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9/9/02

9/9/02 *Newsweek* Lunch Remarks

The attacks on New York and Washington found me in Frankfurt where a speech I was giving was interrupted by the nearly unbelievable news. It was an event fraught with great symbolic significance. I would be detained for four days in the country from which my family had fled 65 years earlier because terrors and hatred had reached the shores that had given us refuge. Much had changed [since then]. Our involuntary hosts were helpful and compassionate, exuding the conviction that our countries now shared a common history. And my thoughts went back to that September day almost exactly 63 years earlier when I saw the New York skyline for the first

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time - of course, then without the World Trade Center. Looking [then]
at those thrusting, abstract structures, self-contained and assured,
reaching for the sky, I was struck by the difference from the European
cities I had grown up in. Those cities were about shelter and historical
continuity; New York was about aspiration and self-reliance. Its
pulsating life was an affirmation of the possible by transcending the
past and building a new future.

That promise, that eternal revival, was being assaulted by the
fanatics whose Golden Age, unlike America's, was sought in the
ritualistic interpretation of the past, whereas the United States is the
country whose Golden Age is always imagined to be in its future.

In the immediate aftermath, 9/11 was often interpreted as the
end of American invulnerability. But it was, above all, the beginning of

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an unprecedented challenge based on the privatization of international
conflict. Its warriors defended no national base; its goals were not
articulated by a particular state. They were, therefore, beyond the
deterrent threats that nations employ and not reachable by the
conciliating procedures of traditional diplomacy. Their war is fought on
national territories, for transnational causes; it is supported directly,
indirectly, or through neglect by nation-states, but the issues far
transcend the nation-state and go to the heart of whether hope or
fear, vision or retrospection, choice or fanaticism should be the
dominant issues of the world.

This is why the United States emerges once again – as it did
after the Second World War – as the hope of the world. It is
fashionable – and I have contributed to it – to contrast the universal

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approach with the precise calculations of European cabinet diplomacy.

But the war against terrorism is incompatible with these practices; it is
not possible to wait on events and calibrate the response accordingly.

The targets are too elusive, their supporters too shadowy; the
catastrophes incurred would be too devastating.

There is no shortcut to going to the heart of the problem. It is
to demonstrate that the methods of terrorism are, above all,
catastrophic to those who practice them. This is why the second
phase of the war on terrorism is so decisive. What contributed to
September 11 was the tendency to deal with terrorism as a police
problem, in its manifestations but not its causes.

Now, as we face the problem of Iraq, the key issue is not the
size of its stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction but the toleration

by America of these weapons in the midst of a region which spawned
the present wave of terrorism by a country that has used them against
its own people and their neighbors and retains them in violation of
many United Nation resolutions to which it adhered. Therefore, the
national debate should address not primarily the consequences of
dealing with that danger but the consequence of not dealing with it or
a variation of so-called inspection systems that have failed before. In
1998, President Clinton announced that Iraq had just admitted [to]
holding stockpiles of anthrax, biological weapons and botulism. These
stockpiles can only have increased. We cannot wait for a September
11 from such stores or from parts of them that fall into the hands of
others or that are created at [the] invitatation of them.

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A year after the tragedy of September 11, America must not let
matters slide back into the illusions of the period before it. And I hope
we will conduct our debates with the awareness that reasonable people
can develop scenarios of most favorable outcomes; but we must also
remember the consequences if they turn out to be wrong. And, above
all, we have a duty to conduct this debate in a manner that preserves
America as the hope of the world.