INTERESTING TIMES: Design to win

(September 16) The day after, I had the same traumatic, disoriented feeling I had after my brother fell in battle and after Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. How could the sun still be shining? How can daily life just continue as if nothing happened? The sickening scenes of the collapsing twin towers and the gaping hole left in their place did not just terrorize America, but us, sitting here in Jerusalem. It was a successful attack on the entire world.

Terror must be understood as the most potent form of psychological warfare. Terrorism is a way of bypassing the armies that countries build to defend themselves and directly attacking the morale of the enemy. Terrorists know that the ability to fight is irrelevant if the will to fight has been defeated.

If we think of the fight against terrorism only in military terms, we have fallen into their trap. Israelis show instinctive understanding of this when they fight back by continuing with their normal lives. Workers labored around the clock to reopen Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria (devastated by a suicide bombing a month ago) as quickly as possible . The reopening this week was an occasion of pride and defiance, attended by President Moshe Katsav and United States Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer.

Most Americans, like Israelis, will have the instinct to deny terrorism the victory of affecting their way of life, but this instinct must be cultivated and reinforced. President George W. Bush, unfortunately, displayed a blindness to this psychological aspect of the fight against terrorism when he let his security people keep him away from the White House.

The president, as the explanation goes, was shuttled from one place to another, including a nuclear missile base in Nebraska, because of unnamed threats against the White House and Air Force One. This is not convincing.

There is no doubt that Air Force One could have been more than adequately defended by a fighter jet escort; the same is the case for the White House itself.

Grounding every American civilian airliner, closing the borders, sending the president into bunkers, all these are victories for the terrorists. The actions taken on the civilian side were perhaps necessary precautions, but the president should not have been swayed from his path by a single inch.

The generals were thinking about how to maximize the security of the president, but by ignoring the psychological aspect, they unnecessarily weakened America's national security.

THE CHOICE of where to fly Air Force One was just the first of many that will demand understanding of the psychology of terror. It is not too late for Bush to learn from his mistake. Indeed, he must, because the president bears great responsibility for setting America's mood, and by extension, the mood of the world.

It is not enough to say, over and over again, that America's spirit will not be broken; what matters is acting that way. The twin towers were not just a financial center. They were, as George Will writes, "like Manhattan itself, architectural expressions of the vigor of American civilization."

President Bush should announce a national competition to design a new World Trade Center, with the stipulation that the new center capture the soaring spirit of the towers that were destroyed, and of America's belief in itself and the new age.

There will be those who advocate a squat, secure, structure that can withstand the impact of numerous hijacked planes. The winning design should be exactly the opposite: a complex designed for a world that has defeated terrorism, not one that has been cowed by it.

There are 189 members of the United Nations. Roughly five of them use terrorism as an instrument of national policy. America's goal should be to reduce the number of governments that support terrorism to zero by the time the new soaring, wispy, inspiring World Trade Center is rebuilt.

This goal may sound utopian, but it is both realistic and necessary. If we accept the inevitability of terrorist states, we are dooming ourselves to a futile attempt at turning our cities into bunkers. This time the weapon was hijacked airplanes - a weapon so low-tech that it could have been used in the 1940s. We know that the technology is already available to make September 11 look like child's play.

The United States alone, the 184 non-terrorist states together, or some combination in between, have the might to make it impossible for a handful of tin-pot dictatorships to sow terror and remain in power. The first step is for America to show that it is not only saying it is unbowed, but has set a deadline for and is betting on its own victory.

saul@jpost.co.il