On Thursday, September 13, two days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a fellow musician sent an e-mail to me and some other colleagues: "I know you’re seeing lots of things about displaying flags and wearing a certain color, etc. But I hope you’ll participate in this moment tomorrow night that we put our energy together and send thoughts out into the universe. I’m assuming the time is 7 p.m. EST, but feel free to interpret this as you wish. Hope yours are safe and well." She attached the following announcement which, I later realized, had gone out to e-mail accounts across the country:

Subject:    Candle Lighting

Friday Night at 7:00 p.m. step out your door, stop your car, or step out of your establishment and light a candle. We will show the world that Americans are strong and united together against terrorism. Please pass this to everyone on your e-mail list. We need to reach everyone across the United States quickly.

The message:  WE STAND UNITED - WE WILL NOT TOLERATE TERRORISM.

I wrote back, saying I disagreed with "the message." As an explanation I appended a press release by members of The War Resisters League. Among other things it stated:

From a friend in the group I got the following e-mail:

True, I thought guiltily. I hadn’t explained. I simply couldn’t find any language to explain to these nice, decent women my sudden anger at "WE STAND UNITED – WE WILL NOT TOLERATE TERRORISM." I’d given it a few lame tries, but gave up in self-disgust as I looked at preachy stock phrases I was flinging down in into cyberspace about "US foreign policy." I sent the War Resisters League wording out to speak for me. I’d never talked to other musicians about my experience as a journalist and editor, about my work on the Middle East, Israel and Palestine. Music was music. My other professional life was separate.

My next door neighbor has an American flag hanging outside her door, and another flag drapes the hood of the car that belongs to one of her sons. Both sons are in the reserves. As I sit writing the final draft of this letter to you, it looks pretty clear that Bush and his advisers are preparing a ground war. This means that next year one or the other or my neighbor’s sons could be dead. During the Vietnam War, when I was a student activist, I didn’t have much connection to the kids who were going there. Now I do, and I feel my neighbor’s fear and incipient grief. The boys walk around the yard fixing their cars (a perennial hobby), helping their parents load the station wagon with work tools (they’re house-painters). They have a look the Brits would have called "stiff upper lip" in World War II, the big handsome son with the blue barbed-wire tattoo ringing one gorgeous muscular arm, the other good-natured son who’s in law school.

Tonight Jack and I went out for dinner and we came out of the restaurant to hear cars honking and a group of teenagers screaming and yelling. "We’ve struck somewhere," said Jack tensely. But it turned there’d been a high-school party at a local church, and these kids were on the racy high that gets the adrenalin pumping in people who have never seen war, have no idea what it feels like, have never lost anyone to it. We heard Bush’s latest speech on the radio tonight as we were driving to the restaurant, the speech of an ex-frat-boy or football coach, full of phrases like "rooting them out of their holes." I thought about Afghan’s terrain, about the fact that many nations, most recently the Soviet Union, had gotten caught in the quagmires of its tribal and Byzantine feuds. We’re not a country that listens much to cautions, so Bush certainly won’t pay attention to what the Russian ambassador in Islamabad, Eduard Shevchenko, said to journalists a few days ago: "I have one word of advice for the Americans…It’s easy to go into Afghanistan, but very hard to get out."

I just read an e-mail by an Afghani living in Canada, someone who literally loathes the Taliban and who says, "When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think ‘the people of Afghanistan’ think ‘the Jews in the concentration camps.’" This writer says that carpet-bombing will only further punish the exhausted and suffering Afghani people, and that only a ground war could begin to "get them," the criminals, the ones who have surged up from the Taliban. But "to get any troops to Afghanistan, we’d have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I’m going. We’re flirting with a world war between Islam and the West. And guess what: that’s Bin Laden’s program. That’s exactly what he wants. That’s why he did this. Read his speeches and statements." Americans know nothing about Afghanistan, nothing about the Soviet Union’s war there, nothing about Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons. This is a very, very dangerous game of "chicken." "We stand united against terrorism" won’t educate anyone about its perils.

