Can History Help?

The attack on New York and Washington was shocking, but in one respect it was nothing new. The Western countries in the nineteenth century exuded a serene self-confidence in a certain kind of culture—the culture of rationality, diversity, open discussion, and change. That was the culture of liberalism. But World War I had a bad effect on the old self-confidence. With the nineteenth-century serenity in tatters, a vast fear arose in Europe. It was a fear that liberal culture was a monstrous lie and a crime, a fear that liberal culture would destroy the world unless new movements stepped forward up to oppose it. And new movements did step forward.

Lenin’s Bolshevism was the first of those new, antiliberal movements. It was followed by Italian Fascism, then by German Nazism, then by the Spanish movement to restore the Reign of Christ the King and by several other movements. And each of those movements went to war against the culture of liberalism, each in the belief that morality required nothing less.

The antiliberal movements got their start in Europe, but they spread around the world, acquiring new traits in every new region. That is what we see in the radical Arab nationalism and the revolutionary Islamist movements of today: variations on the old theme of a desperate and violent antiliberalism. So we find ourselves once again under siege, just as in the days of the Fascists, Nazis, and Stalinists- under siege not because of any specific thing that we have done but simply because liberal values and practices arouse a wild fear in some people, and fear pushes them into violent acts.

The present siege did not begin just yesterday. The war of Arab nationalism against Israel, an old war now, has always been, in one of its aspects, a struggle against the principles of diversity, change, and openness. (Otherwise, the Arab world might have found a way to see in a Jewish state a marvelous opportunity for the rest of the Middle East, an opportunity for everyone in the region to become more creative, more diverse, and more modern.) The war against the United States has taken the war against Zionism and extended it into something much larger. And the war against the United States has likewise been going for a long time—at least since the attack on the U.S. Marines in Lebanon in 1983 and passing through the Persian Gulf War and the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, in Yemen, and in East Africa. Such a war is obviously going to continue.

Our struggles with Fascism, Nazism, and Communism in the past should tell us that if we truly want to achieve safety for ourselves, we will have to persuade masses of people in the radical Arab nationalist and Islamist movements to abandon their old ideas, just as happened with the Fascists, Nazis, and Communists. And so this war, too, will have to be a war of ideas, and not just of guns—a war rather like the Cold War, I suspect (remembering, of course, that the Cold War was sometimes hot).

We have suffered hideously just now, and there may be worse to come. But perhaps we will enjoy one advantage henceforth. Until now, we have found ways to avoid noticing that the radical Arab nationalists and Islamists were dead set against us. Today, it’s hard to mistake that we are, in fact, at war. We are not facing a series of little annoyances and minor pirate problems around the world, as we have wanted to believe in the 25 past. Our problem is bigger than that. We should therefore mobilize ourselves, and if we do mobilize, we will succeed. That, too, is a lesson of the past.

It is true that some Americans think we have brought this war upon ourselves, through our numerous sins. These sins are described in different ways by people on the right and on the left. Jerry Falwell points to gay rights and the ACLU. Some people on the left point to America’s history of animosity to the Islamic world. The people on the left are deluded on this point, generally speaking. The United States has fought a number of wars in defense of Muslims, not against them, most recently in Kosovo, where we came to the rescue of the entire Muslim population. But Falwell, in complaining about homosexuals and civil libertarians, may be on to something. Our enemies fear and detest us precisely because we are an open society with individual rights, a society that allows people to live in many different ways. It is precisely because of our respect for diversity and for the rights of small groups (a value that we have not always upheld, needless to say) that America has helped Israel survive too.

So we find ourselves in a war that has many new elements but is based on a clash of ideas and values that goes back to World War I. And, yes, it is going to be a difficult war; it always has been.

—Paul Berman is the author of A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968.

By chance I was reading Winston Churchill’s biography of the Duke of Marlborough. It is not quite topdrawer Churchill; the prose rolls and swaggers, but it is also marbled with phoniness. The climactic event, the War of the Spanish Succession, is very little like the war we are now in, with one important exception: The duke’s side is a coalition. Some of our wars were one-on-one—the Civil War, the Mexican War—and in memory we flatten out the others into the same binary pattern. Churchill gives a hint of the betrayals, cross-purposes, and fishing in troubled waters that everyone, except maybe Canada and Britain, will have in store for us.

