GROUND ZERO, New York City, Jan. 17- The Pentagon has just received a 150--page classified document called the National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism.   A senior defense official told the New York Times today the document presents a 20-30-year three-tiered strategy aimed to build an antiterrorist global environment "so that in 20 to 30 years, terrorism will be like slave-trading, completely abolished."

          Approved by top military officers, the plan is being kept Top Secret.  Unnamed officials would only offer sweeping comments about the plan, according to an article today (Jan. 17) in the New York Times.   The Times reported the plan has three tiers, each designed to address the military's role in a long-range war on Terrorism.       
         The first stage is to attack the most immediate threat, Al Qaeda.   The anonymous Administration official told the Times that "the overall campaign against terrorism is to drain the pool.  How do you do that on a global basis?  You pick your fights.  You go after the most dangerous threats firs, Al Qaeda.  You deny them safe haven."
        The second stage, the official stated, involves organizing for a sustained campaign against terror, including putting pressure on countries that support terrorist activities.  "You don't attack everyone at once," the spokesperson said, "and you don't necessarily use military force in each case."
        Stage three involves building a long-term, anti-terroristic global environment to discredit terrorism worldwide.  The Times reporter assumed this to mean combating propaganda of terrorist groups and their supporters, as well as addressing the economic or political conditions that foster terrorist activities.
        My first reaction to the report was incredulity.   The premise of the strategy was in error, I thought, because  the opening statement was emphatic that the endpoint of the long-range goal was to erase Terrorism.  "Terrorism will be like slave trading, completely abolished," the official stated.

       The last I heard, slavery is still alive and well.   Yesterday, I read about how Italians book vacations to certain underdeveloped nations where young girls and boys, as young as 3, are included in the package, offered as sex slaves.   In America, illegal immigrants often are housed in cramped quarters and worked as "slaves" in illegal sweatshops.   Walt Disney and Wal-Mart are constantly under attack for having products made in countries where young children and women employees are treated as "slaves" in manufacturing plants that pay pennies a day and have horrid conditions not unlike prisons.
       The hubris of the statement--"Terrorism will be like slave trading, completely abolished"--shocked me..  The belief that we can obliterate Terrorism is similar to saying we can change human nature or erase history.   Terrorism--the injection of Fear, Intimidation and Complacency--is a disease spread by those who wish to dominate others with power.  It has always existed and always will exist.  
       Terrorism can ring in a parent's Voice as his or her child cowers, wondering whether the loud Voice will be followed with a slap or even a kick.   An employee worrying about keeping his or her job can kowtow to a mean-spirited boss who rules as a tyrant, holding the power of a paycheck over everyone's head as an oar master might on an ancient slave ship, using the whip of his tongue and the beat of the desire for maximum output with minimal pay as his oar drum.
       The husband or wife who threatens his or her mate in front of the children, or the couple who calls each other names, or shouts at a child:  "I wish I never had you!"--all enslave those around them with Fear, Intimidation and Complacency.  Will the War on Terrorism strike these Terrorists down?
        And then there is the ultimate temerity of the statement--that implication that once abolished, Terrorism will disappear forever, that it will be expunged as a tool of dominance over others, or as a means to exercise power over the seemingly powerful. (Ala, the Terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, an act of a small number against a giant icon that changed the course of history.)

