It is still too early to give any account of the casualties at all, other than to think that 10,000 sounds reasonable. Many of us - perhaps even some people on this list - are still wondering about the status of friends and family. I, for example, know that two close friends of mine worked in the section of the Pentagon that was struck, and I have no idea what has happened to either of them. Similarly, I think that it is highly likely that some members of my graduating class - many of whom worked for Morgan Stanley, which had 3500 employees in the two towers - were killed yesterday. I pray that such is not the case, but it does not seem impossible. Nonetheless, there seem to be two major threads of response. Marvin and Nick seem, to me, to have expressed the first - that American actions have, in some way, caused the climate in the international sphere that allowed this to happen. I have, ineloquently, expressed the second. Let me try to do that better and explain why I have problems with the first. It seems likely that these attacks were carried out by Osama Bin Laden's organization. I will assume that such is the case, or at least that they were carried out by one similarly motivated. There are people in the world who hate the United States. When the news of the attacks upon us occurred, there was mass celebration in East Jerusalem. This reservoir of hatred is what throws up suicide bombers and the members of the terrorist network(s) that have struck us today. These networks are harbored by nations - Iraq, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan - that often actively support, and at the least make no effort to prevent, the actions of these terrorist organizations. There are two major causes of this hatred. The first is the American support of Israel. The easiest way to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again is to abandon Israel. Israel, however, is the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel exists because the Jewish people needed a safe harbor against millenia of European anti-Semitism. The United States stands as the only other one. In the entire history of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, the Palenstinian representatives have never, not once, not _ever_, submitted a proposal of what they consider an acceptable final settlement. Israel's most recent proposal gave the Palestinian's more than 90% of the land in the Occupied Territories, independence as a sovereign state, and a capital in Jerusalem. There was not anything left to argue. The response to this was violence and death. At the recent UN Conference in Dubran, the Syrian representative gave a speech pronouncing the Holocaust a Jewish lie. He was met by applause from the audience. Palestinian schools do not include Israel on their maps of the Middle East, while Palestinian radio continually spreads the vilest anti-Semitic slurs as a way of inflaming the population against Israel. These events have made clear to any person willing to see - even those, like me, who were committed to what is now so ironically called the "peace process" - that the goal of Arafat is nothing more than the destruction of the state of Israel - to complete what Hitler started. Supporting Israel in this situation is no less that supporting civilization itself against its barbarian enemies. It is a moral imperative that the United States continue to do so. No cowardly attack, no mass murder by terrorists, can or should ever dissuade us from this position. The second reason for this hatred is more simple, and truly ineradicable. We are the richest, most powerful nation in the world. Whatever we do, we will be a target of envy and hatred. Because our national story makes the United States inextricable from the defense of freedom, democracy, and secular life, the enemies of those three things will always see us as their enemy. Human history shows that those three vital goods have never, and will never, lack enemies. What they have sometimes lacked is defenders with the resolve to use violence to protect them. That too is something that we can never allow to happen. Marvin indicted "international relations experts" for failing to allow us to step into the shoes of those who would do this. I apologize if I am misquoting him or giving a mistaken understanding of his meaning - I state only what I understood him to mean. I must disagree. Many international relations experts have done so, but many people have refused to acknowledge the picture that has been drawn. The objective of our enemies is our destruction, and nothing short of our destruction will assuage them. As we cannot give them what we want, we must then fight them to protect both the United States and its allies around the world. It is probable that at least 10,000 people died yesterday. To put that in perspective, I believe that 2400 died at Pearl Harbor. _Four times as many_ people died yesterday in a cowardly attack against us. And all of them were civilians, not even sailors with the marginal protection that status offers. It is not only untrue, it is an insult to the dead to imply that the actions of the terrorists were justified or explained by some actions of the United States. The _existence_ of the United States is sufficient to explain those actions. I used the analogy of Pearl Harbor yesterday, and I did not use it lightly. This morning the Boston Globe's headline was "New Day of Infamy." The comparison is, I think, exact. Last night, President Bush stated that we will make no distinction between those who have launched terrorist attacks and those who harbor terrorists. What that means is very simple, and very profound. The United States must hunt whoever did this to the end of the earth. Historically, when we have forced terrorists to ground, we have allowed them to hide, protected by governments willing to offer them refuge, and contenting ourselves with pinprick strikes like those launched by President Clinton in 1998. That is no longer enough. Yesterday war was declared on the United States. The response of the United States should be simple. We must destroy the networks that support the terrorists, and hunt down the terrorists themselves. Any country that harbors, supports, or in any other way aids or protects anyone who did this, should be considered at war with the United States and should be treated in exactly the same way that the last two countries that placed themselves at war with the United States were treated. We should be relentless, and accept nothing less than total cooperation from any country. Yesterday, September 11, 2001, the first great war of the twenty-first century began. The United States of America must act that way. Gautam Mukunda