We also tend to flatten out our own domestic dissensions in wartime. We remember Vietnam but think of it as singular. Yet many Americans have hated their government, especially when it was fighting. The diary of John Quincy Adams (out of print, but available in libraries) gives the viewpoint of a former President who considered the Mexican War a crime and tragedy. The diary of Gouverneur Morris (also out of print) shows a Founding Father with the same view of the War of 1812. Let us hope that Americans unite in a just cause. But there will be many carpers, and some traitors, a good deal less honorable than Adams or Morris.

One other thought comes from very recent history—September 13, 2001. That day, at the impromptu shrine that has sprung up in Union Square in New York City, someone wrote on one of the many sheets of paper taped to the ground this question: “Why is life such a bitch?” Why indeed? It is a beauty and a marvel, but it is also always a bitch. No one leaves alive. Let’s roll.

—Richard Brookhiser, the author of Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, has just completed a book on the Adams family.

Is history relevant to our recent torments? I think it is. I am not suggesting there is a precise parallel, still less of predictive value; analogies are treacherous. Pearl Harbor is a popular comparison because it represents a sneak attack on America, but understanding what drove the Japanese to unleash Kido Butai—or their surprise destruction of the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1904—does not much help us unravel the psychology of the suicidal fundamentalist in the first-class cabin or drain the swamp that spawned him. I don’t know enough about Japan’s Kamikaze pilots, but I suspect, again, that the circumstances and cultural attitudes are so different we might not be helped much.

When I am asked what history can tell us about how we can get through the time ahead, I think of Sir Frederic Maitland’s remark that it is very hard to remember that events long past were once in the future. The historian always has to be sensible of this, recognizing that the first task is to re-create the facts and the feel of an episode, a period, an era, the illusion of a life actually lived, so that we may more easily understand why people did what they did and why events unfolded as they did. Why was it that Neville Chamberlain thought he could deal with Hitler? Why did America stand on the sidelines so long in the thirties when the Fascist menace grew so exponentially with every year that it threatened civilization? What drove us to the excesses, as they seem now, of the McCarthy era?

The world was very dark indeed to the Americans who endured the long years of the Cold War, when mutually assured destruction threatened the planet, but so it was for the Americans of the twenties afflicted with anarchist bombings, the Americans of the thirties, when farms were turned to dust and the Great Depression got deeper and deeper. We were just as baffled by the economies of slump as we were by the enigmas of the Kremlin or as we are today by those mullahs who can so pervert Islam as to incite mass murder. A fine writer may present a new generation with a vivid reconstruction—I have just reread Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery, and the shadow of Dallas is on every page—but however well the writer does something like that for us today, all the past dramas are in soft focus, pale things by comparison with the clear and present danger we feel with our every breath.

Every generation’s crises will inevitably loom larger, seem more menacing, more perplexing than anything that went before. A reading of history can help us keep the oppressive nature of the present in perspective. That is some comfort, I think. It cannot of course guarantee that all will be well. Dr. Pangloss has no place here. Those few who were accused of worrying too much about Hitler’s march into the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, turned out to be right; the failure of will of the leaders unwound in World War II, the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century, and in genocide.

In this crisis of terror, I am impressed, at a historical level, by the steadiness of the people, the universal desire not to persecute every Muslim, the sense of community. It was not like that soon after the end of World War I, in 1919 and 1920. People were hysterical with fear. America itself seemed to becoming apart. President Wilson lay in the White House paralyzed by a stroke. Four million workers, one out of every five, were on strike in 1919, including the police in Boston. There were race riots in 2.5 cities; 70 blacks, some still in uniform, were lynched. Anarchist pamphlets threatened the overthrow of society. A bomb in a church in Milwaukee killed 10 in April; in May, 36 bombs were mailed from New York to prominent Americans; on September 16,1910, came the great explosion at Broad and Wall Street. The revolution never came, but neither did the police state. Good men dedicated to American values came to the fore. The Red “scare,” as we now call it, was over in a year, and the good times rolled through the twenties.

