Like a lot of people raised in my generation, I was mistrustful of U.S. military power, and selfish nationalism. Like a lot of people, I collected news stories about how Americans consistently underperformed in education tests, along with the most egregious jingoistic quotes of the conservatives in power. In those days, I regarded America as almost God-like in its invulnerability. Thus I naturally had a root-for-the-underdog identification with any people or group I felt as a victim of U.S. power. It’s entirely possible that my own adolescent rebellion got caught up in that feeling.

Then I saw the reeking ruins in New York city. 3,000 dead — people just like me, who probably told the same jokes and held the same views. Why dead? Because they were Americans.

The phone rang and woke me Tuesday around 10 a.m., and when I picked it up my ex-wife said, “better get to work; they just blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.” She would be at work, in her little crafts shop, with NPR on the radio, and she probably called me just for the macabre pleasure of being the first to inform someone. She knows I work the night shift and generally sleep past noon.

So I slumped down in my bathrobe at the computer, thinking that she’d gone off the deep end, and I logged on to news sites (Reuters, AP) and I was looking at pictures that took a long, long time to register in my head. The first tower had collapsed. There was that ugly mushroom cloud blooming into the same blue morning sky that was out my window in Pennsylvania. The text was updating as fast as I could hit the “refresh screen” button, and within minutes of my logging on, both towers were reported down. And I kept looking at the pictures, and the words, and thinking, “That can’t be right. That can’t be right.” I had been in Manhattan just three weeks before. As if that made it impossible.

When I finally went in to start my newsroom shift, at 3 p.m., I was given two full inside pages to fill with wire news. Then two more. There were hundreds of stories, each one saying the same thing in slightly different words.

But there was the art. I had to figure out if the picture of the man falling headlong from the North Tower was going to fit my page layout better than the picture of the woman sobbing on the curb, covered in blood. I had to figure if “carnage” or “horror” fit better in a 54-point headline. I looked through stacks of victims’ photos that came in, waiting to see a picture of someone I know — another one. I already knew there was one, Ace Bailey, the amiable former Boston Bruin I had gotten to know in my days covering the NHL.

In scrolling back through the stories I came across the first wire notice of the calamity, a bulletin datelined “New York” and slugged “Trade Center-Crash,” bearing the time stamp 0856EDT. It was a single sentence: “Smoke poured out of a gaping hole in the upper floors of the World Trade Center on Tuesday and there were broadcast reports a plane had struck it.”

I thought of some anonymous ink-stained AP wretch in the New York bureau, filling the quiet early shift on an election day till he saw the punctured tower from his window, flipping channels madly or listening to Howard Stern like everyone else in the city, wondering “what the hell was that?” And the second plane is screaming down the Hudson Valley at 500 mph, but he or she doesn’t know that yet.

After the single sentence, as in all such AP bulletin stories that move in takes, is the single word “MORE.”

The world felt constricted and cloudy all of a sudden; comfortable certainties melted and large chunks of my world-view fell through the floor like they’d been standing on trap-doors all these years. But some things suddenly snapped clear. In my moments when I could look up from my work, I saw my reaction was utterly unlike that of my peers. For years we had shared the same criticisms of America. Now we were hurled down very divergent mental paths.

Mine found a strong echo in Oriana Fallaci. From her home in Manhattan, she watched the towers fall _ “The first one collapsed because it imploded, it swallowed itself up. The second one because it melted, liquefied, as if it really was a stick of butter.” Like many of us, she then watched, on TV, the Palestinian celebration of the massacre. And she heard the news that many in Europe were saying the U.S. got what it deserved.

That, she says, was the trigger. “Ideas that for years I had imprisoned inside my heart and my brain,” sure that no one would listen to them, “gushed out of me like a waterfall.”

Fallaci had traveled extensively and interviewed everyone from Khomeini to Arafat. She had seen into the rotten hearts of the people who plotted these attacks. And she knew what she wanted to say about them.

But her main targets were the breed of European intellectuals she contemptuously called “cicadas.” She assailed the crypto-Marxists who were so fond of the line about religion being the opiate of the masses only when it applied to the benign modern Christian churches of their own lands. She likewise confronted the feminists who couldn’t spare a word on behalf of brutalized, enslaved, mutilated Muslim women.

And she mocked the liberals of Europe who treat all the Muslim emigrants flooding their lands as “poor little things.” And to the bin Ladens and their admirers, she was unsparingly blunt. She envisioned the Muslim fanatics coming after the artwork of her beloved Florence, as they did to the Bamiyan Buddhas or the World Trade Center:

“And should the poor-little-things destroy one of those treasures, only one, I swear: it is I who would become a holy-warrior. It is I who would become a murderer. So listen to me, you followers of a God who preaches an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I was born in the war. I grew up in the war. About war I know a lot and believe me: I have more balls than your kamikazes who find the courage to die only when dying means killing thousands of people. Babies included. War you wanted, war you want? Good.”

