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Opportunity to Sacrifice Was Missed

By Sylvia A. Smith, Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette

September 10, 2006

Shoes off at the airport. Passports to visit Windsor, Ontario. Metal detectors at the Smithsonian museums. The prospect of government eyes on your computer use at the library.

But rationed sugar? Lines at the gas station? Hemlines shortened to save fabric for soldiers' uniforms? Victory gardens?

Not a one.

If you don't have a family member in the military or a business depleted of staff by a National Guard call-up and avoid the headlines, it's possible to go for weeks without noticing that the U.S. is at war.

"The Bush administration has failed to convey the difficulties of the problems and has had a very upbeat attitude and has really not asked the American people to sacrifice in any way," said Lee Hamilton, a former Hoosier Democratic congressman and vice chairman of the Sept. 11 Commission. "Indeed, almost the opposite. They've said we're going to cut your taxes and let you spend more."

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are seared into the country's collective memory. The image of a plane slicing into the South Tower as if it were butter has been seen thousands of times by millions of Americans. It was the "moment that changed everything."

Yet in many ways, nothing has changed. American life in 2006 is not much different from American life in early 2001.

Is that meaningful or worth a yawn?

Jim Carafano, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said measuring American engagement by World War II-era practices meatless Thursdays and victory gardens misses the point.

World War II was nearly all-consuming for America, he said, citing the 40 percent of gross domestic product that was devoted to the war and the deployment of 10 million men. By contrast, the current wars, including the war on terror, account for about 4.5 percent of the gross domestic product. About 1.4 million Americans have served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

"World War II was different," Carafano said. "To expect that kind of engagement in every war we've ever fought which we've never had, by the way is unrealistic and unproductive. It simply doesn't call for the level of personal sacrifice the way World War II did.

"If you had all that productivity, what would you want Americans to do with it? The answer is there isn't much they could do," he said. "They have to be engaged in a way that is appropriate for that kind of war."

What Americans should do, Carafano said, is debate the juxtaposition of war and civil liberties, war and economic growth.

Tim Roemer, a former Indiana Democratic congressman and a member of the 9/11 Commission, said Americans should have been doing a lot since the attacks, but that it required White House leadership to get started. He said that didn't happen.

Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, Americans would have done anything Bush asked them to do, and other countries were standing in line to pitch in. Roemer said Bush should have launched a program to make the country less reliant on oil, especially imported oil.

"My belief is that the president missed a huge opportunity that costs us every day in putting forward an energy independence project that would have begun to both wean us off our addiction to oil and created job opportunities for new technologies to export to other countries," Roemer said.

"Instead, we find ourselves still on the treadmill, not making much progress on an energy independence strategy. We're feeling the effects of that with Iran threatening to cut off the Strait of Hormuz, the continuing difficulties in Iraq," he said.

Roemer said there isn't a sense of shared sacrifice for the wars the United States is fighting, but that the time to launch that was immediately after Sept. 11.

"Everyone was waiting for the political leadership," he said. "Five years later, we still have not seen that concerted effort on the part of the White House. I don't think that really comes from Congress. I think that has to come at the presidential level."

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