Apparently, for some people, a call for reasoned action is equivalent to a call for no action. I received the following e-mail in my mailbox this morning (no changes have been made to the original letter):

Things like this terrify me, and I am glad that cooler, more rational heads seem to be prevailing against any calls for immediate action against Afghanistan.

So far, we have yet to find out with real certainty who committed the attack on the World Trade Center. The government claims to have strong evidence linking Osama bin Laden to the crime, and I don’t doubt that. But "strong evidence" is not the same as "proof".

So, given that… who do we strike against? Terrorists are like the ants that Jennifer and I have been struggling against in our new home for weeks now. They hide and emerge at random, you have to deal with them when you find them, you set out traps hoping to kill off the colony, but when you’ve done all you can, there are still more waiting to strike. I fear that a war against terrorism would be an ongoing war, bloody and violent and with no real end.

Which is why we cannot strike until we have absolute proof. We have to make absolutely sure that the people we strike against are the ones who are responsible. Or they’ll come back for more later on.

Beyond that, though, is the larger issue of what the terrorists were really trying to accomplish with their attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Were they trying to destroy the United States? It would take a lot more than that to do so. Were they trying to disrupt our daily lives? Well, yes, they did, but a well-written Internet worm would have done the job just as well. Were they trying to frighten and demoralize us? Possibly, but anyone with an ounce of education in American history would know that when America is hit with violence, our sense of togetherness and resolve to stand together only grows. If decades of terrorism has not yet succeeded in destroying the resolve of Israel, a nation about the size of California, why would one strike against the United States, with several times the population of Isreal and a much stronger economy and military to boot, succeed?

These terrorists were intelligent enough to plan this sort of thing out; I have to credit them with enough intelligence to know that demoralizing or crushing the United States would take a hell of a lot more than one single strike, no matter how large. And I believe that they’re intelligent to know that succeeding attacks would be much more difficult because of the inevitable tightening of security that followed the first attack. With airports closing left and right whenever anyone whispers the word "bomb" in a closed toilet stall, further strikes of the same kind would take even more cunning and planning. I suppose it’s possible that other types of attacks could be in the works, but probably nothing with the sheer destructive power that was evidenced on September 11.

At this point, I have come to believe that perhaps the goal of the attack, assuming that there was a long term goal at all, was not so much to destroy as to provoke. bin Laden and others of his ilk have been calling for an Islamic Jyhad, in all defiance of the words of the Qur’ân, for years. If the United States, with or without the support of the rest of NATO, invades Afghanistan, we’d have to move through Pakistan; if we didn’t have Pakistani support (which it looks like we do at this moment, thank God), we’d have to march through Pakistan first, which would be costly and destructive — remember that Pakistan has nuclear capability, after all. An invasion of Pakistan would be destructive on both sides, but we would probably make it, destroying Pakistan in the process — and that would certainly unite the American-hating sectors of the Arab world against the West to unprecedented levels, and that would probably bring about the prolonged armed conflict that bin Laden and his cronies are hoping for.

I have no doubt that we would win such a conflict. I don’t believe that we have God on our side any more than I believe that bin Laden has Allâh on his side, but we certainly have superior military and intelligence forces, and we have proven that our military is excellent at learning from its errors.

So that’s why I find it frightening that warhawks like the one who wrote to me are talking the way they do. It means that the terrorists are coming close to succeeding in what they set out to do on September 11.

And finally, to stage a major conflict would be admitting that it’s all right to accept large numbers of civilian casualties in support of our goal — and whenever you believe that it’s okay to kill an innocent person in the pursuit of revenge or some other cause, you start down the same path of lunacy that led to the attacks in the first place.

I do believe that taking action against those responsible is appropriate; to leave this crime unpunished would be a different type of failure on our part. But I am opposed to stupid or unmeasured actions which would lead, in the long run, to the deaths of millions of people.

On a side note, just to clarify a couple of points. I do believe that there must be increased security, for a number of reasons: first, I believe that there may be more attacks in the making; and second, it’s just good for our comfort level. I would not even consider flying on an airplane right now if it weren’t for the near-paranoid security measures currently being taken (not that I’d be all that happy about it as it is).

Of course, I don’t believe that increased vigilance should come at the cost of our civil liberties; and it certainly should not come to any sort of racial profiling of Arab Americans or racist attacks against them. Now, more than ever, it is time for us Americans to demonstrate to the world that the values which we hold true and on which we are founded continue to inform us today: namely, the values of equality for all people and our willingness to accept as fellows even those who act, dress, and even think and believe differently than we do.

If we can’t hold on to our principles and values in a time of crisis, then what good are they at all?