"Faceless cowards." This was mini-President Bush in the first of his abysmal statements on the assault. Faceless maybe, but cowards? Were the Japanese aviators who surprised Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, cowards? I don't think so, and they at least had the hope of returning to their aircraft carriers. The onslaughts on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are being likened to Pearl Harbor, and the comparison is just. From the point of view of the assailants the attacks were near miracles of logistical calculation, timing, audacity in execution and devastation inflicted upon the targets. And the commando units captured four aircraft, armed only with penknives. Was there ever better proof of Napoleon's dictum that in war the moral is to the material as three is to one?

Beyond the installation of another national trauma, there may be further similarity to Pearl Harbor. The possibility of a Japanese attack in early December of 1941 was known to US Naval Intelligence. The day after the September 11 attack, a friend told me that a relative working at the US Army's Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey said that six weeks earlier the arsenal had been placed on top-security alert. In late August Osama bin Laden, a prime suspect, said in an interview with Abdel-Bari Atwan, the editor in chief of the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, that he planned "very, very big attacks against American interests." On the evening of September 11, Senator John Kerry said he had recently been told by Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet that the agency had successfully pre-empted earlier attacks by bin Laden's people. Maybe the intelligence agencies didn't reckon with the possibility of assaults in rapid succession.

The lust for retaliation traditionally outstrips precision in identifying the actual assailant. The targets abroad will be all the usual suspects. The target at home will be the Bill of Rights. Less than a week ago the FBI raided InfoCom, the Texas-based web host for Muslim groups such as the Islamic Society of North America, the Islamic Association for Palestine and the Holy Land Foundation. Declan McCullagh, political reporter for Wired, has described how within hours of the blast FBI agents began showing up at Internet service providers demanding that they install the government's "Carnivore" e-mail tracking software on their systems.

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