American Way of War Read Online Free PDF

“anthrax” in the headline. That’s the news equivalent of a high-pitched scream of horror.) Those envelopes, spilling highly refined anthrax powder and containing letters dated “9/11/01” with lines like “Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah Is Great,” represented the only use of a weapon of mass destruction ( WMD) in this period, yet they were slowly eradicated from our collective (and media) memory once it became clearer that the perpetrator or perpetrators were probably homegrown, possibly out of the very cold war U.S. weapons labs that produced so many WMD in the first place.
The 36-Hour War
    Indulge me, then, for a moment on an otherwise grim subject. I’ve always been a fan of what-if history and science fiction, which led me to take my own modest time machine—the IRT subway—back to September 11, 2001, via the New York Public Library, a building that—in the realm where sci-fi and what-if history meld—suffered its own monstrous “damage,” its own 9/11, only months after the A-bombing of Hiroshima.
    In November 1945, Life magazine published “The 36-Hour War,” an overheated what-if tale in which an unnamed enemy in “equatorial Africa” launched a surprise atomic missile attack on the United States, resulting in ten million deaths. A dramatic illustration accompanying the piece showed the library’s two pockmarked stone lions still standing, guarding a ground-zero scene of almost total destruction, while heavily shielded technicians tested “the rubble of the shattered city for radioactivity.”
    I passed those same majestic lions, still standing (as was the library), entered the microfiche room and began reading the New York Times starting with the September 12, 2001, issue. Immediately I was plunged into an apocalypse: “gates of hell,” “the unthinkable,” “nightmare world of Hieronymus Bosch,” “hellish storm of ash, glass, smoke, and leaping victims,” “clamorous inferno,” “an ashen shell of itself, all but a Pompeii.” But one of the most common words in the Times and elsewhere was “vulnerable” (or as a Times piece put it, “nowhere was safe”). The front page
of the Chicago Tribune caught this mood in a headline, “Feeling of Invincibility Suddenly Shattered,” and a lead sentence, “On Tuesday, America the invincible became America the vulnerable.” We had faced “the kamikazes of the 21st century”—a Pearl Harborish phrase that would gain traction—and we had lost.
    A what-if thought came to mind as I slowly rolled that grainy microfiche; as I passed the photo of a man, in midair, falling headfirst from a World Trade Center tower; as I read this observation from a Pearl Harbor survivor interviewed by the Tribune : “Things will never be the same again in this country”; as I reeled section by section, day by day toward our distinctly changed present; as I read all those words that boiled up like a linguistic storm around the photos of those white clouds; as I considered all the op-eds and columns filled with instant opinions that poured into the pages of our papers before there was time to think; as I noted, buried in their pages, a raft of words and phrases—“preempt,” “a new Department of Pre-emption [at the Pentagon],” “homeland defenses,” “homeland security agency”—readying themselves to be noticed.
    Among them all, the word that surfaced fastest on the heels of that “new Day of Infamy,” and to deadliest effect, was “war.” Senator John McCain, among many others, labeled the attacks “an act of war” on the spot, just as Republican senator Richard Shelby insisted that “this is total war,” just as Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer started his first editorial that first day, “This is not crime. This is war.”
    On the night of September 11, the president himself, addressing the nation, already spoke of winning “the war against terrorism.” By day two, he was using the phrase “acts of war”;