Point of View

Now each coast has its own horror to face

By Carl Heintze

Lots of Americans have likened the World Trade-Pentagon disaster to Pearl Harbor. Having been present on the West Coast when Pearl Harbor happened, I think it is--and it isn't.

Both events were shocking surprises. But Pearl Harbor was, in some ways, more of a shock to the West Coast than to the East. After Dec. 7, we expected landings at Santa Cruz and San Pedro at any moment. The war was suddenly, hideously in our backyard.

This time the situation is (so far anyway) reversed. New York and Washington suddenly find themselves on the front lines, although the truth is in this kind of war, any place is on the front lines. (I find it ironic that the Bush administration has been advocating an anti-missile defense system when whoever wrecked the Pentagon and the World Trade towers didn't need foreign missiles. They made their own--and they made them out of American materials at that.)

But there also are a lot of similarities.

The same emotions moved through both Pearl Harbor and this century's version of the same event: the shock, the numbness, the "how could it happen?" feeling, the uncertainty, the fumbling for ways to deal with the crisis, the sorrow for the suddenly dead, the incomprehensibility of it all.

On the whole, the media have been restrained. Not so at Pearl Harbor, but there were fewer kinds of media with which to work. Today television was sickeningly there. We had the unreal experience of seeing the second airliner hit the second tower. Hollywood could not have done it better.

We didn't "see" Pearl Harbor until days after it was over. And there was a lot we didn't know about Pearl Harbor, particularly the extent of the damage to the Pacific Fleet, for months.

On the other hand, television has to deal with an event continuously. It doesn't know how to shut itself off, and so we were subjected to the same scenes of carnage shown over and over again, simply because television can't stand without a picture.

In the days when there were only newspapers and the beginnings of international radio, events got reported, but not repeated ad nauseam, and somehow the sense of knowing was not diminished. In these days of constant television news, seeing the same tragedy over and over again eventually dulls our senses.

There are other significant differences in the two events. Terrorism is always a matter of statement, not conquest. Pearl Harbor was about conquest, not statement. It was designed to keep the United States out of what Japan thought of as its backyard by a surprise attack on its main Pacific base.

The Japanese were interested in a statement as a strategic advantage. Just what the terrorists hoped to accomplish by wrecking two American landmarks is not so clear. Clearly part of it was revenge. One of the original World Trade bombers was due to be sentenced on the day following the attack. The terrorists wanted him and the world to know that they finally had finished the job he'd started a couple of years ago.

But revenge always invites retaliation, and the terrorists are bound to achieve it not for themselves (for they, after all, are gone) but for those they thought they represented. Just who this is, is not clear.

It seems fairly obvious that terrorists do not represent the entire Middle East. But it also seems obvious that there are many in the Middle East who would like to drive all Western influence out of the Middle East, including the Israelis.

New York and Washington don't seem very likely to enhance this effort. Instead, it is more likely to make the United States even more determined to be a player there. If it is part of an effort to get the Israelis out of Israel and Palestine, that, too, seems doomed to ultimate failure. The so-called peace process was already on the rocks before New York and Washington. If anything, the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center is likely to lend even more American support to Israel.

Pearl Harbor was an effort to physically expand the influence of Japan over what it saw as its natural markets, the islands of the South Pacific and the nations on the coast of Asia. The atrocities at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were an effort to scare us away from world leadership.

How we handle the new insult to our national endeavor will have an equal effect on how we live out the new century.

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