Our war in Vietnam was a ground war. It also meant carpet-bombing the country "back into the stone age," as one high-ranking military official of the time put it proudly. It meant napalming the forests and the people. It meant sending in ignorant young Americans, children like the ones who stood hooting and waving flags on the street corner in my neighborhood. Such kids sweat with fear once the realities into which our old, white, male rulers send them bursts upon them. Terrified, "just following orders," they killed thousands of innocent civilians in Vietnam, destroyed whole peasant villages like My Lai. In any war, but especially in such a war, the words "precision" and "surgical strike" have always been obscenities. "We stand united against terrorism" only makes the adrenalin surge stronger in another generation who will find, wherever they are sent, the same realities that made Vietnam "apocalypse now" for their fathers and grandfathers.

"We stand united against terrorism" is a phrase taken from the most tired phrase-book of patriotic cliché. It sends up smokescreens between us and any possible understanding we could have of the way our country’s policies impact the rest of the world. It blots out massacres like the ones in Guatemala carried out by death squads trained in the US, commanded by Rios Montt, who came to power in a 1982 coup with the blessings and protection of Ronald Reagan. It annihilates the mass graves unearthed in El Salvador and covered up by the media until years later, when the killings our proxy death squads committed there finally came to light. It shields us from knowing that the whole world regards us as the richest, the most comfortable, powerful and lethal country in the world, and also one that is utterly arrogant and heedless of the impact of our policies on everyone else. It allows us to stand, asking like hurt, ignorant children, "Why do they hate us so much?"

It obliterates the fact that has now been reported in THE NEW YORK TIMES. Just as Papa Doc Duvalier was the US’s creature in Haiti, Rios Montt in Guatemala, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, all war criminals, Osama Bin Laden was our man in Afghanistan. The CIA used him to fight the Soviet Union there in the 1980s. The US gave the Taliban Stinger missiles, at the time the most sophisticated ground-to-air missiles in existence. This time we have created a real Frankenstein monster. The nightmare into which last Tuesday has plunged us is largely our government’s creation.

How will another war in the Middle East or Asia "fight terrorism?" We fought Saddam Hussein, our former crony in the Middle East, by bombing his country. He escaped US attacks unscathed. But by the end of some 40 days of bombing, over 200,000 Iraqi civilians were dead, and the country still lies in ruins, children suffer massive malnutrition, disease rates are still sky-high. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 to "fight terrorism" with the help of the $5 billion we have given it annually for the past fifty years. Thousands of innocent civilians were killed there, too, Hizbollah became far more powerful than ever before, and Lebanon turned into Israel’s Vietnam. Its exhausted, demoralized soldiers were forced to retreat.

Even for private meditation with candles on the back porch, "We stand united against terrorism" is a horrible slogan. The immediate association it triggers is between the words "terrorism" and "Arab." The media has been pretty good about cautioning Americans not to equate Tuesday’s terror-bombers with all Arabs or all Muslims. But a mosque in Texas was set on fire only a couple days after the disaster. THE NEW YORK TIMES reported mid-week that a man named Hassan Awdah, from Yemen but now a US citizen, was repeatedly shot at as he stood behind bulletproof glass at the gas station he owns in Gary, Indiana. Friends of mine were talking at a meeting the other night about an Arab woman in Dorchester who has been afraid to leave her house. On the street an Irish-American male accosted her, told her she was "scum," and that she and everyone like her should be "wiped out."

When I think about an alternative to "We stand united against terrorism" I think of some letters that have arrived in my e-mail, from a 26-year-old Palestinian woman to an American family with whom she recently was a guest for a few weeks. She returned to Hebron, the West Bank town where her family lives. Like the thousands of other Palestinians in this city, they suffer daily under Israeli occupation law which is like the former laws of apartheid in South Africa. For the past year they have suffered from Israel’s war and its sieges. They know the sounds of Israel’s US-supplied Apache helicopters, which have been firing down on towns like Hebron all over the West Bank and Gaza. They suffer daily insults and assaults by a group of 400 fanatical Jewish settlers in the town’s center. Like all Israeli settlements, this one is grossly illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. Out of settlers like this erupted Baruch Goldstein who massacred 29 Palestinian worshipers at Hebron’s Ibrahim Mosque some years back. The settlers believe Israel is entitled to all of the West Bank and Gaza, and that "the Arabs" should "bow their heads" or leave. In Reema’s place I’d probably hate all Israelis and all Americans. Her compassion for Tuesday’s victims is so exemplary that if I were to go out on my porch to light a candle in the nightmare that now engulfs us, the mantra I would recite to myself might be, "Let me keep my heart as open and as connected with the world as Reema’s."