The 40-Year War

Whether the declared

war against terror will amount to a new cold war I’m not sure. The war

against Communism had a definable end, where ending terrorism is a

goal without a goal line. And I wonder if we have the patience for

another 40-year war. … There is, of course, no Soviet Union of terrorism, but … there are striking parallels.

…If we are serious about this, it is one of those conflicts that can realign the

world. Like the cold war, this one, while it lasts, will assert a gravitational

pull on everything. It will determine who our friends are, revise our

priorities and test the elasticity of our ideals. It will influence which

departments are suddenly overenrolled in our colleges and who the bad

guys are in our movies. It is siphoning our charity from a hundred

important but suddenly less topical causes, and turning grade- school fire

drills into the modern equivalent of my childhood duck- and-cover

exercises. It will provide — already is providing — a new, opportunistic

national-interest spin for lobbyists peddling everything from corporate tax

cuts to medical research to farm subsidies. It may, belatedly, reshape our

lumbering military and our neglected intelligence services. In the cold war,

we trained soldiers to fight on great battlefields and spies to pass for

diplomats. Now, if we’re smart, we’ll be buying agility and shrewdness

and daring. We’ll be featuring Islamic Americans in our Army enlistment

ads and maybe recruiting some of those bright Saudi college kids from

the prolific bin Laden family. New York Times commentary