December 7, 1941, is often referred to as the day Americans lost their innocence. It was the day we realized the problems of the outside world could affect us. Wars "over there" didn't have to stay "over there" - they could easily come to our shores as well.
It wasn't long after Sept. 11, 2001, that analogies with Dec. 7 were being drawn. It was another loss of innocence for the American people. We were shown again that what is going on in the rest of the world does have consequences for us. In the subsequent military action against Afghanistan, it seemed that the nation had rallied much as it had in early 1942.
One year later is still perhaps too soon to see how deeply the terrorist attacks have altered the American psyche. However, it seems that the anger and resolve of the public has eroded much faster than before. Rather than awakening from innocence, we have scrambled to regain it.
With the Afghan campaign complete, our outlook on foreign policy has returned almost exactly to where it was before. Those who are calling for war against Iraq now would probably have supported such a war before the attacks. Those who vehemently oppose another Iraqi war are the same people who have always protested every war.
Yet it would seem that the average American (if there is such a thing) has already returned to the daily grind of everyday concerns. Foreign policy is just something to be debated by politicians and summarized on the evening news. There seems to be no vocal majority one way or another. What has changed?
Partly this reticence to take action stems from the intangibility of today's enemy. In 1941 the threat was looming, palpable: Evil Empires Were Conquering The World. The danger was a question of whether the attacks would continue. It was a question of how soon California would suffer the fate of Manchuria.
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The 20th century saw an end to world-scale totalitarian regimes. But it also saw the creation of new technologies, and the proliferation of those technologies to every corner of the globe. Now, tiny extremist groups who might once have been safely ignored can communicate globally, create weapons of mass destruction, and cause havoc on a scale far greater than their numbers would imply.
Keep in mind that the attack on Pearl Harbor required thousands of men, not just the hundreds of pilots involved but naval and logistics support as well. In contrast, only 19 men carried out the Sept. 11 attacks, which caused more deaths. How much support they had is unknown, but it was far less than the Imperial Japanese fleet had.
Similar and even more destructive attacks are possible, and it may be our sad fate as a nation to suffer more of them here when all is done. The only options we have are to work to prevent those attacks from happening, or to sit tight and hope for the best.
Those who say peace and understanding are the only way to prevent terrorism are wrong. Perhaps, if we had taken a backseat to the international affairs of the 20th century and acted peacefully towards everyone, the United States wouldn't be a terrorist target today. But would a world dominated by fascists and communists be a better place to live?
It is astounding to see that even after a century of warfare, Americans still seem to prefer to believe that ignoring the outside world is a safe way to live. We shy away from a war in Iraq for fear of losing our soldiers in what seems a distant threat. The danger from Iraq is not its conventional military, but its ability to produce weapons that could be brought covertly to the United States.
Maybe Americans need to experience the pain and devastation of a nuclear detonation in one of our cities. That might be enough to get us riled up. Wouldn't it be better to prevent that from happening? In hindsight, it would have been relatively easy to prevent World War II, if we had acted early.
The question facing our nation now is, how many more terrorist incidents do we want to wish we had prevented? How many more American lives will it take for us to realize we should have acted sooner?
By Craig A. Butler
Daily Lobo Columnist