Among modern nations today, the United States stands out in leading the way with advanced technologies as never before in its history. In fact, if someone wanted to find a silver bullet in our society, it would be the total collection of technologies already available and in use, as well as the knowledge Americans have and are using to develop even more effective tools. Various groups of Americans continue to worry about the effects of one technology or another in harming the environment or in eliminating jobs. However, the fact remains that this nation's economy has prospered since the 1840s, thanks in important ways to a vast collection of technologies that it either invented (such as the telephone and the PC) or exploited at least as well as any other society.

As far back as the Civil War, the death toll fostered the American penchant for innovations after almost every family in the nation experienced a loss of relatives or friends. A determination to develop technologies that would minimize loss of life became an essential design point in U.S. military strategies for the next 14 decades. Unlike the British army in World War I and the Russian army in both World War I and II, which relied extensively on the deployment of massive numbers of soldiers to win battles, America relied more on technology to do the job. The American military and its political leaders always sought to minimize deaths. President Harry S. Truman argued that the reason he authorized use of atomic bombs in Japan was to save the lives of a million Allied soldiers. President George Bush and his generals designed the Gulf War campaign to minimize American casualties; indeed, less than 400 Americans died in that conflict. The campaign in Afghanistan was clearly designed to maximize enemy casualties while minimizing American losses. One reason why the American military specialized in, and did so well with, air warfare throughout the twentieth century was its collection of technologies. In addition to limiting American casualties, it proved an effective way to wage war.

The nation's inventory of technologies that can improve productivity, decentralize work, and enrich quality of life delivers enormous benefits. The national highway system makes it possible to distribute goods quickly across the nation. Almost every building and home has a telephone. Almost every home has a TV and a radio. The Internet is more widely used in this nation than anywhere else in the world, delivering information and services widely. An extensive list of technologies improves economic competitiveness, and personal security, and meets other needs of the nation. In confronting the new normalcy and terrorism, we need to increase our use of technology and to find more novel applications. Just as technology can provide weapons to attack us, it can provide defenses.

Anthrax in the fall of 2001 is an example. There was enormous concern about the safety of handling mail because anthrax was found in correspondence mailed to various people around the country. Postal workers died, politicians were tested to make sure they were not infected, and thousands of incidents occurred where citizens felt their mail was contaminated, causing police, fire, and other public officials to divert their attention from their normal duties. As public officials explored ways and means to decontaminate mail, at least a partial answer was at hand: Reduce the volume of physical mail by accelerating the use of e-mail.

In the financial marketplace, banks have tried for nearly a decade to persuade customers to bank online. Companies have offered to bill customers electronically. (Among themselves, businesses had already moved en masse to e-billing in the late 1990s.) With the growing availability of the Internet, one wonders how long it will be practical to publish and mail catalogs to our homes. First-class mail has been declining for over a decade, replaced by e-mail. One can reasonably expect that 9-11 and anthrax problems will speed up the shift of communications from paper to the Internet. Computer vendors and software manufacturers know how to do that and are already pushing their case. It is cheap, fast, and safer than moving tons of paper. While paper-based mail will probably not go away in our lifetime, we can expect a vast increase in the electronic movement of mail. The trend was already evident in the aftermath of 9-11, as bill paying via the Internet accelerated.

There is a dark side, nonetheless, to the silver bullet of technology. As we move toward greater dependence on the Internet to receive and send information, any threat to that information infrastructure poses a major threat to the nation's security and economic well-being. In the world of the new normalcy, we will have to find additional ways to protect that infrastructure. This is far more than the normal data security issues that corporations and government agencies deal with on a regular basis. This is all about network security, a much more difficult set of problems that range from protecting transmissions to securing the nation's supply of electricity (production and transmission). Due to ongoing innovations in the highly competitive telecommunications and computing industries in the United States and in other countries, the probability of dramatically improving the security of the Internet looks high, even though we may experience some cyberterrorism along the way.

