A Fast People in a Slow War

Here’s the president a short while after the surprise attack organizing a major military deployment overseas while addressing numerous policy and political distractions both at home and abroad. Many fear the crumbling of the fragile international coalition assembled against the enemy. Others decry a lack of obvious, immediate American victories and the impunity with which the enemy seems to wander its home turf. The National Guard is called up. FBI agents conduct nationwide searches for enemy agents, especially among residents with foreign faces and names. Disagreements erupt over tactics, strategy and how quickly and seriously Americans are mobilizing to fight a distant, determined enemy that acts with ruthless zealotry. And there are rampant, volatile fears about homeland security, especially around major airports, ports and bridges.

Here we are today exactly two months after the deadly surprise attacks on New York and Washington and President Bush is facing all this and more, including an exotic enemy that Americans don’t feel they fully understand. But wait. So too, it turns out, was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt exactly two months after the deadly surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. And so too was President Harry Truman exactly two months after the deadly surprise attack by North Korea against its southern neighbor on that peninsula in June 1950. All three times the American public was initially thrown for a loop, shocked, puzzled, even frightened.

In the first two conflicts the United States eventually buckled down and with its allies defeated the Axis powers--the Japanese, Nazis and Italians--and turned an unmitigated rout in Korea into a successful stalemate that eventually allowed democracy and a modern economy to flourish in South Korea.

Do Americans still have the drive, determination and, most important, patience to mobilize beyond, say, a single sport’s season and steadfastly support out-of-sight struggles with a slippery enemy unconfined by national borders, conventional strategies or the need for formal battlefield victories? Are Americans prepared to support waging an unconventional war, long-term and far away, while witnessing the rubble and funerals of terrorism at home and no telegenic surrenders or easily understood victories over there?

In virtually every statement on the subject since Sept. 11, President Bush has warned that this struggle will be long, “unlike any other we have seen,” and will require “the patience and resolve of the American people.” Two months into this one, the open question is: Does the definition of patience remain the same in a modern American populace that now expects packages overnight, pizzas within 30 minutes and e-mail replies immediately if not sooner?

At least we won’t have to wait long to find out.