[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 12]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page 17193]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                 THOUGHTS ON THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM

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                             HON. BOB BARR

                               of georgia

                    in the house of representatives

                       Friday, September 14, 2001

  Mr. BARR of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to share these 
thoughts by Mark Helprin in the September 12, 2001 Wall Street Journal. 
His argument makes an excellent case for a total and committed defense 
of our nation against the elements of international terrorism.

             [From the Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 2001]

             We Beat Hitler--We Can Vanquish This Foe, Too

                           (By Mark Helprin)

       America, it is said, is slow to awaken, and indeed it is, 
     but once America stirs, its resolution can be matchless and 
     its ferocity a stunning surprise.
       The enemy we face today, though barbaric and ingenious, is 
     hardly comparable to the masters of the Third Reich, whose 
     doubts about our ability to persevere we chose to dissuade in 
     a Berlin that we had reduced to rubble. Nor is he comparable 
     to the commanders of the Japanese Empire, whose doubts about 
     our ability to persevere we chose to dissuade in a Tokyo we 
     had reduced to rubble. Nor to the Soviet Empire that we faced 
     down patiently over half a century, nor to the great British 
     Empire from which we broke free in a long and taxing struggle 
     that affords a better picture of our kith and kin than any 
     the world may have today of who we are and of what we are 
     capable.
       And today's enemy, though he is not morally developed 
     enough to comprehend the difference between civilians and 
     combatants, is neither faceless nor without a place in which 
     we can address him. If he is Osama bin Laden, he lives in 
     Afghanistan, and his hosts, the Taliban, bear responsibility 
     for sheltering him; if he is Saddam Hussein, he lives in 
     Baghdad; if he Yasser Arafat, he lives in Gaza; and so on. 
     Our problem is not his anonymity but that we have refused the 
     precise warnings, delivered over more than a decade, of those 
     who understood the nature of what was coming--and of what is 
     yet to come, which will undoubtedly be worse.
       The first salvos of any war are seldom the most 
     destructive. Consider that in this recent outrage the damage 
     was done by the combined explosive power of three crashed 
     civilian airliners. As the initial shock wears off it will be 
     obvious that this was a demonstration shot intended to 
     extract political concessions and surrender, a call to fix 
     our attention on the prospect of a nuclear detonation or a 
     chemicall or biological attack, both of which would exceed 
     what happened yesterday by several orders of magnitude.
       It will get worse, but appeasement will make it no better. 
     That we have promised retaliation for decades and then always 
     drawn back, hoping that we could get through if we simply did 
     not provoke the enemy, is appeasement, and it must be quite 
     clear by now even to those who perpetually appease that 
     appeasement simply does not work. Therefore, what must be 
     done? Above all, we must make no promise of retaliation that 
     is not honored; in this we have erred too many times. It is a 
     bipartisan failing and it should never be repeated.
       Let this spectacular act of terrorism be the decisive 
     repudiation of the mistaken assumptions that conventional 
     warfare is a thing of the past, that there is a safe window 
     in which we can cut force structure while investing in the 
     revolution in military affairs, that bases and infrastructure 
     abroad have become unnecessary, that the day of the 
     infantryman is dead, and, most importantly, that slighting 
     military expenditure and preparedness is anything but an 
     invitation to death and defeat.
       Short of a major rebuilding, we cannot now inflict upon 
     Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden the great and instantaneous 
     shock with which they should be afflicted. That requires not 
     surgical strikes by aircraft based in the United States, but 
     expeditionary forces with extravagant basing and equipment. 
     It requires not 10 aircraft carrier battle groups but, to do 
     it right and when and where needed, 20. It requires not only 
     all the infantry divisions, transport, and air wings that we 
     have needlessly given up in the last decade, but many more. 
     It requires special operations forces not of 35,000, but of 
     100,000.
       For the challenge is asymmetrical. Terrorist camps must be 
     raided and destroyed, and their reconstitution continually 
     repressed. Intelligence gathering of all types must be 
     greatly augmented, for by its nature it can never be 
     sufficient to the task, so we must build it and spend upon it 
     until it hurts. The nuclear weapons programs, depots, and 
     infrastructure of what Madeleine Albright so delicately used 
     to call ``states of concern'' must, in a most un-Albrightian 
     phrase, be destroyed. As they are scattered around the globe, 
     it cannot be easy. Security and civil defense at home and at 
     American facilities overseas must be strengthened to the 
     point where we are able to fight with due diligence in this 
     war that has been brought to us now so vividly by an alien 
     civilization that seeks our destruction.
       The course of such a war will bring us greater suffering 
     than it has brought to date, and if we are to fight it as we 
     must we will have less in material things. But if, as we have 
     so many times before, we rise to the occasion, we will not 
     enjoy merely the illusions of safety, victory, and honor, but 
     those things themselves. In our history it is clear that 
     never have they come cheap and often they have come late, but 
     always, in the end, they come in flood, and always in the 
     end, the decision is ours.

     

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