Because of the decentralized nature of the Internet, there is no one giant computer that runs the network. This makes a lethal attack nearly impossible, although hackers have been mounting attacks for nearly two decades. The most they have been able to do is disrupt individual pieces of the network and spoil files on groups of PCs. Both corporations and key government agencies (FBI, CIA, and increasingly, the military) have been developing know-how to counter such attacks, competencies that will now be used more extensively than before.

Of course, the dark side of technology extends beyond issues of data security and the Internet. It also involves science and the reality that anyone wanting to harm a nation has access to technology and scientific knowledge to use in producing weapons of terrorism. Terrorists are empowered in very dramatic ways. Bioterrorism's terrible arsenal, as Time magazine has noted, can threaten nations with smallpox, the plague, botulism, and hemorrhagic fever (a family of viral diseases). Around the world, laboratories can produce and contain supplies of disease-carrying agents. Bioterrorism, as a threat, cannot be eliminated by simply washing our hands after opening mail. Air, food, and water are all vulnerable.

A serious problem centers on nuclear power plants and the availability of plutonium, which can be acquired from ex-Soviet Union scientists and engineers or already has been acquired by rogue groups around the world. The destruction of a nuclear power plant by use of a bomb or crashing a plane into such a facility could create enormous health problems across a wide swath of geography. Officials of the International Atomic Agency are concerned about terrorists who could create a “dirty bomb” by wrapping stolen radioactive materials used in medicine and industry around a conventional explosive such as dynamite. They could potentially use it to make a significant area of a city uninhabitable for many years.

The pervasive irony of technological progress, as represented by the Internet, is that the same function of decentralization sought by the U.S. defense establishment as a protection against attack also serves the enemies of the nation. Because the Internet is so diffused, if one part is knocked out, messages simply get routed along other paths, using different computers to get to their destination. The Internet's portability, decentralized access, and global availability empower terrorists who are out to use technology for their destructive purposes. For them, the greatest value of the Internet is not the opportunity to hack someone's system. It is the ability to communicate and coordinate activities around the world. They do not need to centralize their operations. They can be scattered in remote locations and use cell phones attached to a laptop to communicate over the Internet with coconspirators around the world. In fact, that is how terrorists in 2001 frequently communicated with each other.

In confronting the new normalcy, we face a primary fact of modern life that is represented by technology. As far as the overwhelming majority of Americans are concerned, those who denounce technology miss the point. Don't blame the machine. Blame those who misuse its powers. For Americans, technology is the great facilitator of their success as a country, nation, and way of life. They are committed to technology as they reach out to it for solutions to problems and never more than in confronting the changes and pursuing whatever opportunities that are part of the new normalcy.

Business leaders, government officials, and academics have been bombarding Americans, Europeans, and East Asians for a decade with statements about the job creation and other benefits brought about by globalization. With good reason. During the past thirty years, three fundamental trends have led to the celebration of globalization.

First, the democracies that came out on the winning side of World War II embraced the notion of free trade as one of the most important building blocks of modern economies. The logic was that free trade would facilitate creation of a middle class in Third-World countries, while in advanced economies the export of goods and services would enrich companies and whole nations. Success has crowned the approach. Free trade is essentially the ruling mantra of the day, with a history going back several hundred years before gaining momentum in the second half of the twentieth century. The establishment and operation of the United Nations, many rounds of economic trade agreements, and most recently, the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) provided institutional support for the movement. Large regional trading blocks in Europe with the Common Market and in the New World with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are generally considered to be successful milestones on the road to free trade.