My peers in the newsroom recoiled in horror from that sentiment. I found it honest, upright, human. I could feel, viscerally, the same way in those hours. One doesn’t act in that moment. Eventually decency or pride in being better than our enemy gets to your brain. But I could feel that. It was, to me, a natural human reaction.

Fallaci is a journalist. So is my co-worker — I’ll call him Paul. That’s all they have in common.

He went to Canada during Vietnam and came back when the fighting was over. He never saw an American president or foreign policy he didn’t like (though he dislikes Democratic ones less than Republican ones). He never protested a war or a dictatorship unless there was a U.S. interest behind it. He works in my office. Paul is given to uttering “as Chomsky says” in the tones a preacher uses to invoke Scripture.

Another co-worker — I’ll call Tom — is a smart enough guy, worked in D.C., comes from a long line of newspaper people and writers whose names you’d know, but basically he’s a gool ol’ boy from West Virginia at heart: pick-up truck, gun rack, Confederate flag and all. And he’s somewhat naive about the ways of ex-hippies.

One day, Paul was waxing and ranting to Tom on the crimes of the U.S. military industrial complex. He sat back, comfortable, with his hands clasped behind his head, damning America’s political leadership and America’s history of military violence. And Tom chimed in with what he thought was an agreement: “Like Sherman’s march through Georgia. That was a crime, they should have all been tried for that.”

“Well …” Paul said, looking away from Tom and staring at his phone, as though wishing it would ring and give him an exit strategy from a suddenly knotty conversation. Tom, without knowing it, had said the exact right thing. After some huffing and hemming, Paul managed to dismiss the intrusive comment with:

“That was OK, because we did it to ourselves.”

And he had his own peculiar reaction to Sept. 11. A day or two afterward, when we still were busy filling page after page of the newpspaper with stories of heroism and tragedy, when the death toll was still believed to be near 10,000, before anyone in the White House had made a move to strike back at the terrorists or their hosts, Paul turned to me and said, “Don’t you think we’re over-reacting to this whole thing?”

Killing the Americans didn’t start on 9/11. It is at least as old as the Palestinian hijacking of the ’80s, when the Americans were routinely singled out on international flights and beaten to death. It’s a result of resentment of American power, you say? Very well, the Germans in the 1930s started killing the Jews not because they felt the Jews were weak, but because they were terrified of the supposed power the Jews had in the world.

I’m one of those who believes America is at war, and ought to behave like it, since Sept. 11.

World War IV began on Feb. 26, 1993, but almost nobody in America realized this. Islamic fundamentalists tried to topple one of the Twin Towers onto the other amid a cloud of cyanide gas. The plan failed, the details didn’t emerge until much later, and at the time it seemed like another wacky day in the Big Apple, not a dress rehearsal for Hell.

We had grown up thinking in terms of World War III, with the enemy cast as a military superpower, our mirror image, armed with bristling missiles and tank brigades. It seemed impossible that we were at war with dark men who lived in caves and who flowed through our national veins and rented rooms in the dingy neighborhoods of old Northeastern cities. They didn’t have aircraft carriers, they had box-cutters and credit cards.

World War IV continued with the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on Aug. 7, 1998. It continued on Oct. 17, 2000, with the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. But even as the enemy became more clear, even as a U.S. warship was blown nearly in half, few people in America understood this as a new war. The administration in power here at the time was not suited for this war. It had an antagonistic history with the military and the CIA when it was out of power, and a tendency to use them fecklessly when in power.

That administration in Washington left. A new one arrived. We were unlucky to get for a president a man with little world experience, who was uninterested in foreign policy; an Attorney General eager to go to war only against home-grown perverts and homos; and a cranky Secretary of Defense great at moving missles and light forces, but unwilling or uninterested in large-force actions, long-term missions, deep investments.

On Sept. 11, 2001, a great many people woke up to the fact that the United States is at war. Since then, with every day’s headlines, the realization seeps in more deeply into some people, and begins to dawn in others. But a great many still do not accept this. They only see one side of the war, like people hearing only one half of a telephone conversation, sitting in the room with the caller.

The main difference among Americans today is that some of us believe the United States is at war, a dangerous war against a desperate enemy. And other people don’t believe that’s true at all. To the non-believers, the people who are waging war look insanely violent, paranoid, and unstable, and to the people at war those who don’t believe it look like appeasers and useful idiots, if not outright traitors. It’s hard to concoct a formula more certain to breed ugliness.

The people we are fighting say certain things very clearly: we are infidels who have offended their religion, they are at war with us, and they want us to die.

