Barack Obama, who saved his presidential campaign by talking to us like grownups about race relations, could fortify America immeasurably by talking to us like grownups about terrorism.
This is something to do now. Or very soon. As a former senior official in the Department of Homeland Security wrote this month, our country is in "an unprecedented vulnerable state as it welcomes a new president and rescues a battered economy ... creating a fertile ground for a terrorist attack."
This is common sense -- a simple truth that has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. That much was obvious back in September when I wrote, "Whether this election gives us President McCain or President Obama, it seems logical to expect that terrorists will try to strike early and spectacularly in the incoming administration in a bid to provoke the new president into responses as counterproductive and repellent as those of President Bush."
Sometimes it can be hard to take in the full scope of what Bush's swaggering incompetence has wrought. While al Qaeda might have anticipated baiting us into a draining war in Afghanistan, could the terrorists possibly have dared to dream of the total non sequitur that came next: Bush using 9/11 as a pretext for pushing us into a second reputation-ruining quagmire in Iraq?
When we let shock or panic or a lust for vengeance guide us, we are a greater danger to ourselves than terrorists ever could be. Any terrorists. With any weapon. Because the bigger the terrorist attack, the greater our shock, panic, and lust for vengeance is sure to be.
I vividly remember changing my daughter's diaper on September 12, 2001. Raw with the shock of the previous day's massacres, I looked down at my sweet, oblivious nine-month-old baby and wanted to keep her safe forever. I thought of the terrorists. I thought of our huge military, our absurd abundance of nuclear weapons, and formed in my head the message Bush should send to the terrorists: Do that again and we will nuke every inch from Mecca to Morocco, from Tehran to Jakarta.
It was madness. Total madness. But I couldn't shake the thought. Like I said, the bigger the terrorist attack, the greater our shock, panic, and lust for vengeance is likely to be.
Barack Obama realizes this. Writing in The Audacity of Hope back in 2006, the future president dissected al Qaeda's plan for "winning a war from a cave."
"Osama bin Laden understands that he cannot defeat or even incapacitate the United States in a conventional war. What he and his allies can do is inflict enough pain to provoke a reaction of the sort we've seen in Iraq -- a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country, which in turn spurs on insurgencies based on religious sentiment and nationalist pride, which in turn necessitates a lengthy and difficult U.S. occupation, which in turn leads to an escalating death toll on the part of U.S. troops and the local civilian population. All of this fans anti-American sentiment among Muslims, increases the pool of potential terrorist recruits, and prompts the American public to question not only the war but also those policies that project us into the Islamic world in the first place."
Or, as another excellent writer, William Langewiesche, said while discussing his harrowing book on the spread of nuclear weapons, "the actual explosion is not the issue, it's the reaction."
Speaking at the University of Chicago, Langewiesche argued we, as a society, don't have it in us to react to terrorism with restraint, precision, and effectiveness. That was back in 2007. It would be interesting to know if Langewiesche feels otherwise now.
I do.
I think we have it in us to react to terrorism with restraint, precision, and effectiveness. But it will take determined leadership to reshape our thinking, re-imagine our patriotism, and ready us for the disciplined task of using our vast might intelligently. The leadership we need is a president who will talk to us like grownups about terrorism. Before the next attack. Obama can be that president.
What might it sound like to have someone talk to us like grownups about terrorism, about something as ghastly as nuclear terrorism, even? It might sound something like Langewiesche did in those remarks at the University of Chicago two years ago:
"Wouldn't it be wonderful to live in a world where the United States would do the completely unrealistic and say in advance, 'If you hit us, we will take the hit. We don't want to be hit. But we'll take it and we'll not complain. We will not overdo our reaction. So we will diminish the effect of what you want to do to us. We will mourn our dead. And there will be possibly several hundred thousand. We will rebuild the city as quickly as we can and we will accept whatever level of radiation poisoning without complaint. So go to hell.'"
These aren't the sort of words that will.i.am could set to music. But they are the sort of words we need to hear. I hope we'll hear them from Barack Obama. Soon. Before the next attack. Once it comes, there will be no reasoning with us. Just like there was no reasoning with me on September 12, 2001.
We need to think ahead for once.