The War That the War Eclipsed
October 15, 2001

By John L. Perry
contributor to Newsmax.com

NEWSMAX.COM — President Bush calls it a war on terrorism. It's much more than that. It's a war for the survival of all that's great about America.
Before the Eleventh of September, this country was at war with itself. That war was nasty, insidious and pernicious, waged relentlessly on many fronts.

On the Eleventh of September, at the very moment the second hijacked airliner smashed into the second tower in Lower Manhattan, that lesser war was all but abolished – plunged into darkness like the sun behind the moon during an eclipse.

Replacing it in an instant of instinctive national coming-together was a larger American struggle, one that will endure for years, maybe decades.

No Guaranteed Victory

Nothing is writ in the heavens that the United States is ordained to win this one, even though it will tax every fiber of Americans' inner strength and collective treasure.

It is entirely possible the United States may lose the war against terrorism, wherever it incubates around this fragile Earth, our island home, just as there was no assurance that fascism triumphant would not engulf America in World War II.

Some Americans – a relative handful of them – do not get that even yet. But as things stand today, just a month after the September terrorist assaults, the signs are hopeful that this new war – which will become the most massive in world history – will be won by a newly united United States of America.

To take a gauge of that, it is well to pause a moment, amid the latest news of daily events, and consider what's happened to that lesser war the nation was indulged in before the Eleventh of September.

America the Divided

Reflecting a nation torn, Congress was hewn down the middle, like a log split under an ax.

One political party was, 10 months after the event, still trying to re-run the 2000 presidential election in Florida, still denouncing the winner as an "illegitimate president," still demanding to re-count ballots already frayed from interminable tabulations that refused to confirm the outcome they wanted.

The other political party, hard pressed to explain why its candidate, victorious in the Electoral College, had not carried the popular vote, was teetering on the razor's edge, helplessly watching its granular margin in the Senate flecking away to the opposition.

Neither side could prevail on the simplest of votes, and "compromise" was as dirty a word as "subversive" was in the days of Joe McCarthy.

A Society of Snarlers

Civil discourse, from the Capital Beltway to every hamlet across this land, was a lost art.

Vast sums were being pledged and banked in anticipation of what everyone knew would be one of the dirtiest congressional mid-term elections in modern history.

In some salons of the leftist establishment press, the president, only eight months into office, was being scorned as a lame duck. Even some in his own party were beginning to wonder whom they could find to run in his place less than three years hence.

What politicians of opposing persuasion were calling one another in public was nearly as nasty as what they were snarling in private and into jug ears of the spin-able press.

An International Punching Bag

It was so bad that politicians in some other nations, whose bacon had been saved again and again by the United States, were maligning it as the "new imperial hegemony." When they weren't portraying the American president as a pitiable political eunuch, the foreign press, egged on by American counterparts, had him caricatured as a dangerous "unilateralist" cowboy.

An angry consensus of would-be, self-fulfilling prophesiers had every last iota of his domestic legislative agenda either doomed to self-destruct or already dead on arrival at the foot of the Capitol steps.

You couldn't tune in a national-network TV talking head or pick up scarcely a newspaper of more than half-a-million circulation without being instructed that those Americans still in the president's corner could effortlessly be accommodated in the same telephone booth.

Like the trainload of passengers animated by self-aggrandizement or revenge in Agatha Christie's mystery "Murder on the Orient Express," the president's detractors were stepping forward to take turns stabbing his presumed political cadaver.

The Worst of Times

Not since the days of post-World War II anti-communist hysteria and the racial-desegregation furor of the 1950s and 1960s has this nation been subjected to such widespread, deep-running paranoia and hatred.

Then, as those two terrorist-commandeered airliners, those in-flight chambers of horror, smashed into the two ozone-scrapers, that lesser war disappeared from the American experience, like data deleted from a hard drive or scribbles from a child's Etch-a-Sketch.

Well, at least for the nonce.

These following few examples will give a taste of how radical was that transformation in the national consciousness:

• Jesse Jackson, ever alert to the opportunity to come circling down to feast upon the carrion of misery or perplexity of others, saw his chance and took it.

It seems the Taliban had beseeched him – which no one in his right mind believed for a moment – to materialize in Kabul, there to work his rhyming bunkum to keep their goose out of the hell fire to come.

The rev was blathering into accommodating TV cameras, something about "World Court, not World War."

It was so outrageously preposterous that all concerned, including the Taliban, who may be crazy but not nuts, wanted no part of Jesse on this one. In 48 hours, His Reverence was off the tube and back from wherever he had crawled out.

• Even the Clintons – both His and Hers – lunged predictably and instantaneously to horn in on the mass-homicide scene now known as Ground Zero.

Their individual efforts – they've learned they make matters only worse for themselves when they appear as a matched set – went over like lead frisbies. Since those ill-advised essays into the limelight collapsed, they've both been uncharacteristically absent, which must be an incredible strain on their true natures.

• Al Gore, who had road-tested a frontal assault against the president, especially in the field of foreign affairs, froze himself in mid-reinvention.

When he got a grip, even before he had a chance to shave his new-Al beard, he was all patriotism and unqualified support for "my commander in chief."

• In a few freckles of idiocy around the country, some school teachers were burning Old Glory or refusing to allow their pupils to salute it.

It was so outlandish in one school in California that the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union rushed to the pedagogue's defense, adding its own fillip that pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands was a "hateful" thing to do.

As might be expected, a swarm of students, parents, other teachers and just about the whole community landed on the teacher-dunce and the ACLU chapter, which no doubt felt in need of the full resources of the national ACLU.