It is prudent not to assume we will emerge so quickly or so well from our present trials. We are in for a long haul, not simply to find the terrorist networks but to persuade millions in other countries to see America whole, to distinguish between the unilateralism this administration so foolishly espoused in its learning months and the enduring ideals and generosity of the nation’s spirit and its daily life. But is the task any more difficult, are the skies any darker, than they were in 1940 for Britain, or for America in 1941, when the Fascists had the world by the throat? I am cheered to recall the spirit of that history in a single phrase. Winston Churchill, addressing a joint session of Congress, asked of our enemies: “What kind of people do they think we are?”

—Harold Evans is the author of The American Century.

President Bush’s response to the terrorist attacks has been exactly right. The country is reaping the benefits of staffing the national security team with seasoned veterans of large reputation. Without shrillness they have announced a determination to respond against not just the terrorists and their organizations but the states that have trained, financed, supported, and harbored them. As the administration goes forward to carry out this de facto declaration of war, it must bear in mind three important principles. First, it cannot depend on the sprawling bureaucracy to produce the plans and operations to carry out this campaign. Second, it must prevent the natural tendency to focus obsessively on “getting” bin Laden. Third, it must overcome a long legacy of the failure of American governments to follow brave words against terrorists with firm deeds.

On October 23, 1983, 241 servicemen were killed in a suicide bomb attack against the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon. President Reagan vowed swift retaliation. The whereabouts of the perpetrators and their trainers were exactly known. Behind them were the governments of Syria and Iran, for whom they worked. The bureaucracy met, worried, studied, analyzed, and delayed. Nothing was ever done. There followed a succession of aircraft hijackings, bombings, and killings of Americans.

In October 1985,3 terrorist team working for Abul Abbas seized the cruise ship Achille Lauro and executed an American. They escaped to Egypt, where they were allowed to depart with Abbas himself on an airliner. In an operation brilliantly executed by the 6th Fleet, carrier aircraft intercepted the plane and forced it to land in Sicily. There the Italian government took the perpetrators from American custody and quietly released Abbas, in a tacit deal to keep terrorism away from Italy. Again, nothing was done.

Encouraged by an unbroken record of successes, Muammar Qaddafi’s network carried out increasingly brazen attacks against American aircraft, civilians, and land targets. President Reagan initiated the first successful and effective retaliation against a principal source of terrorism. In 1986 a series of naval operations culminated in the joint Navy-Air Force strike against Libya and, indeed, against Qaddafi himself in his compound, killing his daughter. Except for the Lockerbie bombing, which had apparently been set in motion before the strike, Qaddafi has been largely quiescent since those strikes.

It was only the extreme provocation of his invading Kuwait in 1990 that moved the United States to action against one of the greatest fomenters of terrorism against the United States, Saddam Hussein. Although the campaign itself was most ably prosecuted by the United States, we then committed one of the worst blunders of the postwar era by leaving Saddam in power, thus handing him—and, more important, the entire international terrorist network—a strategic political victory.

President Bush’s current team participated in these operations, and they have presumably learned the lessons of the blunders. They now must carry out an effective plan to deal with the sources of financing, training, support, and harboring of the total terrorist network. Since these supporters fall into three categories, each must be addressed differently. There are friends like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates that have permitted substantial funding to flow from their countries to finance terrorism as a tacit payment of protection money, and have allowed terrorists to move freely in their territories and to travel on their passports. That must cease immediately. The next category is terrorist supporters like Pakistan, Syria, and Iran. They continue to provide substantial funding and allow training bases and diplomatic support. In this case, if our immediate demands to cease and desist are not met, military operations such as mining and blockade may be needed, along with the physical destruction of nuclear facilities, unless they are submitted to permanent international inspection.

A third category is that of the actual co-conspirators, bin Laden, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein. Nothing less than decisive and complete military action to remove these sources of evil is sufficient.

