Decision Points

days immediately following the attacks. First, keep the terrorists from striking again. Second, make clear to the country and the world that we had embarked on a new kind of war. Third, help the affected areas recover and make sure the terrorists did not succeed in shutting down our economy or dividing our society.
    I went to the Oval Office on September 12 at my usual time, around 7:00 a.m. The first order of the day was to return phone calls from the many world leaders who had offered their sympathy. My first call was with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain. Tony began by saying he was “in a state of shock” and that he would stand with America “one hundred percent” in fighting terror. There was no equivocation in his voice. The conversation helped cement the closest friendship I would form with any foreign leader. As the years passed and the wartime decisions grew tougher, some of our allies wavered. Tony Blair never did.
    Every leader who called expressed support. Jean Chrétien of Canada said simply, “We are there,” a promise that had been upheld by Canadian citizens who welcomed thousands of stranded Americans after their flights were diverted. Silvio Berlusconi of Italy told me he had “cried likea little boy and could not stop,” and pledged his cooperation. Jiang Zemin of China, Gerhard Schroeder of Germany, and Jacques Chirac of France promised to help in any way they could. Junichiro Koizumi , prime minister of the nation that struck America at Pearl Harbor, called the events of September 11 “not an attack against just the United States but an attack against freedom and democracy.” For the first time in NATO’s fifty-two-year history, the members of the alliance voted to invoke Article 5 of the charter: An attack on one is an attack on all.
    The coalition of the willing in the war against terror was forming, and—for the time being—everyone wanted to join.

    After my calls, I had a CIA briefing and convened an NSC meeting in the Cabinet Room. George Tenet confirmed that bin Laden was responsible for the attacks. Intelligence intercepts had revealed al Qaeda members congratulating one another in eastern Afghanistan. I made clear this would be a different kind of war. We faced an enemy that had no capital to call home and no armies to track on the battlefield. Defeating them would require the full resources of our national power, from gathering intelligence to freezing terrorists’ bank accounts to deploying troops.
    The meeting gave me an opportunity to speak to the press. I was ready to make the declaration I had postponed the night before. “The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror,” I said. “They were acts of war.”
    A half hour later, I met with the congressional leadership from both parties. I laid out two concerns. The first was complacency. It seemed hard to imagine at the time, when the pain of 9/11 was so fresh, but I knew the public would eventually move on. As elected leaders, we had a responsibility to stay focused on the threat and fight the war until we had prevailed.
    My second concern was about backlash against Arab and Muslim Americans. I had heard reports of verbal harassment against people who appeared to be Middle Eastern. I was mindful of the ugly aspects of America’s history during war. In World War I, German Americans were shunned, and in some extreme cases jailed. In World War II, PresidentRoosevelt supported placing huge numbers of Japanese Americans in internment camps. One was Norm Mineta , who had been interned as a ten-year-old boy. Seeing him in the Cabinet Room that morning was a powerful reminder of the government’s responsibility to guard against hysteria and speak out against discrimination. I made plans to convey that message by visiting a mosque.

    With Norm Mineta.
White House/Eric Draper
    Members of Congress were united in their determination to protect the country. Senator Tom Daschle , the Democratic majority leader, issued one cautionary note. He said I should be careful about the word
war
because it had such powerful implications. I listened to his concerns, but I disagreed. If four coordinated attacks by a terrorist network that had pledged to kill as many Americans as possible was not an act of war, then what was it? A breach of diplomatic protocol?
    One of the last people to speak was Robert Byrd , the eighty-three-year-old Democratic senator from