Jules Witcover
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com -- IT'S convenient, and dramatic, to compare the Sept. 11 attacks with the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor just 60 years ago today (Friday). Each triggered American outrage and rallied the nation to respond.
Pearl Harbor as a national motivator endured throughout the nearly four years of World War II as the United States recovered from Japan's military body-blow to our Pacific fleet and achieved ultimate and unequivocal victory.
It may prove more difficult, however, with a more amorphous enemy of no single national sponsorship (beyond the disintegrating Taliban), to sustain support for the war on terrorism that President Bush has said won't end until that enemy is wiped out everywhere it exists.
There are distinct differences in the circumstances, threat and response to the two days 60 years apart that are burned into the memories of the American generations that lived through them. And the task facing President Bush in pursuing such an ambitious, unorthodox war poses different challenges from those Franklin D. Roosevelt encountered.
On Dec. 7, 1941, intensive negotiations were in progress between the United States and Japan over an American embargo on high-octane oil to the island empire that was essential to its invasions of China and what was then called Indochina.
When the blow came in Hawaii, the enemy was immediately and irrefutably identified, and it threw the United States into a defensive posture in the Pacific that lasted many months. The Western world was already at war in Europe and four days later Hitler declared war on America, further straining a nation woefully unprepared for a two-front struggle against major military powers.
It was imperative then to commit the nation to an all-out mobilization to build and supply a war machine capable first of holding off the attackers and then turning the tide against them. The home front almost immediately became a theater of the war, with millions of men being drafted or volunteering for military service, and many women signing up too.
Men like my father, who operated a one-man gas station and repair shop and was beyond service age, went to work nights in a defense plant. The rest of our family became Civil Defense volunteers, patrolling our town's darkened streets with muted flashlights during each night's blackout.
Detroit stopped making passenger cars and started turning out tanks, jeeps, planes and many new vehicles that hadn't even been thought of before the country found itself at war. Ration cards for gas and scarce foodstuffs were among each family's most valuable possessions. No one could question that the nation was on a true war footing, and that the very existence of the United States was in peril.
Until about 9 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, the threat of major foreign terrorism was to most Americans something that faced other countries, in spite of warnings from some that it could happen here. When the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit, the nation was not under serious threat from any other country, nor were we on the brink of being drawn into a major war underway elsewhere. Our chief problem appeared to be a declining economy at home.
Rather than Americans being rallied "in their righteous might" to an all-out war mobilization, as FDR signaled in his response before Congress to the "date which will live in infamy," we were asked by Bush not for personal sacrifice but for personal vigilance, while going about our business as we normally would.
At the same time, however, he declared a very broad objective that would end not with the apprehension or killing of the Sept. 11 perpetrators but only after their entire network was wiped out. He warned any countries aiding or harboring terrorists that they would be held accountable.
As long as this war remains an effort to get Osama bin Laden and company in Afghanistan and American casualties are minimal, the nation no doubt will be behind the president. But already questions are being raised about the necessity and wisdom, under his broad definition of the war, of military action against Iraq, and against other havens of terrorists. That's when resolve at home will truly be
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