Could such a catastrophe happen again?

By Conrado de Quiros

MANILA: This is the question a child asked her teacher at school in America. And that is a question all of America is asking today. Can it happen again? As everyone who has been following the aftermath of the bombing of the World Trade Center says, nobody really knows for sure. The possibility is always there. But as everyone says as well, America at least is determined to never allow it to happen again.

On the outside looking in, however, you know with almost terrifying certainty that it will happen again. The direction America's determination to never let it happen again is taking is the very assurance it will. It reflects a failure to grasp the true dimensions of what has become the above most profound and most urgent question of our time.

As shown by CNN in interviews with American officials and ordinary citizens, Americans take that question only to mean, "Can an attack on America happen again?" They do not take that question to mean: "Can this scale of human suffering, of wanton violence visited upon thousands of innocent men, women and children, happen again?"

Those are entirely two different questions. They have two entirely different answers.

You take the question in its broader second sense, and you know that the answer is yes. People have been comparing the crash-bombing of the World Trade Center to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. But there is one other way it could resemble it, and it is not a very pleasant one.

Which is that the only other time war was brought to America other than by itself, which was by the Japanese when they bombed Pearl Harbor, it lashed out in ways that made the world forget the original atrocity. That was not by sending a suicide mosquito squad to bomb Tokyo in return, as the movie "Pearl Harbor" depicted. That was by dropping atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

That horrific deed is justified to this day, as having saved a multitude by the sacrifice of a few thousand lives, notwithstanding that they were innocent civilians. That without the razing of two heavily populated cities of Japan, the war would have been prolonged and many more would have died. That is the kind of logic that makes the atrocity we saw last Tuesday possible.

If there is a difference between Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the aftermath of the atomic bombs, and New York in the wake of two plane-missiles piercing its heart like an ice pick, it is only in that the first left very little rubble compared to the second. The liquid fire melted the buildings and people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as though they were wax, peeling the skins off men, women and children where they stood.

But the same keening of the survivors is there, the same ebbing of hope for the disappeared is there, the same feeling of the world having ended is there.

The loss of those Japanese lives is not the lighter because Japan began the war and because the Japanese presumably hold life more cheaply than others.

Love is love, and grief is grief.

The pain and grief are understandable. The anger and need to find redress are understandable, as anyone who has been wronged on this epic scale knows. But the burning desire to strike out at whoever happens to be in the way is not. The consuming need to make others feel the same boundless grief is not.

One would think that people who have endured much suffering and known much sorrow would learn to abhor them so much they would not think to inflict them on others.

But such is human folly that people often feel exactly the opposite.

The Japanese scuttled the American naval base in Pearl Harbor and the Americans razed two Japanese cities in return. The Germans slaughtered six million Jews, and the Jews slaughtered more Arabs to build a home in land that wasn't theirs.

Can it happen again? If that means, "Can America be attacked again?", the answer is "Maybe." The most formidable defense is nothing to the most resolute attacker, particularly one who is determined to die to bring others to share the same fate. But if that question means, "Can the tragedy happen again?", the answer is "Yes."

It may not happen in America, but it will happen elsewhere. That scale of human suffering wrought by the hand of vengeance has happened before. That scale of human suffering wrought by the hand of vengeance will happen again.

Unless of course Americans hear through the pounding of their grief what both the Bible and the Koran have been saying since the beginning of civilization: Violence begets violence. Death begets death.

Philippine Daily Inquirer/Asia News Network