John L. Perry
Tuesday, June 1, 2004

A well-intended but shallow concept of variations in threat severity serves to reinforce the disastrous fantasy that America is somehow not really at war.

The maximum terrorist threat – whatever that turns out to be in history’s hindsight – existed before Sept. 11, 2001. Unabated, it continues to exist to this day, as it will till the final day when every last terrorist enemy of the United States has been nullified or eradicated. And that day does not lie just around the corner.

Fluctuating colors foster a false notion of a waxing-waning response to the pulsations of a sketchy band of nut cases popping in and out of their bat caves to harass unconcerned Americans caught up in mindless pursuit of pleasures, diversions and acquisitions.

Color-blind Terrorists

You may safely bet the family SUV that those same terrorists, who are anything but aimless, do not perceive their rancid mission on Earth in that fluttering light.

The terrorist threat to America, and thus to all of what remains of Western Civilization, is perpetually at max force. The terrorists understand that, even if most Americans still do not.

Just because explosions are not going off in every town in America does not mean any town in America is outside the crosshairs of terrorism. New York City was exempt until it became non-exempt.

What Will It Take?

How many 9/11s, how many assassinations, bombings, kidnappings and beheadings, how many hideously maimed innocents are required to make the point that America is under siege?

Terrorists waging war against America have no plans to ease up or go away after the next dramatic assault, dusting off their hands and resuming goat-herding.

Despite contrary outward appearances, they are fully invested in the modern world, as well-versed as any culture in the technological know-how of mass destruction. And they are not exactly financially strapped for the price of their next mission.

Total War, Not Vacillating Hues

In World Wars I and II, no one suggested posting changeable-color Venetian blinds to assert the day-to-day degree of danger facing this nation. Everyone knew it was do or die from the get-go.

The outcome at stake for America in its conventional wars was the primacy of imperative national assets. This time it is an oblique global war, and the American homeland could very well become the premier battleground.

The end game in this War on Terror is nothing less than the survival or extinction of the values of Western Civilization, incomplete and compromised though they have been down the centuries, and especially the fragile crucible of freedom forged by the founding of this new nation known as America.

No In-Between Shades

If this country goes down, all the rest that counts on the face of this planet goes down as well. And with it, the very lives of fathers and mothers and children of America.

That stark picture defies trivializing, and you don’t dare paint it with cutesy shades of transient color.

Americans already have the colors they need to fight for survival in this War on Terror. They have only to look up to the Star-Spangled Banner and what it means.

John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for NewsMax.com.

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