Osama bin Laden issued a “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” on Aug. 23, 1996. Again, on Feb. 23, 1998, bin Laden and others signed a fatwa declaring war on the United States. “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it … We — with God’s help — call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.”

Now we are fighting in Iraq. After the terror attacks, many people in the world told America, “don’t just go out and kill terrorists; strike at the root cause of terrorism.” So this is where we’re trying to do that, whether we always realize it or not. This is the most daring thing America has ever attempted. We’ve opened a second front in the war between us and Islamofascism. Except the goal of this front is not merely to kill the enemy and sap his strength; it is to plant seeds of freedom and democracy in the dark places where his poisons grow. Sen. John McCain has said it well:

“In Iraq our national security interests and our national values converge. Iraq is truly the test of a generation, for America and for our role in the world. Faced with similar challenges, previous generations of Americans have passed such tests with honor. It is now our turn to demonstrate that our power, ennobled by our principles, is the greatest force for good on earth today. Iraq’s transformation into a secure democracy and a force for freedom in the greater Middle East is the calling of our age. We can succeed. We must succeed.”

Like a typical liberal, I prefer peaceful solutions over violent ones. But when I look at America, for all its flaws, against its enemies, and all their purposes, I know which I prefer, which side I give my whole support. After much studying and soul-searching, I came to the conclusion that the world probably, and Iraqis definitely, would be better off if the U.S. used its military might for once to remove a corrupt fascist who had been occasionally useful to us. He was our mess, largely, so it was our job to clean him out.

Supporting this war in 2003, largely based on the “humanitarian justification,” as the least bad among bad alternatives strikes me as a decision a principled man could possibly make. A man like Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta:

In almost 30 years of political life, I have supported the use of force on several occasions and sometimes wonder whether I am a worthy recipient of the Nobel Peace prize. Certainly I am not in the same category as Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu or Nelson Mandela. But Mr. Mandela, too, recognized the need to resort to violence in the struggle against white oppression. The consequences of doing nothing in the face of evil were demonstrated when the world did not stop the Rwandan genocide that killed almost a million people in 1994. Where were the peace protesters then? They were just as silent as they are today in the face of the barbaric behavior of religious fanatics.

Or a man like Adam Michnik, the leading force in the Solidarity trade union movement who founded and edits Poland’s largest daily newspaper:

We take this position because we know what dictatorship is. And in the conflict between totalitarian regimes and democracy you must not hesitate to declare which side you are on. Even if a dictatorship is not an ideal typical one, and even if the democratic countries are ruled by people whom you do not like. I think you can be an enemy of Saddam Hussein even if Donald Rumsfield is also an enemy of Saddam Hussein. … It’s simply that life has taught me that if someone is being whipped and someone is whipping this person, I am always on the side of those who are being whipped.

I’ve always criticized U.S. foreign policy for forgetting that the United States should defend those who need to be defended. I would object to U.S. policy if it supported Saddam Hussein, and I have always criticized the United States for supporting military regimes in Latin America.

Until he died in April 2003 while covering the war, one of the journalists who tended to write things I most agreed with was Michael Kelly. Here’s a bit of a column of his published less than three months before his death:

I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications of, America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realised. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot?

Fortunately for me, there was no inherent conflict between this idealistic view and the national self-interest argument, as outlined here by Peggy Noonan:

I do not feel America is right to attempt to help spread democracy in the world because it is our way and therefore the right way. Nor do I think America should attempt to encourage it because we are Western and feel everyone should be Western. Not everyone should be Western, and not everything we do as a culture, a people or an international force is right.

Rather, we have a national-security obligation to foster democracy in the world because democracy tends to be the most peaceful form of government. Democracies tend to be slower than dictatorships to take up arms, to cross borders and attempt to subdue neighbors, to fight wars. They are on balance less likely to wreak violence upon the world because democracies are composed of voters many of whom are parents, especially mothers, who do not wish to see their sons go to war. Democracy is not only idealistic, it is practical.

But it doesn’t strike my liberal friends that way. I understand their vexation, but it seems they can see only venality or psychopathia in people like me. And having once stood on the other side from them, and seen them in that perspective, I can’t imagine going back to their camp (not that they are inviting me back).

Once it’s begun, it has got to succeed. The U.S. is trying to do this almost alone, with a highly capable military, an astonishingly inept and high-handed presidential administration, a vituperative opposition at home, and a wobbly hand-wringing media with a recurring case of the vapors.

It’s too late to bring the boys (and girls) home and pretend it never happened. Like an unwanted baby, Iraq is here, it’s ours, we better adjust. What happens in Iraq now will determine the future of the world for the next century. I’ve always said that it will be 20 years before we can even begin to say whether toppling Saddam and trying to set up a democratic Iraq was a good idea.

[Believe it or not, I'm not done yet]

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