       This "eraser implication" presumes that once we kill Osama and Saddam, once we quash the Tigers in Sri Lanka or help the Russians in their Chechnya war on Terrorism wipe out all the opposition, and then when we pin China to the mat and trounce Kim Jong Il in North Korea to submission, and after we've fireballed all the Terrorists in Africa, that after all that bloodshed, bombs and bullets will rise the Phoenix of Peace, washed clean of Terrorism's threat.
        I don't think so.
        History tells me that the Beast of Terror may be suppressed but never obliterated.  He may be corralled and leashed, but he will break free.   Even under the most severe attack, if even one cell of his massive body is left with its DNA intact, the Beast of Terror will morph again in another time and in another place;  it will rise up out of the primordial pool of human Complacency and strike again, and again and again at our Children and our Children's Children who, assuming the Beast has been castrated, find him as virile as ever..
       History also tells me there is always another Hitler breeding in the wings, another Saddam, another Osama bin Laden, another Charles Whitman, another Lee Malvo, another angry parent who will shove lighted cigarettes into a child's skin to exact punishment or exert power, another sex slave trader who will kidnap and abuse the young, another mother who will drive her children into a lake and drown them.  No, Terrorism will not be abolished.
       For the above reasons I spat out my ingestion of the National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism.  It  soured in my mouth.
       That's not to say I don't agree with its context or its intent.  
       Yes, if a fire is raging next door,  we shouldn't rush in with fire prevention pamphlets and start instructing the occupants how to avoid a fire. It's a little late for that.
       Instead, we call the Rescue Heroes and have Billy Blazes and Wendy Waters shoot water on the flames and douse the fire that threatens lives.  We act with immediacy to save those in peril, and to ward off the danger to neighbors.
       I have no qualms about shooting a Terrorist about to push a plunger on a suicide bomb strapped to his or her chest standing  in the middle of a crowded schoolyard or in the confines of a shopping mall or jammed in a crowded bus.   Those are primal knee-jerk reactions that don't take a lot of analysis.   Survival and security are not up for discussion when one is looking down the barrel of a loaded weapon with its hammer cocked.
      Attacking and destroying, or rendering inert, any known "clear and present danger" is a simple matter of seeing  the barrel of the gun.  There is urgency to act also when we uncover a brewing plot or conspiracy designed to harm the innocent.  We must be Vigilant not Complacent about Terrorism.  We must keep our hands on the hilt of our Swords of Vigilance at all times, always wary of the Beast of Terror's desire to lull us to sleep as Hermes did Argus with his hundred eyes.   Reacting to impending threats is the easy part.

      Now comes the tricky part.   Stage two:  putting pressure on countries that support Terrorist activities.   The clear lines start to fuzz here.   Who decides what degrees of "support" indicate a "Terrorist-supportive nation?"  Does it extend to Germany's manufacturing plants that tool equipment be used in building weapons?   
       How about  wheat farmers who sell foodstuffs to nations known to support Terrorists so that the Terrorists might eat and nourish themselves?   
      And, at what point is a Terrorist a Terrorist or a rebel?   In Sri Lanka, are the Tigers Terrorists or rebels fighting for independence?   Who decides where the line is drawn?  
      Finally, the ultimate gray of the strategy:  to build a long-term, anti-terroristic global environment to discredit terrorism worldwide.
      This one took me for a loop.  I thought Terrorism was already discredited.   Even in history, back thousands of years when the enemy poisoned wells and killed innocent people to drive villagers to their knees, no one agreed with such waste of human life then.  And they don't now.  Why would we have to discredit that which is already discredited?
       Discrediting Terrorism makes a lofty assumption that society somehow endorses it.   Society--the average, common folk who try and eke out a living while warring factions rape, pillage and plunder the soil around them--has never condoned or embraced Terrorism.  If society had embraced it, we would all be living under its shadow.   But Terrorism is a small faction of a large whole.   Its power is exponential to the Fear, Intimidation and Complacency it creates.  When the Terrorist plane struck the World Trade Center and killed less than 3,000 people, 285 million people shuddered and began to sweat.
        I assume the spokesman who made that last statement regarding "discrediting Terrorism" was suggesting we convert the concept of "jihad" into "Terrorism," that we try to convince those who act in what they believe is a "holy war" against the "infidels" that they are just raw Terrorists, murderers masked as religious zealots.   I extend that meaning to include cult leaders like Jim Jones who convinced over 900 of his followers to drink grape-flavored Fla-Vor-Aid laced with potassium cyanide and tranquilizers as a sign of their loyalty to him and the People's Temple. 

