Mr. Rockwell: I really never have understood your attitude towards war. It seems to me that all, or almost all, the wars that United States has ever previously waged have been pre-emptive. That is, United States has always waged war BEFORE it was attacked or was greatly suffering from any blockage of resources or anything else. In World War II, for example, United States’s official reason for siding with GB against Germany was that it was best not to allow Germany time to acquire more conquests and more power and then attack United States. The Korean and Vietnamese wars were ostensibly to prevent the growth of Communism to the point where Communism would become unstoppable and would overcome United States by force.

The current US response to the 9/11 attack seems, by contrast, outstandingly NOT to be pre-emptive. It is, instead, a reaction.

If United States had treated the 9/11 incident the way that, say, ancient Rome might have treated it, it might have found out what country or countries M. Atta and his group were from and then shown the Arabs what a desert really IS, destroying all traces of their civilization insofar as possible and taking no prisoners. No one would have worried about “innocent women and children,” knowing that the worst victims of war are the non-voluntary soldier-conscripts and that a person’s age and sex by now have little to do with whether or not they are part of this group. (It is bad enough that bombs or Napalm or diphtheria or whatever may be dropped on your head because of something your government has done or allegedly done, but even worse is to be threatened and bullied into taking up arms and travelling far from those threats and from those you love in order to try to kill someone who may have no more against you than you have against them, and who may be in exactly the same position that you are).

Or, United States might try to respond to the 9/11 attackers the way it responded to Theodore Bundy and Charlie Starkweather, chasing them down and subjecting them, and any confederates, to criminal prosecution. This latter approach is apparently more what US citizens have in mind. It is extremely messy, leaving much room for differences amongst persons of good will as to who is, and who is not, a confederate of the criminals/attackers. Whatever this approach may be called, it is not correctly called a “war.” It is not a war because care is being exercised not to hurt anyone not responsible for the 9/11 attack. Perhaps it should be called attempted prosecution of a crime.

The “prosecution” is a thoroughly befuddled, bewildered effort, mostly because the actual perpetrators are all dead and United States must concentrate any effort it makes upon fingering the perpetrators’ confederates–whoever they may be. These confederates do not appear to me or to you to include Iraquis or the previous Iraqui Government. However, who are we to say? Because of the unique half-criminal, half-military nature of the United States activity, the charges are completely public AND completely classified, as are the identities of the accused (the target[s]). So is the nature of United States prosecutory activity.

If there can be something EVEN MORE unjust than a war, I predict this will be it. I am thinking a war might have been an improvement.

The 9/11 airplane attack on the WTC seems exactly like an incident that would be featured in a Superman comic book. –Only, what would poor Superman have done AFTER some villains had killed themselves in an attack? Superman has never, in all the years of his existence, confronted a situation in which the (primary) villains were already dead. You can see why that would have made for a poor comic book and poor reading.