It is hard to know where to start. The World Trade Center is a mass of rubble, one side of the Pentagon is a smoldering wreck, and on the day after the most tragic terrorist attack in the world's history, unknown thousands are dead - perhaps more than 10,000.
This much is known: the United States of America is now on a war footing, and the populace, far from being chastened by a bunch of cowardly, mantra-slobbering lunatics, is ready - no, intent - on drawing blood in retaliation.
Repeatedly, the attack has been likened to that on the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941, the attack that propelled the nation into World War II. But it is worse, and the public temperament is even more unforgiving. That is the tone on the streets, a call for certain, swift and devastating revenge.
To those who truly know the country, nothing less should have been expected. Those who carry the Pearl Harbor imagery further point to the statement by Japanese Admiral Isoruko Yamamoto, architect of the Japanese war plan, on the successful completion of the attack. "I fear," Yamamoto supposedly said, "that all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." No one who walks the streets of America today can doubt that resolve is there.
What I cannot fathom is the reasoning behind the attack, or the thinking that the United States would sit idly by in the wake of the worst single attack on its soil.
Those who attempt to comprehend the American psychological profile would find a people slow to anger and reluctant to act until pushed to the brink, but quick to anger and very slow to forgive once pushed past that point. If the aim of the attack was self-immolation, it should work. If the attack was carried out in the belief that the United States would somehow be driven to distraction and acquiescence, it did not and will not work.
Amid the strong calls for retribution by the public has come the flabby, pseudo-intellectual, self-serving invocation to preserve diplomacy issuing from the mouths of the nation's slime-dipped, periwinkle-pink politicians. "Let us not act before we build a consensus," they say. Consensus be damned. Both the president and the secretary of state have called this, officially, an act of war. That it undoubtedly is. The time for consensus is over.
As surely as the mood has turned vindictive in this country, the public and officialdom will support unilateral action, if necessary.
These may seem strong, insensitive words. So be it.
The time for complacency is over. Terrorism knows no bounds, either geographically or in terms of the horrors it is willing to sow. To act in anything less than a positive, proactive and pre-emptive manner is to invite more of the same, not just for Americans but for all.

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