As Andrew Sullivan wrote a few days after the Twin Towers fell, America's national myth includes the idea that the country exists as 'the place apart, the city on a hill, the eternal elsewhere''a place of safety and refuge from the bloodshed and suffering that mark so many pages of human history. Americans have always believed that 'whatever horrors lay out there, there was always this place, where no external force could harm them, where no foreign threat could ever intrude.'1 And the remarkable fact is that this myth had been reinforced and seemingly confirmed over the course of the 20th century'decades during which the United States engaged in a series of wars and police actions around the globe without ever suffering 'an attack on America itself'its soil, its cities, its land.' In these manifold conflicts, only the distant military outpost of Pearl Harbor ever experienced the horror of aerial bombardment. Through two world wars, the deadly skirmishes of the Cold War, and the...
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