Needless to say, this concerted war against terrorism will be complicated and difficult, and we may be sure that the bureaucracy will provide endless obstructions to decisive action in each case, as it has in every terrorist crisis past. But the bureaucracy does respond to leadership, and, to expedite this response, certain actions should be taken. A new intelligence agency should be established, as the Office of Strategic Services was at the beginning of World War II. It should be free of the burdens of decades of witch-hunts and bureaucratic bloat that afflict the CIA, which should be relegated to technical collections and analysis. A new, lean organization is needed to freely recruit and operate intelligence agents and brilliant intelligence thinkers and analysts, who today are unable to get through the sieve of CIA recruitment.

The Vulnerability Exploitation Committee, which was so successful in the Reagan years, should be re-established immediately, under the National Security Council. This committee can range through the bureaucracy, pulling out creative ideas, of which there are many, on how to attack the terrorist system where it is most vulnerable. The President should rescind the Executive Order that prohibits the targeting of heads of government. Our Special Forces, our strike aircraft, and our precision missiles should be targeted at the terrorists themselves as well as at the leaders of organizations and states that sponsor them. While their families and innocent civilians should never be targeted, it may sometimes be necessary to accept such casualties to kill the perpetrators. Terror must be used to counter terror. The guilty parties should not know another moment’s peace or security.

Each of the services has unique capabilities that can be brought to bear in this broad campaign. The resources of the Navy and the woefully underfunded Coast Guard should be harnessed, not only in securing our borders but in carrying out the broadest possible range of naval operations against the sponsoring states. As a strong—and cost-free—signal, the Coast Guard should be transferred to the Navy Department, as it was in previous wars. The Army has unique intelligence capabilities, and of course operations in Afghanistan could possibly require the fullest range of Army capabilities. The Air Force can provide precision strikes against point targets and massive saturation bombing of others. The capacity of the Marine Corps to forcibly enter any coastal area and vertically assault any area inland should be used to strike fear into all the terrorist bases in Yemen, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan.

None of this is to suggest that diplomacy, coalition building, and the United Nations should not be employed to the fullest, as they were in Desert Storm; but they will succeed only to the extent that they are backed by usable force.

We have today the military capability to carry out the full spectrum of operations needed to destroy the terrorist underworld. The only defense against future attack is offense.

—John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, has just published On Seas of Glory, a history of the U.S. Navy.

September 11, 2001. A new date to remember, unlike any other in our history. The last significant attack on the mainland United States by an outside enemy occurred in the War of 1811, almost two centuries ago. The only American death tolls that compare with those in New York came during the Civil War, and now the number who died in Manhattan alone—leaving aside the deaths in Washington and Pennsylvania —may exceed the 6,000 killed at the Battle of Antietam, which was previously the most deadly day in American history. Even those in the midst of the disaster were caught unawares by the singularity of the event. A young trader trapped in the World Trade Center telephoned his father, a retired fireman, to ask what he should do to escape the flames; the reply was “Go to the roof.” Fire is a danger we know from centuries of experience. But who could recall a skyscraper of more than 100 stories crumbling to the ground? “This is not possible,” a stunned witness said as the building sank in a cloud of dust; nothing in our past prepared us for the possibility.

Outside attacks have always brought Americans together. Pearl Harbor immediately comes to mind, but the British assault at Lexington, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775, is another example. John Hancock was terrified as he fled the battle scene and began a long trip to Philadelphia, where the Second Continental Congress would have its first session on the tenth of May. He feared that the other colonies would blame Massachusetts for starting an unwelcome war and leave it to face British reprisals alone. But as the news spread through the country “on the wings of the wind"—taking only days to reach New York—colonists along the Massachusetts delegates’ route came out to express their sympathy and support. Finally, after receiving an unprecedented reception in New York, Hancock and his colleagues entered Philadelphia in what can only be called a triumphal procession with “bells all ringing, and the air rent with Shouts and huzza’s.” Never before, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee reported, had there been “more perfect unanimity among any sett of Men than among the Delegates,” and “all the old Provinces not one excepted are directed by the same firmness of union, and determination to resist by all ways and to every extremity.” The Second Continental Congress soon became, for all practical purposes, the first government of the United States. Americans joined arms and became a nation in the wake of an outside attack. Good of an unpredictable sort can come out of evil.

