Special Section: At War - What Are We Made Of?: The guts to resist evil.(Brief Article)

The United States finally entered the First World War because of the nation's lingering outrage over a few hundred floating bodies from the sunken ocean liner Lusitania, which was torpedoed during Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare. More than two decades later, we declared war against the Japanese Empire after 2,400 of our sailors were surprised and killed on a Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor. In the aftermath of each attack, the United States did not seek the sanction of world opinion. Instead, it unleashed the dogs of war, precipitously so against countries that had promised and delivered death to our people.

In the days after Pearl Harbor, a dazed American public saw newsreels of victorious Japanese shouting "Banzai!" with arms outstretched on conquered American outposts. What terrible foes, we thought, to hate us so-so adroit at surprising us, so successful at killing despite our defenses.

Yet the generation of our fathers was not impressed by either images or rhetoric. In response, a rather innocent and unprepared nation in less than 60 months left both Germany and Japan in smoldering ruins. Both fascism and Japanese militarism were incinerated and have not plagued the world for over a half-century.

On September 11, the United States was attacked in a similar way. The only difference between Pearl Harbor and the assaults on the Pentagon and World Trade Center is one of magnitude. Ours now is the far greater loss. No enemy in our past, neither Nazi Germany nor Imperial Japan, killed so many American civilians and brought such carnage to our shores as the suicidal hijackers who crashed the very citadels of American power in our nation's two greatest cities. It may well be that more Americans died on the 11th than fell at Gettysburg or Antietam, or in fact on any other single day in American history. Surely, by any fair measure, we should now be at war.

But are we, and shall we be?

This generation of Americans is now at a crossroads. We must decide whether we shall continue to be the adolescent nation that frets over the trivial and meaningless while our enemies plot death under our very noses, or our fathers' children-who accept the old, the sad truth that "the essence of war is violence, and moderation in war is imbecility."

The voices of our therapeutic culture will be heard. Indeed, they already have. We all know the old litany of inaction and self-loathing. Such seething hatred is inevitable, we are told, given our world swagger, and is the bothersome price of global activism. Should not we look inward, others will remind us, to examine why so many despise us so much?-as if people who practice neither democracy nor religious tolerance nor equality are our moral superiors. And are not these isolated terrorists emissaries of a new war that we do not understand and for which we are ill equipped?-as if we, the greatest ...