March 14, 2004 - Does it matter who detonated the 10 bombs aboard the commuter trains in Madrid? Is it really important whether the criminals who carried out the March 11th attack are Moslem or Basque? No matter who dialed the cell phones, who built the bombs, or who carried the rucksacks aboard the trains packed with passengers, the effect is the same. Millions in Europe and America board similar trains each workday morning. The economy of our Western cities depends on them; depends on them rising early; getting to the station; emerging in the city’s center; depends on them taking their places at the keyboards and monitors, in the shops and stores; in the offices and cubicles that direct our Western economies.

Whether it was ETA or Al Qaeda that attacked the Spanish economic engine by killing some of the column of worker ants that make it operate the effect is the same. Whether they board the London Underground, the Paris Metro, or the New York Subway commuters will look askance at the passenger carrying a backpack. That swarthy man standing in the station dialing a cell phone, who was he, was he calling a friend, a business associate; was he making a deal or was he triggering a bomb? The act of simply going to work has become an act of heroism. Sitting at a desk in the financial centers of our global economy is an expression of courage equal to that required to take an evening meal at a stylish restaurant in Tel Aviv or Haifa.

It is that theatre in which a war with terrorism is being fought – not in the deserts of Iraq or the mountains of the Afghan-Pakistan border. We won’t win a war with terrorism with tanks and helicopters or with divisions deployed in distant battlefields. We won’t win a war with terrorism by sending manpower, machines and treasure to occupy and control the population of far away countries. That is not where the war is being waged.

No weapons of mass destruction were used to bring the Twin Towers down or strike deep in the heart of the Pentagon. No weapons of mass destruction exploded in the Madrid railway stations. Momentum and jet fuel brought down the World Trade Center. Fertilizer and diesel fuel devastated the Murrah building. Explosives found in Spanish mines and quarries ripped apart the commuter cars. The detonators were cell phones. The bombs were not encased in aluminum tubes but in canvas backpacks. Civilian commodities and not military ordinance are the terrorists’ weapons – that and the fear that the use of them engenders.

The war with terrorism will be won by cops on the street not by troops on patrol. It will be won by patient investigation not by impulsive retaliation against the shadows. It will be won in forensic laboratories and police stations and courtrooms. It will be won by the simple process of civil society. It will be won by surviving with our free institutions and individual liberty intact.