An attack such as today's requires systematic planning, a good
organization, a lot of money and a base. You cannot improvise something
like this, and you cannot plan it when you're constantly on the move.
Heretofore our response to attacks, and understandably so, has been to
carry out some retaliatory act that was supposed to even the scales while
hunting down the actual people who did it.
This, however, is an attack on the territorial United States, which is
a threat to our social way of life and to our existence as a free society.
It therefore has to be dealt with in a different way – with an attack on
the system that produces it.
The immediate response, of course, has to be taking care of casualties
and restoring some sort of normal life. We must get back to work almost
immediately, to show that our life cannot be disrupted. And we should
henceforth show more sympathy for people who are daily exposed to this
kind of attack, whom we keep telling to be very measured in their
individual responses.
But then the government should be charged with a systematic response
that, one hopes, will end the way that the attack on Pearl Harbor ended –
with the destruction of the system that is responsible for it. That system
is a network of terrorist organizations sheltered in capitals of certain
countries. In many cases we do not penalize those countries for sheltering
the organizations; in other cases, we maintain something close to normal
relations with them.
It is hard to say at this point what should be done in detail. If a
week ago I had been asked whether such a coordinated attack as today's was
possible, I, no more than most people, would have thought so, so nothing I
say is meant as a criticism. But until now we have been trying to do this
as a police matter, and now it has to be done in a different way.
Of course there should be some act of retaliation, and I would
certainly support it, but it cannot be the end of the process and should
not even be the principal part of it. The principal part has to be to get
the terrorist system on the run, and by the terrorist system I mean those
parts of it that are organized on a global basis and can operate by
synchronized means.
We do not yet know whether Osama bin Laden did this, although it
appears to have the earmarks of a bin Laden-type operation. But any
government that shelters groups capable of this kind of attack, whether or
not they can be shown to have been involved in this attack, must pay an
exorbitant price.
The question is not so much what kind of blow we can deliver this week
or next. And the response, since our own security was threatened, cannot
be made dependent on consensus, though this is an issue on which we and
our allies must find a cooperative means of resistance that is not simply
the lowest common denominator.
It is something we should do calmly, carefully and inexorably.
The writer is a former secretary of state.
