Are terrorists cowards?

NEW YORK - The Vietnam war, which still holds bitter and lasting memories for most Americans of an earlier generation, was a politically divisive conflict that split the nation apart.

The war in Southeast Asia, which cost over 58,000 American lives, brought about a sharp division among Americans and triggered a rash of massive anti-war demonstrations in major US cities at that time.

When Richard Nixon took office in 1969, American soldiers were being killed in action at an average rate of about 1,500 per month, according to then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Watching the arrival of body bags on network television was a traumatic experience for most Americans.

The Vietnam war, fought to save the world from going Communist during the height of the Cold War, was also called "the living room war" because it brought the horrors of the battlefield to American homes via the boob tube.

The divisiveness in the country continued right upto the time the last US troops pulled out of Vietnam in March 1973.

Unlike the Vietnam war, however, the deadly terrorist attacks on the US last month, far from dividing the country, has brought about a semblance of unity never seen in many moons.

President George W. Bush, long a target of comedians and newspaper satirists, has seen his ratings zoom in popularity polls — even as high as 95 percent.

The country is in a virtual state of war — although the battle is to be fought in the mountain terrains of Afghanistan — and no one dare make fun of the American presidency or challenge the patriotism of the average American.

But the very few who have spoken up, including talk show hosts, writers and even the media, have come under attack as lacking patriotism and refusing to wave the American flag.

Smack in the middle of the controversy is TV talk show host Bill Maher whose nightly show "Politically Incorrect" has been criticised by major sponsors of the programme and even by the White House.

Last month one of his guests, Dinesh D'Souza of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, challenged President Bush's characterisation of the 19 terrorists as "cowards".

"Not true," said D'Souza. "Look at what they did. You have a whole bunch of guys who were willing to give their life; none of them back out. All of them slammed themselves into pieces of concrete. These are warriors."

Maher, the host of the show, added fuel to the comments, by responding even more sharply. "We have been the cowards," he said, of Americans. "We have been lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."

Maher, of course, was referring to the dozens of long-range cruise missiles fired from American warships into Afghanistan and also into Sudan in August 1998 as part of the then US military attacks on terrorist training camps and presumed chemical arms factories.

Maher, who came under heavy fire for his comments, almost lost his programme because even some of the affiliate stations refused to run the show on their networks. But eventually saner counsel prevailed.

Susan Sontag, described as author, columnist and an integral part of the New York intelligentsia, rushed in with even stronger comments in a piece for the New Yorker magazine (circulation: 851,000). She dismissed some of the TV programmes as "self righteous drivel and outright deceptions."

She argued that the terrorist attacks on the US were not attacks on "civilization" or "liberty" — as politicians and the media would have us believe — but an attack on "the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions."

As for the use of the word "cowardly," she said: "It might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others."

A week after the deadly attacks, Rev Jerry Falwell had to publicly apologise for comments he made which were deemed inappropriate by mainstream Americans.

Falwell, who is chancellor of Liberty University and pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Virginia, said the September 11 terrorist attacks were reflected as God's judgement on a country which has been spiritually weakened by supporters of abortion rights, homosexual advocates and federal rulings against school prayer.

The protests were so overwhelming that be backtracked on his comments and said that "the only label any of us needs in such a terrible time of crisis is American."

Meanwhile, the Reuters news agency has been embroiled in an emotional debate among its editors because the management has refused to call the 19 hijackers "terrorists."

"We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist.... To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Centre a terrorist attack," Stephen Jukes, global head of news at Reuters, is quoted as saying in an internal memo.

"We don't want to jeopardize the safety of our staff. Our people are on the front lines, in Gaza, the West Bank and Afghanistan. The minute we seem to be siding with one side or another, they're in danger," he added.

The controversy over newsreporting also reached out to a spokeswoman for Cable News Network (CNN) who referred to the hijackers as "alleged hijackers."

"CNN cannot convict anybody. Nothing has been judged by a court of law," she argued.

A late night comedian on TV, displaying his own sense of patriotism and infuriated by the comments, had the last word when he dismissed the CNN spokeswoman as "an alleged idiot".