WAR AND ANTIWAR.(Vietnam War, 1959-1975)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 05-SEP-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

A few days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush, during a visit to the still smoldering Pentagon, said that what was already called the "war on terror" would be "a different type of war"--different, presumably, from the two World Wars, different from Korea and Vietnam, different from the surrogate skirmishes in the Cold War's buffer zones, different from the Cold War itself, different from his father's war to expel Saddam Hussein's marauders from Kuwait. Four years later, many of Bush's (and others') expectations about the ensuing struggle have fallen by the wayside. But that one has proved right.

It is a different type of war. It's different because of the predominantly stateless, decentralized nature of the enemy, whose only columns are fifth columns, and because of the nature of the battlefront, which shifts week by week, minute by minute, from New York and London and Madrid to Bali and Tel Aviv and Baghdad. It's different in terms of the arsenals used to fight it, with language skills, coordinated intelligence, and body armor more useful--and in shorter supply--than the stealth bombers, nuclear submarines,...

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