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This war will not be for the fainthearted. Sources tell TIME that the Administration is considering altering the ban on assassinating enemies of the U.S., adopted 25 years ago. Bin Laden, the Administration believes, is not covered by the ban; as one who has waged an act of war against the U.S., he is considered fair game in any military operation. But a change in policy might help the fight against other leaders of international terrorism. Guns and bombs, however, are not the whole story. "We should not overemphasize the military part of this," says a senior White House adviser. Bush's war is one that will be fought sometimes on fronts where there are no foxholes, without the benefit of night-vision goggles and precision-guided missiles. It will involve actions that are economic, financial, political and even religious. Nor will the war be fought only in the folds of Afghanistan's rugged corrugations. The kind of group responsible for the attacks, as a former U.S. diplomat says, cannot simply be "a guy talking on a cell phone in a cave." It surely includes members of a "network that is deep within the society of the United States, Germany and other countries." The battlefields of the new war, it follows, will include the countinghouses of Swiss banks, the teeming cities of North Africa and the Middle East — and the suburbs of New Jersey, Michigan, Paris and Hamburg. "This is as complete a war effort as mankind has ever seen," says Senator Chuck Hagel, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee.
That said, historians, as they must, will peer into their occluded mirrors to find the closest parallel to such a challenge. Is it the Monroe Doctrine, which warned the nations of the Old World to keep their snouts away from the feeding troughs of the New? Or — less happily — is the analogy to Woodrow Wilson's determination to make the world safe for democracy, a crusade disavowed at home and mocked abroad and whose ending was the greatest charnel house the world has ever known? History tells us this at least: when nations take upon themselves a global responsibility to rid the world of a shameful practice, they had better prepare for the long haul. In the early 19th century, it took the British navy the better part of 50 years to close down the Atlantic slave trade. If Bush is serious, he has laid upon his successors a task hardly less demanding than the one he has adopted for himself. In just such fashion did Harry Truman in 1947 commit his nation to a 40-year-long cold war against totalitarian communism.
It takes nothing away from Bush, and the clenched-jaw poise with which he delivered his speech to Congress, to say that but two weeks ago, few would have thought him adequate to the task he now faces. At first blush, there is little in the President's background that equips him for his new mission. He is not a young man — 10 years older than John F. Kennedy was at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, only four years younger than Franklin D. Roosevelt, on the original day of infamy. But for someone age 55, he has often seemed to have absorbed few of the annealing lessons of maturity.