Events assume historical importance not only by their consequences but for what they reveal about the time and place at which they happened. Notice the identities of the people who are missing or dead at the World Trade Center. Hundreds were foreign nationals, and the Americans who lost their lives bore names that suggest the far-flung origins of their families. There were Irish and Italians beside Latin Americans, Indians and other Asians, Jews and also Arabs. Some were recent immigrants, others American-born of parents who came here for the opportunities that many of their children found in the World Trade Center. New York, like the nation of which it is now more than ever an indisputable part, is an amalgam of peoples. The terrorists attacked symbols of American financial and military strength, but they killed people, including many of their own.

What can we learn from the past to assuage our sorrow? Grief is immediate for those whose friends or family members died, and they will carry the scars to their graves. Some have the consolation, unthinkable at Antietam, Gettysburg, or even Pearl Harbor, of a final “goodbye” and “I love you” from a cell phone, a device that added to the singularity of September 11, 2001. And there are mourners who know exactly how heroically their loved ones died: Airplane passengers, having learned by cell phone about the earlier crashes, brought the fourth flight down not in a fiery collision with another populated landmark but in rural Pennsylvania, dying in a way that let others live. For the rest of us, the pain is an imaginative extension of what we have known privately, multiplied until the burden is indeed, as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani predicted, more than we can bear. The desperate notices for missing persons posted in New York, with pictures of smiling people like so many we know and unforgettable legends (“Help me find my Mommy”), add immediacy to the tragedy and deepen our sadness. But we must and will pick ourselves up and go back to work, and in a remarkably short period of time—a year, a decade—the water will seem to have closed over. Death, like fire, is something human beings have lived with forever. Time heals.

—Pauline Maier is William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of American History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence.

History does not arrange itself for our benefit. The labors of every historian who ever lived have barely scratched its surface. It does not repeat itself, form itself into convenient cycles, offer cautions for the foolish, or humility for the arrogant.

If it did any of these things, humankind long ago would have achieved a state of perfection, guided by our cumulative historical wisdom. As we learned once more and to our everlasting regret on September n, we are far, far from wise.

The ruins of the tragedies were still smoldering as the world began wondering how to make sense of them. As if sense could banish grief, we looked toward the past to help us explain what we felt. The surprise and shock of Pearl Harbor were immediately available, but as New York City’s casualties rose well above 1941∗5, even that disaster seemed less compelling. As investigations began to point toward Afghanistan, public commentary fixed first on the nineteenth century’s imperial misadventures, then on more recent wars. The Soviet Union’s ill-fated war seemed to hold important clues: the Soviets’ own Vietnam, the rise of the mujahedeen, the rise of radical Islamism (not, we are reminded by the experts, true Islam). Here we can find some of our enemies in their youth, learning their trade and sharpening their hatreds.

As we turn the pages faster and faster, our historical knowledge turns back on itself, overwhelming our intellect, forcing us to retreat to our senses. Now we are in the presence of a different sort of history, history unprocessed, undigested history, history in the raw. This is the kind of history that moves one not only to know but to act. This is the history that we are making now.

The austere doctrines of scholarly history do not acknowledge its curative powers; the search for historical understanding can be as important as the knowing, and revisiting friends centuries old can help you see history in new and different ways. These are not the applications of history. They are the applications of the historian in all of us.

Lately, I have kept Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War a bit closer to hand. This ancient book speaks to me more usefully than many others; at times, I think it is a strangely modern book, a story of how an empire was torn apart by the stresses of war. Thucydides is often reviled as a pessimist, as unfeeling in the face of tragedy. I have come to see his story as a Greek tragedy, and like any tragedy, it is not a prediction but a cautionary tale. He believed his history was worth knowing and that it would be known. “My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever,” he wrote, assuming all along there would be a forever and that all endings, perhaps better endings, were possible in the future. I think our chances of a happier ending are better than they would be if Thucydides had never written his history. I hope our enemies have never read him.

—Roger J. Spiller is George C. Marshall Professor of Military History at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.