America's crumbling sense of immunity

America is now presided over by a president who is the son of the commander in chief of Desert Storm, and who has proposed his own "Son of Star Wars." His secretary of state, who conducted Desert Storm, crafted the Powell Doctrine, which holds that the military shall never involve itself in a war unless the enemy is clearly defined, the U.S. public is clearly in support, and the firepower available is so overwhelming as to assure victory with a minimum of casualties. This is a relatively new definition of the threshold for war, and speaks to how gingerly U.S. leaders feel they must treat their citizenry's feeling of safety and well-being. There hasn't been much appetite for risk, not for a long time, not since Vietnam.

And so George W. Bush has made his top military and foreign policy priority the creation of a $100 billion mechanism for knocking down a handful of missiles lobbed at America by one or another "rogue nation." The psychological need for such a national missile defense system was well spelled out in the New Republic by senior editor Lawrence Kaplan. America must play policeman in an unruly world, Kaplan asserts, yet Americans aren't likely to go along if the risks seem too tangible at home. A Bush National Security Council expert frets aloud that without NMD, countries with nuclear long-range missiles could "hold American and allied cities hostage and thereby deter us from intervention." A Rand report calls missile defense "not simply a shield but an enablerof U.S. action."

"In other words," sums up Kaplan, "missile defense is about preserving America's ability to wield power abroad. It's not about defense. It's about offense. And that's exactly why we need it."

But selling Americans on the dream of a world kept in line, and reshaped, by America will be a lot tougher now. Our psychology of immunity blasted, we are likely to examine the consequences in a far harsher, new light.

What yesterday's terrible events demonstrate, for example, is the folly of believing a shield against "rogue nations" is anything but a psychological illusion. Given that some 50,000 people worked in the World Trade towers, the death toll may well reach nuclear proportions. And if Osama Bin Laden's shadowy multinational underground is in fact responsible, the enemy is nothing like a nation, rogue or not.

Yesterday, in between the gut-churning images of jumbo jets crashing into New York's monoliths and the carnage and wreckage below, there began arriving TV scenes of Palestinian men, women and children cheering the news. The sight was made even more chilling by the sight of their supposed leader condemning the act in a quivering voice. The celebrants, who live in a neighborhood wracked by fighting over the last year, are but the latest to live far, far from the daily lives of Americans, and to believe that they are at war with the United States. The people of the United States either did not know it, or we knew it but felt sure it could not affect us right where we live. Neither can be true anymore.

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