• Center-city screamers, whose choir mistress was once Rep. Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, were as silent as Jodie Foster lambs.

Ask yourself: When was the last time you heard the shrill tommyrot about what a terrible country America is in which to be black? Not since the Eleventh of September.

• Same for the professional feminist radicals who were so occupied throwing mud-pack pies at the president.

Not a one of them is itching to be invited, if they don't like it here, to go cohabit with the Taliban. It's just got to be sweltering and malodorous beneath one of the full-length bee-keeper get-ups those Afghan Bubbas make their women live inside.

• Then there was the sad case of the leftwing congressman from – where was it? Minnesota? – who stood up and said the president's idea to help stimulate the economy by reducing the capital-gains tax, thus freeing up money for investments, was pure and simple nothing other than paying off his political contributors under the shameful guise of patriotism.

The silence with which that bilge was greeted, by even colleagues in his own party, could be heard resounding throughout the Capitol.

• Give credit to Christopher J. Dodd, "the other senator" than Joe Lieberman from Connecticut. Don't sneer, it's the Constitution that provides the state with two. If Dodd's the last man standing, by golly, he's not going to let a little mishap like the World Trade Center stop him from being himself.

He's been busy as a beaver exploiting his committee position to block one particular presidential appointee to a key State Department post. Dodd doesn't like this fellow from the last movie.

So alone and forlorn has Dodd been in this petulant pursuit, that he has had to be taken to the woodshed – not once, but twice – by the editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal, who, this second time, stripped him just about naked, switched his legs and sent him running down the Capitol corridors.

Dodd's colleagues are now giving him a berth as wide as if he were a door-to-door anthrax salesman.

From Third Rail to First Choice

The point of those illustrations is that it's become the closest thing to political suicide to be caught on the opposite side of an issue from George W. Bush.

Why so, all of a sudden?

Certainly not because Bush's opponents in politics, like Saul on the road to Damascus, have been suddenly blinded by the light of how wrongheaded they've been.

It's because this president and these times have come together in an unprecedented rushing confluence of mighty rivers.

No president before in the history of this nation – and you're welcome to dispute it all you wish – has risen with such exquisite precision to the imperatives of the moment. He had to have had it within him all along.

The Nation Is With Him

What's more, he has done it in a way – unique, for there's no apt model for him – that has captured the hearts and the minds, and thus the allegiance, of the closest thing imaginable to a totality of the American people.

You can hear it everywhere, and right in the forefront are people who say, yes, they voted against him, but – man, oh, man – are they ever glad it's Bush and not someone else who's president now.

George W. Bush is the political equivalent of baseball's Cal Ripken Jr. It's more than those endurance records the Orioles infielder set. It's the class and style with which he played the game that earned him all those home-and-away standing ovations. Americans see in each of those champions the kind of American they'd like to be. And if you for one minute think the wind-sniffers inside the Beltway don't sense this, you're living in a dream world. That's why they're lining up to have their photos taken while shaking the president's hand and assuring him of their support.

Much of It Is Sincere

Well, that's not really the only reason, or even necessarily the biggest reason.

Remember how churlish the opposition leaders in the Senate and the House of Representatives were right up till the morning of the Eleventh of September? They were, not always to their everlasting credit, playing out their political roles. It is, after all, a two-party government.

But Sen. Tom Daschle and Rep. Dick Gephardt are also Americans, and they have to love this land as much as anyone else. Do them the justice of believing in their sincerity when they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the president.

Is it not, after all, what their opponents have been demanding of them? So take it and be gracious about it. Thankful, too.

What you're seeing now on Capitol Hill you may not have seen before in your lifetime – a healthy civil discourse taking place, in which the two fundamentally differing approaches to running a nation are contending, but civilly, as they were meant to be by the Founding Fathers.

A Few Examples

• How is the best way for the nation to beef up airport security: Put baggage-checkers and other employees on the federal payroll? Or leave them in private employment but under sharp federal regulation and supervision?

• Is it a smart or a dumb idea to arm airline pilots with guns?

• Do you kick-start an economy in recession by cutting taxes in order to induce investment in new plant capacity? Or do you prime the pump with more appropriations for federal programs?

Or should it be a combination of both? If so, what combination?

These are but a few of the questions that could never have been considered in early September. Now they are imperative. And the debate is both civil and healthy.

The litmus test is no longer: "What's in it for me?" or "How can I mess up an issue for the other party?" Instead, it is: "What's best for America?"

Wherever you look today you see: "God Bless America" and "United We Stand."

The loonies are being drowned out in renewed belief in God and old-fashion American patriotism, the two cornerstones upon which this nation was founded.

Won't Last Forever

Granted, the disappearance of the lesser war within America is a partial eclipse, and like any eclipse it will not have an eternal life span.

But this nation, like no other, has the ability to determine its own destiny. It can, if it chooses, by acting as a nation, hold that lesser war of divisiveness in eclipse for so long as its people decide that's how they wish to behave as a nation.

Chester Carlson – that gentle soul who invented the Xerox process – gave millions of dollars to a California think-tank, The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

Asked why he did, Carlson replied: "When the country gets into real trouble, the first question the people with the most invested in it always ask is: 'Who's thinking?'"

Now It's Become a Must

The country is now in trouble, possibly the worst it's ever been in.

The good news is that people are thinking again.

When this big war – the war on terrorism – eclipsed that lesser pre-Eleventh of September war, it suddenly made thinking possible… and absolutely essential to survival.

John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for NewsMax.com.

Reproduced with the permission of NewsMax.com . All rights reserved

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