I don’t know all the steps the United States needs to take after last month’s outrage but one step is clear: formally declaring war against whomever we intend to attack. Otherwise, whatever we do will be just another executive branch program, intrinsically no more important than, say, the school lunch program – which it will eventually have to compete with for funding.

This has nothing to do with retribution and everything to do with follow-through on the government’s part. The great virtue of a declaration of war is that it establishes the war effort’s absolute priority. We need to do this because while the war is really there whether we want it or not, people high in government don’t deal well with reality and prefer ‘spin’ – especially when reality may require them to put their pet projects on hold. Given the chance, at some point our leaders will simply ‘spin’ the war out of existence and go back to politics as usual.

Without a declaration of war we may see a few weeks or months of action and tough talk, followed by Congress’ wandering off after whatever brightly colored object flits across its collective vision. Its most “enlightened” members will begin to wonder aloud if we haven’t already achieved our goals and whether the money being ‘wasted on retribution’ wouldn’t be better spent on domestic programs. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (for example) will begin to make noises about sacrificing Native Americans (meaning BIA’s appropriation) for the sake of “inflated” military spending, and the Judiciary will insist on more money to handle its “war-related” workload. Curiously, this money will almost all be used to fund proposals which were old long before the war began.

The end will be signaled by the sudden ubiquity of the saying “vengeance is a dish best served cold,” ostensibly meaning “let’s slow down and do it right” but actually meaning “let’s slow down and spend the money on something else.”

Alternately, suppose our initial military moves result a disaster on a par with the Iranian rescue mission, or start well but bog down? Is there any doubt that the politicians who are now so eager to support the president will distance themselves from the effort as soon as it stops looking like an automatic winner? One bad month could turn it into something “somebody else” is in charge of. The war in Vietnam was ultimately handed over to midlevel bureaucrats because nobody on top wanted to be associated with either losing it or ending it,

we all know with what effect.

We need a formal state of war as a permanent reminder to our

officials – elected, appointed and hired – that the war is real and that those who slip back to doing business as usual, or who jump ship as soon as the war runs into trouble are acting irresponsibly. The war is there, and if we try to walk away from it, it will follow us.

There are other reasons for declaring war. It would allow us to legally blockade ports, seize or sink an enemy’s commercial shipping on the high seas, activate laws providing for the internment of enemy aliens and seize U.S. assets held by hostile parties. This list is far from complete (the author is no expert!), but two centuries of war experience has given us a body of law designed to make our war-fighting more effective and it seems a waste not to use it.

Another important reason for declaring war is to provide a “wartime” context for those intrusions on our civil liberties – for instance, aggressive, loosely restricted FBI wiretaps or the use of computerized crowd-scanning technology to look for known terrorists – which will happen whether war is declared or not. If necessity forces such practices on us in what is legally peacetime, we risk being saddled with them forever. By declaring war we mark them as being exceptional and peculiar to wartime – and when the war is over, the fact that it is over will give us a good reason to get rid of them.

Will we declare war? I doubt it. The Congress has already started as it means to go on, Resolving this and Deploring that and Pledging Support for the president so long as he keeps the hard choices on his side of the street. In turn, the president has produced some terrific words and looked for an international coalition (read: committee) with some success.

Declaring war just isn’t on the table, although I’m sure we’ll splutter most ferociously. We’ll do something effective enough to be an excuse for quitting, “spin” our way to “peace” and then be hurt and astonished when there is no peace.

I’d be delighted to be proved a cynic, but when Marx observed that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce,” he didn’t have our advantage of exposure to television. Now we know that after it becomes farce, it goes into syndication.

If we want any other outcome, we need to get our government to take Sept. 11’s attacks seriously. This won’t be easy since war requires commitment and our officials treasure their “flexibility,” but if we’re firm we may squeeze something out of them besides Rambo talk and patriotic posturing.

The place to start is with a declaration of war.

John K. Lunde is a resident of Orono.