Editorial: Out of the ashes

The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, CA)

It is a devastating fact of life in America, at the dawn of the 21st century, that we are becoming familiar with this drill. We are not just seized by the scenes of terror that spill into our living rooms -- or even, in the numbing reality, in New York or Washington, that explode in front of our eyes. We are developing a reflex.

Not since Pearl Harbor has a surprise attack unleashed so much destruction on American territory. And in war and peace, going back 150 years, Americans have not seen the like of the tragedy visited upon them here, on this continent -- at home -- on this day. But we have seen too much that is like it.

The bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen last year, the bombings of the American embassies in Africa in 1998, the car bombing of the World Trade Towers in 1993, and so much more. Scenes of dazed people amid smoke and flame in a shattered urban landscape are something we recognize all too quickly now.

There is, as ever, an urge to respond with a terrible swift sword. As late as the 1980s, when nations like Libya smugly sponsored terrorism without a fig leaf to cover their culpability, this was realistic. In April of 1986, Ronald Reagan sent warplanes against Tripoli. That was in response to a string of provocations, but most immediately to the bombing of a West German disco in which three people -- just one an American GI -- were killed. So what is an appropriate response on a day such as this?

As terrorism has evolved -- as we come, through awful frustrations, to recognize -- the enemy is no longer so easily identifiable, or locatable. It may occur that this time, it will be different. But that is not the likelihood.

And so our first response, when we have gathered ourselves, as individuals, as a nation, must be to steady ourselves for a long campaign, to channel our response into a determined, sustained drive to justice. All those familiar first signs indicate that the destructive acts of this day are exactly what the FBI called the bombing of the Cole: a premeditated criminal act. Enlarged to the scale of war, true; but criminal acts for all that.

So we must react by first seeking out the who and why, then by fashioning the response. We react by conducting a self-examination for complacency. We remind ourselves that we do not flinch from a fray that is justly joined. And through it all, we remind ourselves that the freedoms that make us vulnerable here, at home, to just such attacks as these are also our strength to endure, and in the end to see justice done.