       I wonder where the line in the sand will be drawn on Terrorism.  Will it include those who Terrorize all, or just a political few?   Will we reach down to the grass roots with the War on Terrorism and yank them out, or just scythe the obvious weeds on the surface, leaving the roots to grow again?
       It was chilling for me to notice the absence of the word "Vigilance" both in the comments by the defense spokesman, and by New York Times author, Eric Schmitt in his expository.  Also, clearly absent was the definition of a Terrorist, or a Terror Nation, or a Terror-Supportive Nation.
        To me, the first requirement in a Strategic Anti-Terrorism Plan is to define the terms. This also applies to reporters who record comments on Terrorism.  What does that word mean to whomever is speaking, or being interviewed.  Terrorism is a huge word encompassing vast degrees on the moral compass.
        A Terrorist in my line of work is "any person who uses Fear, Intimidation or Complacency to achieve power over others."
        If that were the definition used by the defense spokesman, the U.S. Government would have to be placed on the Terror Nation list, along with all other nations.  So would most newspapers and media outlets.
        Governments rule by Fear, Intimidation and Complacency.   They always have and always will, whether Democratic or Tyrannical.  Daily, we are told many things about Terrorism and the battle our government is waging against it.  We pump billions of dollars against the War on Terrorism.  Yet there has been not one attack on our nation except that of September 11, 2001.   Virtually billions of dollars are being spent, and the government is massing hundreds of thousands of fighting men and women to wage war on Saddam Hussein who was not a direct part--at least evidentiary so--to the Nine Eleven Terrorist attack.
        America is being told, however, that it is our duty and responsibility to hunt down Terrorism throughout the globe, and that we will use "force" against any nation that harbors Terrorists.
        The government is riding the fumes of Nine Eleven, shifting from the clear and present danger of immediate attack, to the preventative preemptive attack mode.   Daily, we must cast the comments of U.N. weapons inspectors who allege to find  no smoking guns in Iraq against U.S. rhetoric that Saddam is gearing up to launch a full nuclear and biological threat upon us (at some time in the future)--even though he hasn't the capacity to yet do so, but, the argument goes, left unchecked, he will. 
       At the same time, North Korea sticks a gun in our back and uses the tips of nuclear missiles it is manufacturing to extort concessions, including a non-aggression pact the Koreans want that will deter the U.S. from using force against them.  Plus, of course, they want billions of dollars in aid.
      In addition, North Korea is using Terrorism to get its name off the "terror nation" list.   North Korea is using Fear, Intimidation and our Complacency to deal with them on an "evil axis" level playing field, to bargain for more power.  

     Strategically, the U.S. is in a box.   No matter how it plans to cut off the heads of the Terrorism Hydra, it neither has the weapons nor manpower to achieve such a goal on its own.  America, comprising six percent of the world's population, is saying it will police 94 percent of the globe, when, in the midst of its lofty global goals, U.S. forces couldn't find two snipers who went on a rampage and killed more than a dozen people until a truck driver spotted the sniper's car and called police.  Our ineptness at home suggests a more critical ineptness on a global basis.  I believe it is called the Lippman Gap, where our commitments exceed our resources.
       There is a solution.
       The solution is to declare a State of Global Vigilance.
       If the War on Terrorism has any chance of being won, it will be won in the homes of the 6 billion citizens who comprise the Targets of Terrorism..  It won't be won in Washington, or Beijing, or Moscow, London, Paris, or Baghdad, where politicians make policy adapt to the whims of tertiary leadership.
      The War on Terrorism begins with how a parent treats a child, how a child treats other children, and how society itself treats children's security.
        This leads to the one really solid part of the proposed military Strategic Plan-- its length.  The plan stretched out one generation, nearly 30 years.   It extended to the children, but stopped short of the children's children's children, which would have taken it to nearly 100 years.
        A Global Vigilance Strategic Plan would put the need for Vigilance far into the future, but not so far we couldn't reach it with our fingertips.  It would call upon each Parent of Vigilance to act in behalf of the Children's Children's Children--today's children, tomorrow's children, and tomorrow's children's children.   It would put the faces of our great grandchildren within sight.
      By extending the generational lineage of today's children to our great grandchildren, we drop the barriers of race and culture, of religion and politics in making decisions that benefit their future.   When all children, not just our own, or our neighbors, are included in the equation of Vigilance, we now have a true basis for a global strategy.  Such a strategy can now be embraced by all nations' parents, by all mothers and fathers, because it goes far enough beyond the immediate prejudices and bigotries of existing cultural, religious, racial and economic walls.  It suggests that one day the world can indeed become truly integrated, can become a potpourri of racial and cultural mixes such that those Six Degrees of Separation would not be so obvious, and differences would blend from hatred and angst to legends and legacies.