Second, the vast improvements in telecommunications, the processing and movement of data (thanks to computers), and more effective transportation systems (most notably, commercial air traffic) created an infrastructure that reduced the limitations of distance. The telephone is widely available in all societies and is effectively ubiquitous in advanced economies, where phones exist in over 90 percent of all households and nearly 100 percent of all businesses. In some societies, cell phones are used by over 60 percent of the population. Satellites and the Internet have made it possible for businesses to operate more globally with integrated operating processes and in many markets around the world in ways not possible in 1950, let alone in 1900. The result is that commercial activities are increasingly conducted with fewer borders, with cheap, fast communications and with more and more nations basking in the sunshine of free trade. Never in the history of human kind have global trade and communication been so easy or so extensive.

The third trend involves the spread of two related concepts and sets of actions. The first has been the creation and expanded use of international agencies that transcend borders. The United Nations is the most obvious example, but there are important others, such as the Common Market and the International Monetary Fund, all creations in the second half of the twentieth century. These organizations made it possible to establish global standards of behavior, law, and economic practices. That is why, for example, a mass murderer can be arrested in Bosnia, tried before an international court in The Hague, then imprisoned in Holland. The second related part of the trend has been the slowly developing set of legal and moral benchmarks for behavior that are appearing across the world, mostly in advanced Western societies. For example, the global trend toward eliminating the death penalty is putting pressure on countries that still impose it, such as the United States and China. Another involves the less publicized movement toward implementing laws that protect property and personal possessions from seizure and clumsy legal bureaucratic behavior. This has been most in evidence in what were the Iron Curtain countries, in Latin America, and now in parts of Asia, although too slowly in sub-Saharan Africa and in what was the Soviet Union.

As positive as these three trends are, globalization and the new normalcy present problems. Open borders make it easy for terrorists to move from country to country, as became evident when police organizations all over the world began tracking down individuals involved in 9-11. They were popping up all over Western Europe and across North America, the two most wide-open land masses in the industrialized world. As already noted, the excellent infrastructure for communications also makes it possible for terrorists to stay in close touch with each other. Communication and transportation, when coupled with the long-standing trend of making information increasingly available, accessible, and inexpensive, make it possible to learn what to blow up and how to do it, and to stay in touch with fellow conspirators.

Globalization, therefore, presents a problem for governments, particularly for liberal democracies. The problem is simple to state, difficult to resolve. Over the past 200 years, governments have been increasing the free flow of information and increasing the civil rights of their citizens and foreign nationals. Periods of totalitarian rule, such as in Nazi Germany, Franco's Spain, or Mussolini's Italy, were discredited exceptions to the broad pattern of liberalism. Even the Soviet Union, which fell apart because it could not compete economically or politically in ways that globalization called for, is in the process of participating in this new trend. The problem is, how do we retain and expand civil liberties and access to information in the face of terrorist threats that can be addressed more efficiently by restricting the free flow of information and curtailing civil liberties?

No country has been more tested on this issue than the United States, which clearly and unequivocally laid out its basic position in a series of documents in the late eighteenth century with the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and myriad state laws protecting freedom of religion. Over the course of the next two centuries, this nation expanded the availability of information, freedom of speech, and civil liberties, curtailing them only in times of war. During the American Civil War, for example, President Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus, locked up newspaper editors, and censored telegrams. In World War II, U.S. officials placed Japanese Americans in internment camps and censored all correspondence by its military forces in combat zones. During the Vietnam War, some protestors were thrown in jail for expressing their views, and in October 2001, Congress passed legislation increasing the authority of state and federal law enforcement agencies to conduct wiretaps and read e-mail. Every generation of Americans has been willing to curtail some of its personal freedoms for the duration of a national crisis, most notably in time of war. Afterward, they were persistent in regaining those constrained freedoms. A healthy sign.

What do we do in the current situation, where normalcy means living on a wartime footing for an extended period of time in a struggle against global terrorism in all its elusive dimensions? First, let us recognize that in no war in American or European history did anybody know how long it would last. Overwhelmingly, forecasts on duration have been wrong, underestimating the length of a conflict. According to European military experts, World War I was supposed to last two to three months. Earlier, American officials thought they could wrap up the Civil War in 90 days or so. Who would have predicted that the Vietnam War would last seven years? What a surprise it was that the Gulf War lasted only 100 days! Arab-Israeli wars are often seen as a continuum, marked by pauses that are interrupted by low-level fighting between Palestinians and Israelis.

