Did We Give In?

It was the advice the nation needed to hear on 9/11. Sadly, it was ignored.

We heard late-morning that day that the Twin Towers in New York had been destroyed by terrorists. The television networks were at the stage when it was time to bring out the pundits. One struck gold when it brought before its cameras George P. Schultz. Now for those who don’t remember, Schultz was the Secretary of Treasury in the Nixon Administration and Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration. In other words, he was a heavy-weight who certainly could comment on the international and domestic implications of the attack. And, it should be remembered, he was a Republican of impeccable credentials.

What Schultz said that morning was right on target.

Put succinctly his advice to the nation and the Bush Administration was to as quickly as possible put the events of that day behind them. No prolonged days of national mourning. No public outcries. No massive military build up. Quietly we should let the intelligence services go about their business of tracking down Osama bin Laden and al Qaida. But other than that, we should remain calm and go about our daily business as before.

Now you may think this was pretty cold, especially for a nation boiling for revenge, especially for the families that had lost loved ones. But Schultz understood the implications of terrorism. And the first rule in combating it is not to let the terrorist get into your head.

What does that mean? When you break it down, terrorism is nothing more than a form of extortion. Put simply, “We’re going to continue attacking you until you give into our demands.” The real victims of terror are the survivors who live on in fear. Those who died in the World Trade Center, the airliners, and the Pentagon were murdered, and the perpetrators should be tried not as terrorists (which would create all sorts of legal problems) but for premeditated murder.

To beat terrorists at their own game is to display the strength, the bravery, not to let them know that they have impacted the way you live and think.

If we had followed Schultz’s advice, what should we have done? Well for starters, on Day Two we should have begun rebuilding the World Trade Center towers. Yes, build them right up to their 110 stories. (Well, with some modification in design to make them less vulnerable to collapse!) What a wonderful message that would have sent out to the world: “You can knock us down, but we stand right back up, stronger and prouder than ever.”

We all know what happened instead. The Bush Administration seized upon the opportunity and gave us “The War on Terror” and “Homeland Security.” We were caught up in a media campaign of “terrorist alerts.”

In New York, there are now plans to erect a smaller “Freedom Tower” on the WTC site. While it might be seen as a memorial to those who lost their lives in the attack, it also stands as a permanent reminder of the power that terrorists can wield over our national consciousness.

It’s so sad. By having politicians and the media continually tell us that our world has changed forever and that we will never be as secure as before, we unwittingly do the work of the terrorists for them. Look at the past week. A taped message from bin Laden (and bizarrely his yearly message has become part of fabric of what is now the annual 9/11 ritual) is grist for hours upon hours of cable-news analysis.

The reality is that our world has not changed. Yes, we experienced a major terrorist attack, but we have experienced terrorism throughout our history. There were the anarchists, the Klu Klux Klan, the Puerto Rican nationalists, and the abortion-clinic and Oklahoma City bombers, just to name those that come to mind. We have survived them all, and we will survive al-Qaida. We will do this with heightened security measures — but we don’t have to do it at a panic pitch.

What is most amazing out of all this, going right back to the morning of the attacks, is that there was little attention paid to the most obvious question: What was the al-Qaida’s demand? And today we have to ask: Did we give into that demand? More on this next time.