An Urban's Rural View

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was standing beneath the south tower of the World Trade Center, watching with mouth agape as terrorists slammed a Boeing 767 into the building. In the horror of the moment my only semi-coherent thought was, "We are at war."

We are at war. Almost at the same moment millions of Americans came to that same conclusion. President Bush told Vice President Cheney, "We're at war, Dick, and we're going to find out who did this and we're going to kick their ass." (http://tiny.cc/…) Nine days later Bush declared a "war on terror."

When you're besieged, you naturally feel you're at war. Like New York and Washington on 9/11, Paris last week was a war zone. The onslaught took 17 lives, including the three terrorist gunmen. In the wake of the bloodshed Prime Minister Manuel Valls said France was at war with radical Islam.

Yet as easily as it springs to the lips, that familiar word "war" can deceive us. No previous war prepared us for this. Our armed forces don't fight battles against the enemy; they struggle to figure out who the enemy is. Once a skirmish has begun the best our fighters can do is give the terrorist what he wants: martyrdom.

Typically the enemy doesn't live in a barracks but in a village or city, among neighbors who may not know he's a terrorist. In the rare case when he's identified before he strikes, he is hard to take out without killing innocents. In that way terrorism is an urban phenomenon; the broader population shields the terrorist.

It's an urban phenomenon in another sense, as well: Because the terrorist wants to kill as many victims as possible, he strikes where the people are -- in cities. Suicide bombers don't waste their time blowing up farms.

So is the countryside safe? Not necessarily. After 9/11 the Pentagon and USDA did war-game scenarios on bio-terrorism. The results were chilling. If foot-and-mouth disease was introduced to four U.S. locations, tens of millions of animals would have to be slaughtered.

Many of the plant or animal diseases a terrorist could deliver wouldn't spread that quickly, and a slow-spreading disease wouldn't have the desired terrorizing effect. Or would it? If the terrorists announced they'd introduced a deadly disease that was incurable and irreversible, we'd be reminded of the terrible consequences day after day, year after year.

Some farmers are already terrorized by diseases that have no connection to bio-terrorism. Over the last decade, for example, citrus greening has cut Florida's orange output in half. Imagine the consequences for the country if corn growers faced a comparable devastation.

Maybe the terrorists will continue to target cities. But there are no assurances they will, so the country, like the city, must remain vigilant.

How to maintain vigilance is a tricky question. There are limits to what we can do this side of paranoia. If we turn our lives upside down and surrender our civil liberties in fear, the terrorists will have won. There's a fine line between vigilance and paranoia.

But we have to learn to walk that line. As deceptive as the word may be in the context of terrorism, in a larger sense all of us -- rural and urban -- really are at war.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanity@hotmail.com

(ES)