Commentary: Reason Must Overcome Terror

W A S H I N G T O N, D.C., Sept. 14 -- "The one means that wins the easiest victory over reason [is] terror and force."

Those words were spoken not by a philosopher but by a terrorist.

The speaker was Adolf Hitler, writing in 1923-1924 in his autobiography, Mein Kampf. Hitler blamed his adversaries for applying terror against him. But the point is still valid: Terror overwhelms reason.

The United States is overwhelmed at the moment. The question is how America will respond to the terror of this week

It is clear that military retaliation is being planned and may not be far off, but whether it will be properly focused all depends on what can be discovered about the attackers.

What is not clear is how well America understands the fury and the identity of its attackers. There are scattered, but disturbing, reports of anti-Islamic slurs and threats. There are also instances of gestures of support and understanding for members of the American-Arab community.

Reason is not always the result when the country is attacked. During the Vietnam War, news of an attack on a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin led to an open-ended grant of war power to President Lyndon Johnson. Only later did the attack prove bogus. During the lead up to the Gulf War, reports of atrocities involving babies in incubators proved false, but not before senators voted to support the war.

In this new century, there is no doubt of the brutal authenticity of this atrocity against American civilians. But deciding how to deal with it may take longer and be more complicated to unravel than any previous military — and civilian — effort in American history.

So the challenge to America is to prove Hitler wrong, and to deprive terror of its expected easy victory over reason.