, now they can, and now, while they travel by foot and stroller, I can only wait and ponder the possibilities...
...What is known...
...Think, think, the mind says while the emotions strain to cut loose...
...and friends trapped in New York or just eager to be together are swelling the crowd at many a meal...
...his mother and father (the latter having returned, with great difficulty, from Europe) are camping out in the spare room...
...Turn on the TV, field a call, make a call...
...But when we are said to be at war— but a new, different kind of war—I want to know what that means...
...A week later, our grandson is lighting up our apartment...
...Peter Steinfels writes the "Beliefs" column for the New York Times...
...How is it the same, how different...
...But I still feel myself carefully nursing a layer of that phony calm...
...Congress is apparently convinced that this is not the time to ask the tough questions...
...A kind of deathly, phony calm descends at moments like that...
...Commonweal 8 September 28,2001...
...Think, think, the mind says, repressing the terror, pretending there are reasonable categories for processing such unimaginable images...
...In truth, I want to sink into those stories, soak in the grief and the justifiable outrage...
...There is surely a lesson in that...
...I have no problem calling the September 11 attacks "acts of war...
...But every dip into scripted sentimentality makes me recoil...
...Is it like the cold war...
...The president is in charge of cheerleading, which he carries out unevenly...
...Every appearance of a Washington official puts me on guard...
...Whoever destroyed the World Trade Center took two years or more to mount these attacks...
...As on September 11, the information is incomplete, the events fast moving, the feelings always on the verge of taking control...
...Colin Powell and Dick Cheney, with their command of detail, do educate the public about complexity...
...How will we know when we have won...
Vol. 128 • September 2001 • No. 16
