It was strange to hear about tightened security around the launch of the space shuttle Endeavor "because it's the first time a space shuttle has been launched while we're at war", according to NASA. The President and the Departments of State and Defense have also been calling it war, but the actual war stuff seems limited to disgruntled Afghan tribesmen under the neighborly-sounding moniker of the Northern Alliance. It doesn't feel like war. It feels like a manhunt combined with a confusing shell game in which the good guys look exactly like the bad guys and none of them are telegenic.

Was ever war in this fashion waged? Was ever war in this fashion won? The last war fought to catch a single person was 6000 years ago, in Troy, as the Greeks pulled up in their long ships to get Helen back. Now, in the same general part of the world, the US is buzzing around looking for Osama, a mild looking, in fact downright goofy looking fellow. Was this the face that launched a thousand Tomahawks?

No matter how many pictures of cratered runways and nighttime video of parachuting commandos the broken Pentagon trotted out, this war lacks the clarity and gratification of the Gulf War. 'New type of war' is a common and high-level refrain. Perhaps our images of war are antiquated: dusty Marines in Humvees liberating cities and oil wells, B-52s bombing bridges and columns of tanks, aircraft carriers plowing through the waters to enforce blockades. This war can't be fought in those recognizable 20th century ways. It certainly can't be won those ways. It is a war that involves freezing assets, rooting out immigrants with insidious intent, and a domestic vigilance that would make victims of the McCarthy era squirm. At what price victory? And even if we do win, we may not realize it. Perhaps this accounts for the spate of holiday war movies: a sad nostalgia for the comforting and conventional ways of dying and killing. But those old concepts of war may have collapsed.

Earlier in the year, China seemed like the latest greatest boogieman threatening freedom and democracy in the world. Not only are they still Communists (let's see, that leaves Cuba, North Korea, and China), but they're thugs who bumped one of our planes out of the sky and had the audacity to rifle through it. That was back when international incidents were the domain of superpowers.

In 2001, we finally tidied up the whole Kosovo thing, or at least brushed it under a UN-monitored rug. Early in the year, the Serbs themselves arrested Slobodon Milosevic and shipped him off to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes. But then the people we were helping in Kosovo, the Albanians, start causing trouble in Macedonia. No wonder 'Balkan' is also used as a verb meaning 'to split into numerous small groups bitterly opposed to each other'?

You can't use the words 'bitterly opposed' without bringing to mind Palestine and Israel, who overnight took two steps back after spending long slow years to take one step forward. Israel had loosened her grip and Palestine had finally shown her moderate side. Land and peace were changing hands at long last. And then one day children are throwing rocks and getting shot, suicide bombers are going off in buses and malls, and now F-16s are bombing Palestinian police stations in Gaza City. Of all the stories of 2001, this one offers the least hope. There are very few encouraging signs that the two sides will be able to resolve their immediate differences and come back to the negotiating table. In Israel, it seems that all the olive branches have dried up and blown away and the dove is an endangered species.

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