The US may react with warlike vengeance, or avoid spiralling into reprisals.
On Day Zero, the reaction of America’s leaders was one of dumbfounded inarticulacy. It was hard to follow what any of them, particularly the president, was trying to say. This was not all that surprising, considering
that this was the most devastating single act of war that the United States of America had ever experienced on its own soil.
Until Day Zero, distance had shielded the majority of Americans from the true impact of acts of armed terror committed against civilian populations – Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Congo, My Lai, Cambodia, Angola, Sudan, Baghdad, Kosovo, Rwanda, Burundi, and so on.
Now terror had not just come to America, it had struck down the tallest and most dazzling twin towers that symbolised the wealth, the grace and the power of its most dazzling city – “the metropolis around which the whole world revolves”, as Duke Ellington described it.
Further south, in Washington, DC, a massive hole had been punched through the once impregnable walls of the Pentagon.
The politicians and the generals were temporarily lost for words. But the television cameras were there to tell it like it was, almost as it happened.
Never in the world had there been live coverage like this. And none of it was planned – not by the television stations, anyway. Someone else had planned the show, and the cameras couldn’t tear their eyes away as it unfolded in all its terrible reality, real time in slow motion, more terrible each time those unpredicted images of doom were repeated, over and over again, all through Day Zero, and into Day Zero Plus One.
As that second day dawned to remind us that this had not all been a nightmare, that it was all too shockingly real, America’s leaders began to pull themselves together, to rally the country in the wake of the unspeakable.
“We’re Americans,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said to his people, to the world. “Americans don’t walk around terrified.”
The president was a new man: a man, at last, with a vocabulary that he himself could manage.
“America is a peaceful nation,” he said, “but fierce when stirred to anger.”
America would respond in the most devastating way possible. The rest of the world was given warning: anyone who is not with us will be deemed to be against us and will be dealt with accordingly.
The television cameras were brought to heel, the out-of-control images carefully manipulated now to reflect a change of mood, a shift from passive shock to determined riposte. The heat was on, seeking out the enemy without and within.
Henry George, a flight instructor in Opalocka, Florida, found himself being grilled on live television, grilled on why he had failed to spot the terrorist menace, the streaks of naked evil in the men he had just described as shy, polite, professional, and who had come for training in his Boeing 727 flight simulators, training they would adapt for use in the 747s, 757s and 767s that were to be employed in the world’s most spectacular suicide attack.
“Didn’t you see anything suspicious about them? Do you know if they had visas to be in this country? Did they pay in cash? Didn’t you find anything suspicious in that?” George could do nothing but squirm, shrug, and say, heck, next time he’d check their visas, whatever. What was he supposed to do?
For days CNN’s running subtitle was: America Under Attack. Then, ominously, they changed it to: America’s New War.
Across the Atlantic, an African commentator on the French channel TV5 was urging moderation:
“After the shock, the horror, the feelings of anguish and compassion for those who have suffered and continue to suffer,” she said, “this is now the moment when we will have to pass judgement not only on the perpetrators of these acts, but also on the manner in which the United States will respond. Will the US simply content itself with warlike vengeance, or will it react in a more measured way, avoiding the descending spiral of reprisal and counter-reprisal?”
Wise words, but perhaps too late. In the US of A, the crazies are already taking to the airwaves, and to the streets.
Reverend Franklin Graham (son of the indefatigable Cold War warrior-priest Billy, perhaps) goes on air advocating the deployment of weapons of mass destruction – this from a man of God. But deploy them where? Against whom? Across how many countries?
In Mesa, Arizona, a Sikh is shot dead outside the gas station that he owns because he is wearing a turban and a beard. This comes in the wake of the killing of an Egyptian grocery store owner in San Gabriel, California, an attack on a Moroccan gas station attendant in Palos Heights, Illinois, and an attempt to run over a Pakistani woman in a parking lot in Huntington, New York. An armed man is arrested as he tries to burn down a mosque in Seattle.
Belatedly, the president urges Americans not to turn their anger indiscriminately against Muslims at home and abroad. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has ordered a stepping-up in the production of “Tomahawk” cruise missiles.
The president does not deny that he is preparing for war: “This crusade, this war … is going to take a while,” he says. “We will rid the world of evil-doers.”
The restoration of an ability to articulate does not mean that the speakers themselves have become articulate.
Where is good and where is evil? A Crusade prepares to launch its missiles against a Jihad. But who has cast the first stone?
I have never yet heard of a missile that can root out evil, and yet spare all the innocent blood that might be fated to be lying in its path.
As we reach Day Zero Plus Seven, I fear for what is yet to come.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza