I am grateful for the opportunity to speak with you at what is so clearly
an urgent time. With your permission, I will depart from the line of
remarks I had initially sketched out and address myself explicitly to
these times. I can certainly be expansive on the subject of broadcasting,
and how we are or are not meeting our responsibilities. But those
observations would now be small-minded. The fact is, during the
recent weeks of crisis all major broadcasters not only including,
but specifically much-maligned commercial broadcasters have met those
responsibilities with professionalism and devotion.  This week, they
have only my admiration.

I suspect that what I have to say today about war and peace will not
please a good many of you. I don't want you to feel compelled to offer
courteous applause for remarks with which you may vigorously disagree. I
am grateful for the chance just to be heard in this forum; that is as much
courtesy as I can expect. So let me suggest that my remarks be received
simply with silence. There is nothing good to be said about tragedy or
terror, but miseries can distill a sense of utter clarity; remind us of
who we are; whom we love; and what is worth giving our lives for.

When Jeremy Glick of Hewitt, New Jersey, called his wife, Lyzbeth,
during the last moments of United Flight 93 he said: "I love you. Don't
be sad. Take care of our daughter. Whatever you do is okay with me." The
depth of his love compressed, and clear as a diamond.

Over the past ten days, the pain of loss and fear of terror may have
caused many Americans to admit to themselves how much they really love
their country.  Love it not blindly, but with unblinking awareness. They
love that frivolous America that proclaims pride in 31 flavors of
icecream, but also the solemn mission of having a gaudy Times Square
assortmentof all the world's peoples within its borders. They love
the America that can be shallow, giddy, and greedy, but also funny,
delightful, and generous. America can abound with silly, malicious, and
even dangerous ideas because people here are free to express any damn-fool
idea that comes to them. America can be bigoted and inhospitable, but
it also takes strangers from all over the world into its arms.

America has now been targeted by a few blind souls who are willing to
kill, and kill themselves, to make this nation bleed. But far more people
from around the world have already been willing to die, over-packed
into holds of ships and trucks, just to have a small chance to live
here. It's not that Americans don't want their country to change, in a
thousand ways, from making good medical care available to all Americans,
to abolishing the designated hitter rule. But the blast at our emblems
last week has made many Americans see their nation as that place in the
world where change is still most possible.

Patriotism has often been the last refuge of scoundrels, and we've had
those scoundrels. But what hiding place is open to those who twist their
faith into a weapon to run through innocent people? Do we really want to
live in the kind of world such blind souls would make for us? In the end,
the choice may be that harsh: to live in a world that revolves around
fear, or in America, with all its faults.

Now I say this knowing that we have our own American mullahs; and by this
I don't mean, in fact, I specifically do not mean, American Muslims who
have recently been the object of harassment. I am not of a mind to be
obscure about this: I mean specifically the Reverends Jerry Falwell and
Pat Robertson. Please permit me to repeat the thrust of some remarks
I delivered this past weekend. In a way, I am grateful for this duo:
they renewed my capacity to be shocked at a time I thought my sense
of shock had been exhausted. Right after the terrorist strikes in New
York and here in Washington, when America was wounded and confused,
the Reverend Falwell was a guest on Pat Robertson's 700 Club. He said
that God Almighty, angered by America's abortion rights, gay rights,
and secularism in the schools, had permitted terrorists to slay the
World Trade Center and smite the Pentagon: "What we saw on Tuesday,"
said Mr. Falwell, "could be minuscule if, in fact, God continues to lift
the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we
deserve." Mr. Robertson joined in, saying, "Jerry, that's my feeling. I
think we've just seen the antechamber to terror.  We haven't even begun
to see what they can do to the major population." Then Mr. Falwell
concluded, "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists,
and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to
make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American
Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the
finger in their face and say, you helped this happen." Last week, both
the reverends issued apologies. Mr. Falwell called his own remarks,
"insensitive, uncalled for, and unnecessary," everything but wrong.

Also last week, it was reported that Mark Bingham, a San Francisco
public relations executive, may well have been one of the passengers
who so bravely resisted the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 93,
which crashed into an unpopulated field, instead of another national
monument. Mr. Bingham was 31. He played on a local gay rugby team,
and hoped to compete in next year's Gay Games in Sydney, Australia. I
don't know if Mark Bingham was religious. But it seems to me that
he lived a life that celebrated the preciousness of this world's
infinite variety. While the Reverends Robertson and Falwell, and the
mullahs of the Taliban, see a God who smiles with approval on murder and
destruction. Let me put it in the bald terms in which many Americans may
be thinking right now: if your plane was hijacked, who would you rather
sit next to? Righteous reverends who will sit back and say, "This is God's
punishment for gay Teletubbies?" Or the gay rugby player who lays down
his life to save others? And by the way: which person seems closer to God?

One of the unforeseen effects of being in journalism is that your
first-hand exposure to the issues of the world sometimes has the
consequence of shaking your deepest personal convictions. I happen to
be a Quaker; this is known, I have written about this, especially in my
memoir, HOME AND AWAY, which, if you would please permit a small parochial
note here, is now available in paperback. I covered conflicts in Central
America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and Africa. None of them shook
my belief that pacifism offers the world a way to foment change without
the violence that has pained and poisoned our history. Gandhi and Nehru's
non-violent revolution gave India a skilled and sturdy democracy, rather
than another violent religious tyranny. Nelson Mandela's willingness
to employ deliberate and peaceful protest against the brutalities of
apartheid made today's South Africa an inspiration to the world of the
power of reconciliation and hope. Martin Luther King's campaign to bring
down American segregation; Corazon Aquino's People Power revolution in
the Philippines; pacifism has had its heroes, its martyrs, its losses,
and its victories.

My pacifism was not absolute. About half the draft age Quakers and
Mennonites in North America enlisted during World War II, on the idea that
whatever solutions non-violence had to offer the world, it was without
a response to Adolph Hitler. I hope I would have been among those who
enlisted. And then, in the 1990's, I covered the Balkans. And I had to
confront, inflesh and blood, the real life flaw, I am inclined to say
literally fatal flaw, of pacifism: all the best people could be killed by
all the worst ones. Bosnia, we might remind ourselves, had the ambition
of being the Costa Rica of the Balkans, an unarmed democracy that would
shine out to the world. Its surrounding adversaries were not impressed
or deterred by this aspiration.

Slobodan Milosovic will now stand trial before the world, but only after a
quarter of a million people in Bosnia and Kosovo have been killed. Forgive
me if I do not count his delivery for trial as a victory for international
law; and therefore a model to now be emulated. In fact, I am appalled by
the fact that much of the evidence presented against him at trial will
almost undoubtedly be derived from U.S. intelligence information. That
evidence will be used to try to convict Slobodan Milosovic after he has
committed murder because America lacked the will to use its military
might to prevent those killings. I doubt that future despots will be
much deterred by this example.

So I speak as a Quaker of not particularly good standing. I am still
willing to give first consideration to peaceful alternatives. But I am
not willing to lose lives for the sake of ideological consistency. As
Mahatma Gandhi himself once said, and, like Lincoln, the Mahatma is
wonderful for providing quotations that permit you to prove almost any
point you choose:  "I would rather be inconsistent than wrong." It seems
to me that in confronting the forces that attacked the World TradeCenter
and the Pentagon, the United States has no sane alternative but to wage
war; and wage it with unflinching resolution. Notice I don't say reprisal
or revenge.  What I mean is self-defense; protecting the United States
from further attack by destroying those who would launch them.

There is a certain quarter of opinion in the United States, we
certainly hear from them at NPR, who, perhaps still in shock, seem to
believe that the attacks against New York and Washington were natural
disasters:  horrible,spontaneous whirlwinds that struck once, and
will not reoccur. This is wrong. It is even inexcusably foolish. The
United States has been targeted for destruction. We know now that
more hijackings were likely planned for September 11th. Other agents
were at least exploring the possibilities of other kinds of attacks,
including sending crop-dusters over cities with poisonous chemicals. If
you dismissed these kinds of scenarios as Hollywood folderol before, it is
just not informed to do so now. There is an ongoing violent campaign aimed
at bringing down the United States. How many more skyscrapers and national
monuments, and the people in them, citizens are we willing to lose?

There are some quarters of world opinion who believe that simply
delivering those who plotted the attack to international justice
should suffice. But this is not the nature of the danger we confront,
literally, physically, in this very city, which is present, persistent
and current. Simply arresting those who executed the attacks in New
York and Washington will not deter other assaults that we must assume
are proceeding right now. There are some quarters of opinion who say,
just this bluntly, that Americans somehow invited this attack down upon
ourselves, that this attack was some kind of recompense for holding slaves
a century and a half ago, for extinguishing native tribes from America,
for interning Japanese-Americans during a world war sixty years ago,
for overthrowing Salvador Allende in Chile, or for standing by Israel,
however the Mossad behaves.

None of those individual assertions are untrue. All of them irrelevant.
The people who make these arguments usually consider themselves at
the polar opposite of the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the Reverend Pat
Robertson. But are they?  They say that those who died in New York
and Washington have only their country to blame for their deaths. By
ignoring the extensive advancement America has made towards becoming a
just society, they make it seem as if sins that are centuries and decades
old can never be overcome by progress. Some very fine minds have become
so skilled at playing this parlor game of moral relativism that they make
little in American life seem worthwhile. They insist, in so many ways,
that the United States cannot criticize the Taliban for enslaving women
in the 21st century because some of New York police practiced racial
profiling; that the United States does not have the moral standing to
oppose terrorism because we once supported the Shah of Iran.

This kind of rhetorical exchange can go on endlessly, and it
shouldn't. Sharp and powerful minds should be applied to something
more productive right now. How would those who now urge reconciliation
accomplish that?  Reconcile ourselves to what?  Should we surrender
Manhattan Island? Iowa, Utah, or Hollywood? Should we impose a unitary
religious state on these shores, throw American women out of school
and work, and rob all other religious groups of any rights so that we
will have the kind of society that our attackers will accept? Should
we renounce our pledge to make a home for those we turned away from our
shores during the Holocaust and abandon Israel? To reconcile ourselves in
any way with the blind souls who flew against New York and Washington,
and who have other targets within their sights now, is to hand our own
lives over into wickedness.

I'm glad to see reporting now that asks, "Why do they hate us?" We
need to hear the complaints of those who experience U.S. foreign
policy, sometimes at the blunt end. But I would not want our increasing
erudition to distract us from the answer that applies to those who are
now physically attacking the United States:  they hate us because they
are psychotics. They should be taken no more seriously as political
theorists than Charles Manson or Timothy McVeigh.

There are also a number of Americans, and we heard from them, who
suggest that this war should not be fought because a number of Americans
who are Muslims have been the objects of threats and harassment.
Those attacks against Muslims are reprehensible. Every American
of every stripe has the obligation to disown and prevent them. I
have been impressed by President Bush's determination to make the
rights of Muslim Americans, and American respect for Muslim nations,
an essential part of U.S. policy. This is vastly different from the
actions that were inflicted against Japanese-Americans during World War
II. The difference between the damage that good liberals of their time,
Earl Warren, Franklin Roosevelt, and Hugo Black, imposed on an ethnic
minority in 1941, and what conservatives of this time, George W. Bush,
Rudolph Giuliani, and John Ashcroft, have specifically avoided doing,
radiantly represents America's ability to improve itself.

Over the past ten years, every time the United States has committed itself
to a military deployment, explicitly in the Gulf War, then in Somalia,
and over the skies of Bosnia and Kosovo, it has been in the defense of
Muslim peoples. At the same time, tens of thousands of Muslim students
and other immigrants have been accepted into the United States. American
Muslims now number close to six million. We still suffer the stain of
racial and ethnic bigotry. But this largely peaceful incorporation
of Islam into American life should be a source of pride that is not
belittled by the actions of a few cranks and bigots. Surely we have the
means to defeat them, too.

I can conjure a score of reasons why this war should not be fought. The
terrorists who struck are ruthless, and undaunted even by their own
deaths. The war will kill some, perhaps many, of our own best people;
the first attack already has: the firefighters and police who perished
in the World Trade Center. The war will be lengthy and costly, and it
may be impossible to tell when it is done.  There will be no unequivocal
surrender. And just when we may begin to feel a sense of safety returning,
another strike may occur. The war may restrict some of our traditional
liberties to travel, unfettered, across our own nation. And yet: to back
away from this war would be to accept all of that as permanent. To live
the rest of our lives, not just a few years, with deaths delivered by
people dying, by terrorist bombs, chemical attacks, and the successive
devices of sharp and ruthless minds, to live out our futures with our
liberties shrinking as our losses and fears expand.

I do not accept that this war must cost us our best qualities.  American
men and women often wreaked terrible punishments on their adversaries in
Germany and Japan, from the fire bombing of Dresden to the incineration
of Hiroshima, and by the way, that kind of retaliatory brutality is
in no way justifiable or necessary in the conflict at hand now. Those
men and women returned to their families and proceeded to pay their own
tax dollars into those programs that rebuilt the nations they fought so
fiercely, and fermented the civil rights movement at home. Yes, there
was the blight of McCarthyite witch hunts, the prolonged and pernicious
mistake of the war in Vietnam, and CIA incursions into Nicaragua, Iran,
and God-knows where else. But do we genuinely believe that we would live
in a better world today if the West had used its own flaws and sins as a
moral license to avoid fighting world fascism? Would Martin Luther King
have succeeded in changing our world so palpably if his opponent had
been Adolph Hitler instead of an overstuffed Bull Connor, opposed by the
U.S. Federal government? None of us are immaculate and innocent past the
age of six. But we cannot avoid making judgements, sometimes harsh ones,
for the rest of our lives. One of those judgements is upon us now.

I think that peace activists can sometimes commit the same error in
judgment as generals: they prepare to fight the last war, not the next
one. The conflict before us now does not involve American power intruding
in places where it has interests, but American power intervening to save
lives where only American power can be effective.

We are living in a time when we must remind ourselves of the imperfections
of analogies. But let me press ahead with one that has recently been on
my mind. In 1933, the Oxford Student Union conducted a famous debate
over whether it was moral for Britons to fight for king and country.
The leading objective minds of that university reviewed the many ways in
which British colonialism exploited and oppressed the world. They cited
the ways in which vengeful demands made of Germany in the wake of the end
of World War I had helped encourage the kind of nationalism that may have
kindled the rise of fascism. They saw no moral difference between western
colonialism and world fascism. The Oxford Union ended that debate with
this famous proclamation: "Resolved, that we will in no circumstances
fight for king and country."  Von Ribbentrop sent back the good news to
Germany's new chancellor, Adolph Hitler:  the West will not fight for
its own survival. Its finest minds will justify a silent surrender.

The most intelligent young people of their time could not tell the
difference between the deficiencies of their own nation, in which liberty
and democracy occupied cornerstones, and dictatorship founded on racism,
tyranny, and fear, but Mahatma Gandhi knew the difference. He spent
World War II in a prison in Poona and sat on his hands and spun cloth,
rather than to raise a hand in revolt against England when it was most
vulnerable. He knew that, in the end, a world which was spun by German
and Japanese Fascism offered no hope to the oppressed of this planet.
And in fact, at the close of World War II, Britain divested itself of
empire: exhausted by its own defense, to be sure, but also ennobled by
defending its own best ideals.

Have thoughtful, moral Americans in the 21st Century become so
exquisitely sensitive to the sins and shortcomings of the United States,
so comfortable with the lack of resolution that moral relativism promotes,
that we do not see the blessing that it has been put into our hands to
protect; an incomparably diverse and democratic nation?

When George Orwell returned to England after fighting against Fascism
in the Spanish Civil War, he felt uneasy over finding his country so
comfortable, so close to Fascism. His country, he said, with its fat
Sunday newspapers and thick orange jam. "All sleeping the deep, deep
sleep," he wrote, "from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake
till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs."

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Scott Simon is host of "Weekend Edition" on National Public Radio (USA).