       A second point on extending the length of the strategy--by thrusting the Strategic Goal to the benefit of the Children's Children, rash decisions about the needs of the present, and, Complacencies for acting now to avoid future dangers, would balance themselves.   If removing Saddam Hussein is the right thing for the Children's Children's Children, then who will replace Saddam becomes of equal importance as his removal.   To change one despot for another is just reshuffling an old deck.
        This same formula applies to North Korea.  The question with North Korea is: who appears a far more formidable threat to the safety of the Children's Children's Children--Kim or Hussein?   Decisions made under the mantle of the Children's Children's Children win rather than alienate world support.   They shift from being political decisions into being "caretaker" decisions, "guardian" decisions, Sentinel of Vigilance decisions.    It is hard to refute a U.S.-stance based on the protection of the Children's Children's Children of all nations.  It is easy to turn one's back on a decision the U.S. is making to protect its own children at the expense of the rest of the world's.
         A good strategy, like a good opening in a chess game--it must seek the greatest benefit of the land.   If by conquering the "enemy" the land is richer, more fertile and yields more crops, then such a conquest was right.  But, if the land is simply stripped and used until it expires, with little regard to its value to future generations, then such a decision is selfish, self-centered.  The world sees through such diaphanous thinking.   Currently, much of the critical world sees our action in Iraq as a tool to capture and manage oil reserves to keep Americans warm and its engines of commerce churning.  This myopic thinking is broadened by changing the end point--where oil becomes a secondary goal and the future of the children of Iraq and the rest of the world the primary objective.
        The next step in building a Vigilance Strategy For The War On Terrorism requires Action.  Instead of sending in military forces to raze the land, we need to send Vigilance Delegates to each nation to sign up citizens of that nation as Parents of Vigilance.   We don't just approach Iraq, we go to all nations, large and small.
        Providing each nation with a Pledge of Vigilance in its own language, geared to its children, offers every nation the opportunity to rally behind a common goal that not even a dictator or despot in control could deny.    Recalcitrant nations refusing to allow "Vigilance Inspectors" to set foot in their countries would be bombed--not with weapons of destruction--with Pledges of Vigilance dropped from planes, and other Vigilance Tools to help their citizens join the Global Vigilance Corps--a worldwide organization dedicated to applying the Principles of Vigilance to the Children, and the Children's Children's Children at the grass roots.   It only requires the citizen to agree to fight Terrorism's Fear with Courage, its Intimidation with Conviction, and its Complacency with Right Actions--all geared to the Children's Children's Children. 

      Part and parcel of the Vigilance Strategy is facing our Beast of Terror.  To become a Parent or Citizen of Vigilance, we must understand and accept that Fear, Intimidation and Complacency are part of our human nature.   We must expose it for what it is and be prepared to counter it when it tries to take control of our thoughts our actions.
       Once exposed, the Beast of Terror has few, if any, hiding places.  The Triad of Terrorism--Fear, Intimidation and Complacency--cannot be abolished.  They are as integral to our nature as their Vigilant opposites-- the Trinity of Courage, Conviction and Right Actions.   Fear fuels Courage.  Intimidation kick starts Conviction.  Complacency drives one out of his or her chair into Right Actions.
        Properly balanced, Terrorism's Triads are a powerful asset to human evolution.   The Terror of going hungry drives science to seek ways to feed more people more efficiently.   Intimidation of knowledge or prestige moves people to seek education and status.  Complacency over the ways "things are" forces the common into the uncommon, the average into the exceptional and sets new standards for which all can aspire.
        The dark side of Terrorism consumes us when we do not balance it with Vigilance.   When we let Fear roam without building the muscles of our Courage to face it, it dominates us.   The same is true with Intimidation and Complacency, each requiring a counter action of effort to replace the negative with the positive, the strong with the weak.  And, to insure the Trinity of Vigilance--Courage, Conviction and Right Actions are at least One Percent greater than the Triads of Terrorism--Fear, Intimidation and Complacency.
       But Vigilance doesn't come without effort.  It is far easier to hate someone than to love them.  Love requires putting aside the things you dislike about someone or something, and finding at least One Percent more reasons why you should be attracted to, and support the other person or thing you strive to love.  

