In reaction to the greatest massacre most Americans have ever seen, our first national priority has been to realize that we are at war. Now our leaders must conduct that war in accordance with a comprehensive strategy seeking not merely episodic retaliation, but victory. To defeat terrorism, in the measure that any such evil can ever be permanently defeated, will require that we devise ways of identifying the components of terrorism and disabling them. This means targeting the people who carry out the missions of death and destruction, their training facilities, regimes hospitable to terrorist activities and the institutions, including banks, that support and help to finance these operations. All entities that participate in any effective way in the terrorist project must be rendered incapable of action, so that they cannot coalesce effectively against the people and interests of the United States.
Americans usually think of handling evil-doers in the reactive way that law enforcement must. We do not generally want police to take pre-emptive action against citizens they believe are going to commit a crime. Rather, we want them to defend the law by responding to actual crimes, and bringing criminals to justice. Such response is sufficient to maintain the culture of self-government which is the real source of order, freedom and safety in our society.
The task before our government in response to the attacks of last week is not to defend the law, but to provide national security against any such attacks in the future. Such security requires action to forestall, prevent and defend against attack. And for this task a national security policy is required, not a law-enforcement policy.
This means that we will have to substantially strengthen our internal defenses. We are a free and open society, but we must understand that the greatest freedom should be reserved for our citizens. Visitors from other countries must be treated with respect, but not with the same latitude that we give to our citizens. We have the right to be more careful – to be more surveillant – with those who are not even in principle required to acknowledge loyalty to the interests of the United States. We have been surrendering this right in practice for the past several decades, and this surrender is at least partially responsible for what happened in New York and Washington.
Most important to our success in the struggle now beginning is that we remember two vital realities that will not always be obvious amid the thrust and counterthrust of military might, diplomacy, propaganda, economic measures and the other complex forms of engagement that a multi-national struggle will involve. We need to remember who our enemy is, and we need to remember who we are.
We can remember who our enemy is simply by never forgetting the nature of the act that was perpetrated against us and the world, for it showed a ruthless and cold-blooded disregard for the humanity of thousands of people, from all over the world. The people on the plane were the best instance of this. They did not exist for these terrorists, who treated them as no more than dust on the floor. The plane was just a weapon, and the fact that people were on it mattered no more than its color.
We have to understand and, in the days, months and years to come, we have to remember, that the force attacking us is without conscience in the evil that it means to do us. And therefore, as we resolve to give no quarter in the struggle against such evil, we must be wary above all to defend our own conscience. Our enemies cannot kill America if we keep our national conscience safe.
And this is the other, and most important, thing we must remember. We must remember who we are, and why it matters that we defend ourselves. Any people, any nation, can summon righteous anger at the senseless and hateful destruction of innocent people and attempted destruction of its political order. Only America can respond to such destruction by resolving to defend what is best in human life – the possibility of pursuing together a vision of justice and ordered liberty, respectful of human dignity and of the authority of God.
Our anger at what has happened would be enough to fuel this war. But we must not settle for a war sustained by anger, unless it is an anger that is placed humbly and wisely in the service of something good, something we can love and can ask our young soldiers to die for.
At the beginning of America, our founders called the attention of the world to the self-evident principles of justice and human dignity that obligated them to declare independence in order to do their duty to God and neighbor. It turned out to be a moment of education for the world. That Declaration was, as well, an enduring example to our own people, as we recalled in crisis after crisis that America was born in a struggle that was explicitly dedicated to the vindication of those exalted principles.
In this time of trouble, we must all strive to see clearly that war is justified not by the evil to which it responds, or seeks to prevent, so much as by the good it seeks to protect and increase. Among our many particular duties in the days ahead, we are all responsible to do what we can to make sure that America remains a fitting instrument for the good that God can bring out of the evil which, in His mysterious providence, He has permitted to befall us. In this war, as in all wars, the home front that matters most is the decency and charity of the human heart.