It's Been Hard Convincing Allies that it's War - 13 September 2002

As the solemn day approached I began to riffle through the forthcoming television programmes for the day and evening of the 11th.

I suppose that in the past 50 - more - years I've seen as much as anybody of television that concerns America - its news, both domestic and foreign.

Yet I was astonished to discover in advance that, of the 40 or so television channels that are available nationally, and to be seen from Maine to Mexico, from the Florida Keys to Vancouver, 30 were devoting most of the day and all the evening to memorial programmes.

Many networks announced they would cut their television commercials to a minimum and one network - the one presided over by Mr Rupert Murdoch - announced it would play none at all as a respectful reminder of the awful day itself and the three or four days afterwards when we lived in a numbness of thought and when there were no commercials at all, no regular programmes and all public sports were cancelled or postponed.

By the time this Wednesday morning dawned and we began to glimpse something of the literally thousands of religious services going on I could not recall any American anniversary or celebration or national festival of any kind that so overwhelmingly stayed with the original event itself - not Independence Day, not Thanksgiving, not Christmas, not Labor Day - it was only to be matched by the funerals of Franklin Roosevelt and John F Kennedy.

By Tuesday evening there had been hundreds of street interviews, starting with New York city and going out to strollers and shopkeepers and farmers and office workers from coast to coast.

Many sorts of answers were given to the general question about how the day could best be commemorated.

And then came the delicate question about how it would feel to go off to work on the morning of the 11th - or would they prefer to stay at home or perhaps go to church?

Many, especially young women, said they would do both - go to mass or to the synagogue or the mosque and then on to work.

Remember, one American in five - and rising - is a Roman Catholic. There are six million Jews but seven million Muslims.

There was an interesting, easy-to-recognise but hard-to-define emotion common to the secular interviewees.

Most of them threw back the answer: What would be the point of staying home - to brood? Better go to work and hope for the best.

I noted many variations on "hope for the best" and they eventually came into focus on one word, never expressed though - covered up in many ways - the word was anxiety.

And then it struck me that until late in the day no television host or whoever came out with the blunt question: What do you suppose al-Qaeda has in mind for the 11th? But once out in the open the word dominated the national mood.

By the evening the possibility, the likelihood, of an anniversary atrocity seemed to have become the main concern of government.

So in last Tuesday evening's reports from the White House, from the Defence Department, from the head of the new, huge Homeland Security Department, the insistent message was that the nation was never more secure - that every vital target the terrorists could think of had been monitored and the entire airspace over army, navy, nuclear laboratory, monumental sites, would be under a surveillance unmatched for any previous national event.

Reassurance with the note on which the government responded.

Of course it was the only practical line to take, though no government spokesman or woman is a good enough actor or actress to convince a national audience that all would be well.

I'm recording this talk a day after the event and so you will already know if the wonderful news through Wednesday was that there was no news.

Who was it said, in any national crisis it does not do to overlook history?

Well let us not overlook history for a minute or two.

It's often been said - indeed it's a universal cliché about the establishment on the eve of any war - that the generals always prepare for the last one.

And although this is always meant as a jibe, surely it's also the most rational thing to do.

None of the generals at the outbreak of the American Civil War could guess that a new invention called the railroad would prove to be the decisive factor in what was called "the war of supply".

The north had the railroads and at the end the southern armies were close to starvation.

But the civil war also introduced the first rudimentary form of trench warfare and so for 50 years trench warfare and night raids were the things to study in the primary textbooks of France and Britain.

The First World War on the Western Front was, for four years, a war between two trenches reaching from the Belgian coast to Switzerland.

And in the process of trying to capture the few miles in between millions of men lost their lives.

Throughout the 1930s all the preparations were for another trench war modified by the tank until suddenly Hitler discovered the blitz - a war of huge and devastating movement, massive aid raids paced by fleets of tanks and infantry coming on behind to do the mopping up.

After that came Korea - a mixture of first and second war - and then Vietnam, when the Americans anyway assumed that the sheer weight and power of aerial bombing and new tanks would produce a quick victory.

But the North Vietnamese had reverted to a centuries-old form of warfare that had defeated Napoleon in his first and only attempt on the Americas, that had defeated the armies of George III in North America - guerrilla warfare.

The rebelling colonials had no standing army, only very roughshod local militias and any tradesmen - farmer, shopkeeper, clerk - who cared to join the fray.

A British general complained: "The Americans will not stand to a set battle - they were jack-in-the-box guerrillas who fought for a day and a night, broke up, went to work their farms for the weekend.

Anyway to the astonishment of President Lyndon Johnson and his commanders, the north Vietnamese played the same guerrilla game in huge numbers and the result was the same as Edward Gibbon wrote about the Romans' defeat by northern barbarians: "All things became adverse to the Romans, their armour heavy, the waters deep, nor could they wield in that uneasy situation their weighty javelins.

"The barbarians, on the contrary, were inured to encounters in the bogs."

So what kind of war is the one provoked by 11 September?

It's so new that President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld and the administration are having a hard time even convincing some European generals and some essential allies that it is a war at all.

And that's because, for the first time, the principle victim and only superpower has been the first to recognise the nature of the new world and the invisible enemy.

Within weeks of the 11th, President Bush told his secretary of the treasury to try and track down the funding, the banking deposits, that could be positively traced to al-Qaeda.

With the help, notably, of the Dutch, the Germans and the British, Secretary O'Neill discovered that al-Qaeda has banking resources in over 200 countries and in that time among other horrors the administration recovered from the caves of Afghanistan were records, video and audio tapes going back 20 years of al-Qaeda organising plans for the years to come.

And proof positive that the emigration visas, the melding of agents into American society, the movements and the jet plane training, the orders for Boston on the last 11th, had been in the making for at least two years.

The Bush administration and Prime Minister Blair were the first to recognise that the new war is one against a carefully long prepared worldwide network which in the simple true words of Mohammed Ali - our Mohammed Ali: "They hijacked my religion, which is one of love and tolerance".

So the administration has on this perilous anniversary taken every imaginable precaution against the al-Qaeda's damnable, unique weapon - the suicide bomber and aerial attack.

But that may already be the weapons of the first phase of the new war. Last time's tactic.

Heaven alone knows. We shall see.

As with people's memory of the day John Kennedy was killed so New Yorkers are now remembering and pouring out their stories - brave, grievous, heart rending - of what most moved them on that appalling Tuesday.

For myself, I can most clearly recall that as I sat then where I sit now and heard the sirens cross the park and grew wet eyed as I watched the marvellous bravery of the firemen, I had a phone call from two friends - New Yorkers - people we see maybe once a month, Yankees - New Englanders that is - who keep their emotions fairly well buttoned.

They called - they knew I was alone - and the woman said: "We want you simply to know that we love you."

After that I had several similar calls, some from strangers and from friends who, I guess, like me but have never before openly said so.

And today New Yorkers especially are recalling this extraordinary, miraculous bond that was forged and felt and spoken by the unlikeliest people.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.