        Hate is lazy.  It requires one narrow thought--"I don't like you."   Hate denies access to any good or positive that might exist in the other person or thing.  It bores a single hole, justifying itself over and over with the same tired information, never seeking to diffuse itself with the light of other viewpoints.   The closed mind refuses light.  It wallows in the darkness where the Beast of Terror feels most comfortable.   It savors the dank darkness of human bigotry and prejudice, and breeds in human righteousness and hubris whose selfishness forms cataracts on the Children, and their Children's Children.
        That's why the Vigilance Formula:
                 (Courage - Fear) + (Conviction - Intimidation) + (Action - Complacency) = Vigilance! )
                                                         C-F + C-I + A-C = V!
 is the single best weapon to fight Terrorism not only on the home front, but globally.   If each citizen in the world learns to stop and think through his or her beliefs and feelings under the guidelines of the Vigilance Formula, the end result benefits the Children's Children's Children.  It  limits the sating of the present.  Such decisions tend to be selfless rather than selfish, generational rather than political, and expanding rather than contracting. 
        The final stage of the Vigilance Strategic Plan is really the first stage of the military plan.   The Pentagon's approach to stage three is "to build a long-term, anti-terroristic global environment to discredit terrorism worldwide."
        With the exception of the phrase, "discredit terrorism," this stage is on target.

         A wise nation can overnight become a Nation of Vigilance. Vigilance can be a short-term goal.  Leaders can agree to embrace the Pledge of Vigilance as a tool to form Right Actions in behalf of the Children's Children's Children as part of its Constitutional structure.  Or, they can take billions of dollars earmarked for "war" and apply them to "selling the concept" to the citizens.   By legislation or by commercialization, Vigilance can sweep nations into a state where Terrorism can find few cracks to wriggle through.
        Legislation is not beyond possibility.   Each day, hundreds of laws are proposed worldwide, and multitudes effected into the lives of the citizens of every nation.   One such law can be the Law of Vigilance, requiring all new parents to sign a Pledge of Vigilance as part of the marriage licensing process.   Marriage is sanctioned in most all countries by the state for legal reasons, primarily property and ownership.  A child born within a nation or state becomes a citizen of the state under current law.  Citizenship is a franchise, granted to those born on that nation's soil.    The citizen has certain duties and obligations to the state, and the state to the citizen. 
       One of the state's fiduciary duties as the franchisor is to protect that child in the absence of parental responsibility.  Part of parental duty to the state includes shaping the child to be part of society.  Liability for a child's actions returns to the parents until the child is of legal age.  The relationship is symbiotic.  The state--the composition of all citizens--expects parents to raise a child in accordance with moral laws the society embraces.
         For example, it is a legislated crime in most developed nations to abuse a child, and, a moral crime in others.   Child abuse can be extended beyond mere physical abuse.  It can include Emotional Abuse, which incorporates not training a child to use Tools of Vigilance to compete in a world full of Beasts of Terror--Fear, Intimidation and Complacency.  Children who grow up emotionally weak, psychologically vulnerable, become a burden to society.  It is not their fault, but the flaw lies with the parents who were Complacent in the child's upbringing.

      Requiring newly married couples, and couples seeking to have children, to sign and document a Pledge of Vigilance is nothing more than assuring the state that the parents know and are responsible to the duty of protecting the child from Internal as well as External Terrorism.
       Teaching a child hate, bigotry, prejudice destroys a nation's foundations.   It breeds cancer in its citizens, and urges the Beast of Terror to rise from its quagmire and take shape and power in the child's mind and subsequent actions.
       Terrorists are bred at home, they are fed Fear, Intimidation and Complacency.    Their adult form is nothing more than extension of how they were trained to think when they developed as youths..
       While most nations might argue such a law as onerous and doctorial, such nations need only look at the thousands of laws on the books that penalize "bad behavior."   If a law is but a moral guideline for the ability of citizens to live and work harmoniously, the Vigilance Law would be no less common than one that required a driver to take a driver's test to be licensed, or a doctor to take a medical examination, or a teacher to take a course to teach.    Parents should be licensed, but only from the most positive framework.

       Parents must know the Duty of Vigilance is not an infringement on individuality, but an extension of it.   If all children were raised under the Pledge of Vigilance, and the tools they learned were to the benefit of the Children's Children's Children, fewer Terrorists would appear.  When we arm children with the Sword and Shield of Vigilance, they are ready to do battle with Terrorism's Beast.  Then we have a true strategy that can fight and win the War on Terrorism.
        Are these lofty goals?
        Certainly.   But they are not as lofty as the U.S. Strategy of trying to abolish Terrorism in the next generation.
        We don't have to wait that long.  We can start today.
        Take the Pledge of Vigilance.  And, pass it on.

Jan. 16 -- China's Beast Of Terror Purrs As U.S. Prepares For War