NP The battle ahead

[David Morris]

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=788398

The battle ahead
Sep 20th 2001
>From The Economist print edition

To fight will be hard. But not to fight would be worse

[...]

Many are afraid of the battle that lies ahead. Some are horribly, even 
obscenely wrong in their reasons for objecting to it, notably those who 
blame America itself for the horrors that were inflicted upon it last week 
in New York and Washington, DC. But others are understandably afraid, and 
are opposed to it for nobler-sounding reasons. They think retaliation would 
be to stoop as low as the terrorists. They think it would be wrong for more 
ordinary people to die, in Afghanistan or in a new cycle of violence 
elsewhere. They argue that it would be better to do nothing beyond 
self-protection, because that would deprive the terrorists of the 
satisfaction of having provoked a reaction, especially a reaction whose 
chances of success look daunting. They want peace, not war.

The sad truth of human relations, however, is that you cannot get peace 
without fighting for it. Doing nothing would invite far worse consequences 
than doing something, perilous though that is. It would simply be to delay 
action rather than to avert it. It would encourage other tyrants and 
trouble-makers to believe that they can mount such attacks with impunity, in 
any country in the world, for if America cannot or will not hit back, then 
perhaps nobody can. Such attacks could well use even more fearsome means, 
including biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. It would be likely, 
indeed, that the same network of terrorists that planned last week's attacks 
would soon mount others, killing yet more innocent people and sowing even 
more fear. For one observation by the pacifists is surely true: that the 
terrorists do want to provoke a reaction, and will carry on their attacks 
until they get one.





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