How to Respond

By Jim Hoagland

Tuesday, September 18, 2001; Page A31

Nations respond in character to terror campaigns. So too will the United States. A unique combination of American national strengths, and weaknesses, will dictate U.S. responses as surely and strongly as will the immediate strategy being drawn up by the country's political and military leadership.

This may be obscure in the glare of the urgent -- of events like President Bush meeting with his National Security Council and pressuring Pakistan to go after prime suspect Osama bin Laden and his gang. But understanding where others have been in facing this kind of test will illuminate where we are going, long term as well as short term.

The British kept their upper lips stiff under the assault of Hitler's V-2 rockets and of the IRA's bombs decades later. Others have cracked. I watched Lebanon's riven society disintegrate as Beirut's fabled avenues of pleasure turned to streets of horror and rubble.

Israelis combine chutzpah with determination and initiative to deal with human bombs in their markets and on their buses. The French responded to explosions near the Champs-Elysee in the 1980s with diplomacy and deal-making to gain respite. Saudi Arabia has been secretive, vengeful and ambivalent when bombs go off on its soil.

American society is durable and resilient under the blows of terrorism. We are a decentralized people, politically, financially and even emotionally. Our resources lie in our communities and their innate self-sufficiency, as New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has made so abundantly clear. We have the depth of a continent, even if the oceans we once viewed as barriers to our enemies have shrunk.

Americans also have the good fortune to share the ideal of the great melting pot, even if that ideal is not perfectly fulfilled. Our knowledge of the vast disparities in good and in evil within every group bound together by religion, ancestry, social advantages or whatever other force comes from daily life, not from textbooks or theory.

The FBI paused yesterday in the greatest manhunt ever conducted to express publicly its determination to also pursue hate crimes directed at innocent Arab Americans or others. That speaks to this nation's deep commitment to fairness to all, even in crisis. Americans will not respond to terror with a hatred of peoples, but with a specific hatred of people -- those who committed and supported these acts.

Finally, leadership in America is not confined to the fate and abilities of national politicians. Leadership is the very quality shown by those magnificent New York firefighters and policemen, the rescue squads at the Pentagon, the medical professionals and others who have labored around the clock since our tragic Tuesday. This president, still new to the most pressing demands of global leadership, has enormous support to draw on.

The path ahead has three distinct phases. Bush's overarching task is to link them in the public mind to overcome America's prime weakness -- a short national attention span and the susceptibility to distraction it brings.

Phase One will be the hunt for and capture of "Osama bin Laden," the brand name for a certain kind of terrorism carried out against U.S. targets by a nebulous, evil band that the Saudi dissident commands or inspires. If the Pakistani overture fails, the legal foundation for a limited U.S. action in Afghanistan to eliminate the bin Laden network already exists in the U.N. Security Council resolution quickly passed last week.

Phase Two is what former CIA director Jim Woolsey calls "draining the swamp." Once bin Laden and/or other perpetrators -- the mosquitoes, in Woolsey's metaphor -- have been squashed, the United States must transform itself (starting with a serious government-financed air safety program) and the oil-drunk region in which these terrorists have been allowed to flourish.

That means, among other things, following the money: strengthening international controls over banking havens and financial structures that allow vast amounts of oil revenues to be funneled to and used by criminals like bin Laden. The Group of Seven finance ministers should meet this month with this as their primary agenda item.

Phase Three will be a renewal of serious U.S. engagement in Middle East peacemaking, to be pursued after Phase One has been accomplished and in conjunction with Phase Two. A Bush commitment to that outcome now, similar to the one his father sketched as he prepared to fight the Persian Gulf war, will enhance the chances of success of the first two operations.

America the Patient? Not our style. But it is the moment for America the Determined: an America that takes its time, matches its bountiful resources and abilities to the challenge, and this time does not let those who would destroy us escape.