Among industrial nations, Americans and Europeans now live in a time of persistent peril—the danger of minor and extensive military action, concerns about physical security at home, and threats to the welfare of the global economic infrastructure. How do we reach a balance between personal security and free movement? How do we leverage the benefits of free trade while restricting the movement of terrorists, dangerous materials, and their funds? These are not easy questions to answer, in part because the specific circumstances involved in formulating policies and practices shift. If the past has anything to teach us, it is that we will tolerate constraints to personal movement and access to information. We will also monitor the physical movement of people and goods, with increased cost to all economies and reduced flexibility of action. Watch then for products and services that become less attractive to sell and buy.

What became obvious in the wake of 9-11 were the unintended consequences for globalization. The New York Times on October 14, 2001 published a photograph of a bar in Tijuana, Mexico. It was empty. Prior to 9-11, that bar, along with many others in that community, would have been packed with tourists and Americans going south for the day to have a good time. But with the fear of traveling, the owner of that bar, well over a thousand miles away from New York and Washington, D.C. and in a different country, was in financial trouble. All over Latin America, currencies dropped in value within days of 9-11; sales of raw materials, such as copper and zinc, came almost to a halt; and around the world, airlines from the U.S. to China experienced 20 to 80 percent declines in sales. The economics minister of Argentina, Domingo Cavallo, summed up the impact on globalization: “What is approaching is a deceleration of the United States and European economies in the context of a war against terrorism.” He was pointing out the perils of the interconnectedness brought about by globalization.

Negative, unintended consequences rippled rapidly through a globalized society. Within two weeks of 9-11, airlines, hotels, shipping lines, and restaurants around the world saw sharp, dramatic declines in business. Airlines began laying off tens of thousands of employees; hotels accustomed to 80 percent or more occupancy rates either closed whole floors or entire buildings. People around the world saw the Twin Towers blow up and reacted quickly and simultaneously to protect their economic assets and to improve their physical security. What is different from earlier decades is the speed with which positive and negative by-products of an event emerge.

For Americans, that means we will personally have to know more about international affairs, keep up with and be a part of activities of many other countries. We will have to learn foreign languages, more world history, and political science. We cannot leave it to diplomats or senior executives in our largest corporations. Americans as a whole must become more worldly as they make voting decisions, support various issues, take actions on behalf of their families and careers, and better understand the potential consequences of their actions. The day may come when some Americans will ask the kinds of questions globe-trotters and families living abroad have always asked—In what society should I raise my children? In which economy will my children and their children be best off during the 21st century? Americans rarely ask those kinds of questions, but their immigrant forebears did. That is how they made up their minds to come to America in the first place.

On the plus side, globalization delivers the many benefits of interconnection, starting with global infrastructures to deal with crises and foster cooperation that transcends national boundaries. These include telecommunications, international governmental and regulatory bodies, multinational corporations, and both profit and nonprofit organizations operating around the world. Add personal relationships among national leaders, nurtured by state visits and exchanges at every level of government, along with ongoing contacts involving business leaders, academics, consultants, and experts of all kinds.

Gone are the days when, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the White House had to scramble to find people living in Washington, D.C. who personally knew Fidel Castro and could advise the administration on possible Cuban moves. Today, American presidents know national leaders personally, exchanging visits that are supplemented by frequent telephone conversations. As necessary, they send personal emissaries to hot spots at a moment's notice. From the United Nations to the Red Cross, the world is tied together by organizations working full time on the world's problems and needs, their efforts facilitated by personal relations between individuals at many levels of government.

While some observers worried in the 1980s and 1990s that national governments would collapse in the face of the growing economic power of large corporations, nothing of the sort happened. In fact, the historic trend has been toward more national governments. Nearly 200 now exist, almost double the number after World War II. In many nations, decentralized governmental entities, such as in Italy and Spain, add to the mix of governance and spread connections around the world.

The results are striking. When President George Bush put together his coalition to go after Iraq in 1991, it took him several months to organize it; his son created a worldwide coalition in less than 30 days. One could argue that the issues were different, that the players were the product of a different generation and so forth but in the end, what sped up the process was a sense of global community. Of course, the glue that held it together, a war against terrorism, was enormously appealing to nations that had experienced the horrors of such violence and those that feared it. But there was more to it. Nations have become conditioned to mobilizing their resources in joint efforts. They have been acquiring the habit of working together on global issues.

Free trade, international monetary policies, environmental protection initiatives, and now antiterrorism all have become global projects. The implications are enormous. For one thing, it suggests that Americans do not necessarily have to bear alone the full burden of dealing with thorny diplomatic and military issues in the decades to come. Other countries—not just the U.N.—can work on these issues by cooperating via international channels that already exist. We can envision a situation where national leaders might hesitate before launching an initiative that would offend the rest of the world.

As the interdependence of economic, monetary, and political conditions increases, already a major consequence of globalization, increasing numbers of nations will have reason to work together in protecting standards of health, economic well-being, and environmental conditions. Political scientists have long noted that the best way to create a democracy and keep it going is to ensure the creation and preservation of a thriving middle class. While the critics of world trade point out that Earth's resources are dominated by wealthy nations, they forget that, even in the poorest nations, standards of living are higher than in their past. Poverty in such countries is magnified in comparison with rich nations. The historic trend has been a slow rise in the standard of living of many parts of the world, particularly in that middle tier around the Earth that straddles the Equator for a thousand miles above and below it. Meanwhile, a disturbing imbalance troubles the waters as wealthier nations get richer faster than the poorest improve their economies. This creates tensions because all countries compete, and those that fall behind resent the prosperity of the wealthy nations. This goes a long way to explaining why anti-Americanism is more evident in poorer countries than in wealthier ones.

To be realistic, there are limits to the positive, facilitating features of globalization. The world is still a competitive arena. The distinguished historian, David S. Landes, in his book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), points out that the benefits of trade have always been unequal. The comparative advantages of nations never remain fixed but shift over time as those who respond to economic conditions tend to do better. According to Landes, in all societies, “some people find it easier and more agreeable to take than to make.” He also points out that advanced economies can protect themselves, although not completely avoid the pain of doing so, by pursuing trade, exploiting innovations in technology, learning from others, creating new knowledge, and pursuing new markets for goods and services. He ends his lengthy, well-reasoned book with a simple statement that captures an essential feature of citizens living in industrialized nations: “Educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right.” Globalization facilitates our ability to apply that perspective. Given the nature of capitalist societies and recent trends, globalization can be leveraged in the years ahead to preserve and enhance the economic standards and cultural values of more and more countries around the world.

Soon after 9-11, a pilot told his passengers that, if anyone tried to take control of the plane, they should get up and seize the hijacker. A few days later, a mentally unbalanced passenger on another flight actually broke into the cockpit area. Passengers immediately rushed the man, overpowered him, and regained control of the situation. It was a close-up of Americans responding to the challenge of the new normalcy, a sign of the sense of individual empowerment and of personal responsibility.

Prior to 9-11, air passengers had been told for years that, if their plane was hijacked, they were to remain quiet and passive so that nobody would be hurt. The strategy worked, since hijackers usually just wanted a free ride to some other country. But the rules of the game changed after 9-11, when hijackers crashed aircraft into buildings, giving passengers the choice of either dying that way or trying to foil the hijackers. It might still cost them their lives. Or save them, as happened with the mentally unbalanced passenger. In the weeks that followed the pilot's suggestion that passengers take charge of their situation, passengers all over the United States commented to the press on how they would do the same thing. They felt empowered and responsible.

The incident symbolized what was happening. Americans were being asked to take charge of their circumstances in a nation whose culture always celebrated personal initiative. This authentic American trait was dramatized in the landings of Allied troops at Normandy in June 1944, when American soldiers found that the German defenses differed from what they had been trained to meet. Because they faced up to their objective—to get inland as fast as possible and overrun German defenses—they brooked no delay. Rather than call back to commanders in Britain or on ships for orders on what to do, they took things into their own hands. With so many officers killed or wounded on the first day within hours of landing, enlisted men made decisions about how to move forward and what actions to take without asking for permission. The results were stunning: They broke through German defenses, devised new tools to cut through the hedgerows blocking their advance, and improvised tactics. Privates and corporals took charge of groups of men that normally would be commanded by lieutenants and captains. And it worked. Officers of both Allied and Axis military units commented for years afterward about this unique characteristic of American soldiers: They didn't need permission to do what was necessary to get the job done.

This feature of American society grew out of the necessities of frontier life, where often homesteaders did not have the benefit of nearby army units to protect them or law enforcement officials to keep the peace or government agencies to handle community-wide problems. They were on their own. This attitude, nurtured when Americans went West to settle the frontier, is still around. Throughout American history, institutional support for taking the initiative ensured the existence of an empowered citizenry and reinforced this behavior. Constitutional rights, the protection of copyrights and patents, the free enterprise capitalist system, free speech, and entrepreneurship all contributed to this characteristic. To be sure, alternative pressures to regulate and dampen this trend also have emerged. Censorship during war and laws against specific business practices (such as monopoly behavior) have surged and waned over time. But a sense of empowerment persists.

In the new normalcy, we can look for a resurgence of empowerment and a sense of responsibility. In the wake of 9-11, public officials reverted to a long-standing American practice of reminding people that all citizens had to personally be part of the vigilance required to ensure security. People had to report problems and unusual behavior or circumstances, individuals had to seize control in a crisis, and everyone had to assume responsibility for handling their mail very carefully. From the president on down, public officials urged Americans not just to leave things to the government, rather to take personal responsibility for security in the new normalcy.

Just as technology and globalization were changing our world without alarming us and without demanding attention, so did Arab-American relations move through ups and downs, with only occasional headlines when blood was shed. The Cold War was America's international concern. The first (and sometimes only) thing America and its foreign correspondents wanted to know and to report was whether a Middle Eastern country was pro-Western or pro-Communist.

Lost in the process were the realities and the complexities of the Middle East—until terrorism that reached across sea and ocean demonstrated the power of technology and the impact of globalization. Suicidal terrorists personified the meaning of “Anyone-anywhere-anytime” by killing civilians, destroying towering symbols of economic power, and shattering illusions of invulnerability. As with all wars, the war against terror started on one dreadful day. But it was not the beginning of the edgy and complicated relationship between a Western democracy and a complex group of Arab countries traumatized by the arrival of a new nation in their midst that they did not want and could not get rid of.

Middle Eastern countries do not constitute a monolith. The have their own schisms, radical regimes, moderate societies, fundamentalists, Sunni and Shiite sects of Islam, modern nation states, and loose collections of tribal alliances set up as governments. This enormous diversity of cultures and countries means that anybody who wants to understand the region, do business there, or fight wars against terrorists or any other group has always found the region difficult to understand and deal with. That makes simplistic generalizations misleading.

The region as a whole is politically and militarily very unsettled, even violent, and seething with more issues than the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation. In the past 30 years alone, Muslim nations have fought more among themselves than with the West. After World War II, newly independent Syria was caught in a revolving door of political instability and repression. Lebanon was torn apart by an enduring civil war that broke out in 1975 and led to Syrian intervention. Iraq and Iran have had their bloody conflicts. Iraq invaded Kuwait. From time to time, assassinations have signaled changes in regimes. On top of underlying conflicts within Middle Eastern politics, repeated Arab-Israeli wars have broken out since the late 1940s, punctuating ongoing violence in contested areas claimed by both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Because of the persistent warfare in one part of the Middle East or another, a dangerous state of violence and extremism of one form or another persists as a constant feature of the region. Even stable Egypt has experienced terrorism, ranging from the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat by Muslim fundamentalists to attacks on tourists. South of Egypt, Sudan has for years had a vicious civil war that occasionally spills northward into Egypt.

In such a troubled context, focusing just on the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation blurs an overall picture of the Middle East. There are complications enough in that confrontation. Israel sees the end of the conflict in establishment of normal legal national borders and peace, much like liberal democracies do in other countries. The Palestinians claim territory that is occupied by Israel, while Muslims at large consider the existence of Israel an abomination because it intrudes upon their holy places. Neither side has been able to budge, despite enormous efforts on the part of the last 10 American presidents to bring peace to the region. The high-profile role of the U.S. government in pursuing a peaceful solution, as well as its commitment to Israel's survival and its substantial military and economic aid, has led many Arabs to see the United States as siding with an avowed enemy. Henry Kissinger, long experienced in negotiating in the region as the secretary of state in the Nixon administration, recently concluded that “the parties are not ready for a final settlement.” He has recommended that low-level negotiations continue in an attempt to bring the parties slowly to some interim peace agreement, with the involvement of NATO countries.

Iraq, Iran, and Africa (of which a great portion is Muslim) present other problems for United States in the region.As the Gulf War of 1991 clearly demonstrated and the ongoing low-level military activities with Iraq remind us each day, Americans can easily get drawn into ongoing conflicts in the region. To argue that this will be the case until the region runs out of oil is to avoid the immediate uncertainties of political and military tensions in which Americans are perceived as intruders, as favoring Israel, even as being anti-Islamic.

Fanatics who are ready to go to the extreme of suicide are not born but made by circumstances, reinforced by their surroundings, and shaped by their origins. The hostility mixed with a deranged sense of mission that turns them into terrorists has well-nurtured roots. What they set out to do raises serious questions for Americans. Why do Arab terrorists target the United States? Why do so many Arabs, more than dislike, hate America?

Let's begin with the recent roots of terror in the Middle East. Beginning in the late 1940s and leading up to the first Arab-Israeli War, guerrilla tactics have been employed on both sides, by Zionists and by Palestinians. The same set of tactics was also deployed in fighting civil wars, in toppling various Arab leaders, and even in conflicts between Arab countries. So there is a large body of know-how and experience in using the tools and techniques of terrorism—an entrenched practice in the region, as demonstrated by ongoing incidents involving Palestinians and Israelis.

Enter the United States as a target for terrorism. While strongly supporting Israel from its founding, the U.S. has never hidden its concern over the supply of oil and has formed alliances, landed troops in the region, and even fought one war to protect that supply. To many Arabs, the Americans behave much like the colonial powers that occupied almost the entire region in the nineteenth century. These have included Russia, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Turkey, with the British the most visible because of their control of Egypt, Iraq, and their lifeline to India, the Suez Canal. Great Britain and America have nearly always worked closely together, as in Afghanistan today. To an Arab, that suggests the Americans are like the British and the other colonial powers that have exploited the region.

An additional factor is the growth of militant Islamic political groups who merge political and religious perspectives. Beginning with the rise of Gamal Abdel-Nasser in the 1950s—after he overthrew the king of Egypt and several years later seized control of the Suez Canal from the British—pan-Arabism has developed into local religious and political nationalism. The ouster of the Shah in Iran and the erection of a conservative Islamic regime in that country in the 1970s continued the expansion of conservative religious governments in the region. Every country in the area today has what we in the West would call right-wing religious groupings. These groupings either run a country (as in Iran) or are so powerful that their demands cannot be ignored (as in Saudi Arabia). Militant groups train members in terrorist tactics and deploy them to further their local agendas. Repeatedly, that has involved targeting the United States.

Over the course of the last half-century, in response to Cold War politics, domestic political pressure to support Israel, and the need to protect oil supplies, the American government has sided with various political regimes that promised internal stability. That led the U.S. to support from time to time oppressive regimes that various Arab republics have opposed. Saudi Arabia is a good example, but so, too, was the Taliban when the Soviets were attempting to occupy Afghanistan. The result is widespread criticism of U.S. policies and less Arab condemnation of terrorist attacks than America expects. This helps to explain why the Arab states in general publicly criticized the terrorism against the U.S. in September 2001 but did not provide ground troops to help root out the terrorists. The most the U.S. could get were rights to fly through their air space and, in a few instances, the ability to use local air bases.

Meanwhile, over the years, the creeping violence directed toward the United States failed to arouse the American public to a crisis level. Shock and indignation, yes, but not sustained outrage and demands for retaliation. The episodes were limited to newspaper headlines and TV footage about an embassy here, a group of hostages there, Marines killed during the Reagan administration, a U.S. Navy ship attacked in Aden. Only once before Afghanistan did the U.S. reaction reach the level of direct military conflict at the level of war, and that was when a major supplier of oil to the West, Kuwait, was invaded. The thrust of U.S. efforts has been consistent: to reduce the level of terror and tension in the region while protecting the supply of oil.

The key point is that a pattern of anti-U.S. violence was not effectively quashed by the U.S. The declaration of war on terrorism finally changed that situation as America set out to impose a penalty that deters terrorism and to neutralize radical groups. But there's more to the equation. Until the Israeli-Palestinian problem is worked out, America will be branded as hostile to the Middle East and to the Islamic values cherished by its adherents. Ultimately, it will be the Palestinians and the Israelis who must make peace by succeeding where the U.S. has failed, despite its strenuous efforts.

The new normalcy calls for us to recognize that the Middle East will probably remain highly unstable for years to come. The area's governments need to sort out a large number of regional, historical, economic, even religious tensions, many brought on by themselves, others exacerbated by European colonialism and the rivalries of the past 10 decades. Arab governments are paying the price of failing to create stable middle classes by capitalizing on oil revenues and of not addressing the harsh realities of poverty and ages-long competition for limited supplies of food and water. Meanwhile, religion continues as a powerful incendiary force that inflames the atmosphere, threatens internal stability, and motivates terrorist actions. The situation calls for recognition of a clash of cultures, which hundreds of years ago would have been called a rivalry between Christians and Muslims, a view still widely held in the Middle East but which seems anachronistic to Western minds. As the area remains volatile, to the extent that we can extricate ourselves from the ups and downs of its conflicts, so much the better.

Overall, for Americans, the new normalcy calls for different ways of thinking about many issues at the global level and a return to bedrock values at the local level. Some of these have been suggested in this chapter; others will be explored in detail in the pages to come. It all begins with attitude and a way of thinking and feeling about current circumstances. George Washington, the commanding general of the rag-tag army that ultimately defeated the best equipped and managed army of its time, summed up the challenge that echoes today. On April 30, 1789, in his first Inaugural Address as the first U.S. president, he said, “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are…entrusted to the hands of the American people.” For us as 21st-century Americans, the objectives are clear and unequivocal:

These objectives pose major challenges to nation and citizen alike. In the chapters ahead, we will deal with their implementation and suggest approaches for achieving them. The overarching strategy on a day-to-day basis was summed up by New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who urged us to go back to work, go out to dinner, return to the normal routines of life. President George W. Bush echoed a similar theme. The widow of one of the passengers who struggled with hijackers over Pennsylvania, Lisa Beamer, put it simply, “It's time to get back to life.”