AS AN AMERICAN soon to leave Hong Kong for the third time and return to my Washington DC home, the appalling terrorist attacks guarantee the United States I find will be different in at least one substantial way from the country I left three years ago - it will be a nation at war. Not total war in the World War II sense, but one engaged in an expanding global battle against any groups which seek to organise such unprecedented carnage and against any governments anywhere which assist them.
US President George W. Bush made that explicit in his comments on Tuesday night. 'The search is under way for those who are behind these evil acts,' he said, adding most significantly that 'we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbour them.'
Like many other Americans, I will welcome the effort - provided it is sustained and targeted, based on reliable intelligence and not on an angry urge to do something for the sake of action itself. And if televised interviews are a reliable indication, it is reassuring to hear so many politicians, including some of the most conservative of Congressional leaders, insisting that nothing rash be done.
But the enormity of the attacks will intensify calls for effective retaliation as their full impact drives home. The eventual death toll will total several thousand, though more days are needed before reliable counts can be known. By contrast, Japan's raid on Pearl Harbour, America's 'day of infamy', killed relatively few - 2,400 - in December 1941. The count at the World Trade Centre and Pentagon may even exceed those of the bloodiest event in US history, the 1862 Civil-War battle of Antietam, where 22,000 perished.
This appalling death toll means that an expanded battle against terrorism will not resemble the Vietnam War, which for so many years divided the nation and poisoned political life. It will have popular support provided its tactics relate clearly to an effective strategy.
Just who was responsible remains unproven. However, bit by bit, evidence is already emerging which links the terrorists to Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi exile who enjoys the hospitality and personal friendship of Mullah Mohammad Omar, supreme leader of Afghanistan's Taleban regime. Speaking on Mullah Omar's behalf, a Taleban official has insisted that neither the regime nor bin Laden could possibly have been involved because neither has the resources required for such co-ordinated attacks on widely separated targets.