In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, President Bush told the nation that we were at war. In the weeks that followed, the president and television journalists repeatedly invoked an analogy to Pearl Harbor, and many millions of Americans began flying flags from their porches or from their pickups and sport utility vehicles, to demonstrate that we were ready for the challenge.

Over the last year or two, movies like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Pearl Harbor” and best-selling books like Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation” have reminded us that in the World War II years, hundreds of thousands of Americans put their lives on the line for what we saw as a noble cause.

The nostalgia for the World War II years suggests a deep hunger for a sense of national purpose. Thus the sense of creeping disappointment many of us are now beginning to feel as we discover that our nation is asking us not to gird up our loins and prepare to do battle for freedom and democracy, but only to return as quickly as possible to the malls of America, there to spend, spend, spend our country out of economic recession. World War II, in contrast, demanded real and sustained sacrifice from the American people, and so far we’ve been asked to sacrifice only some of our constitutional liberties. As yet, no one has dared to suggest that we might have to sacrifice our sacred right to drive SUVs.

In other ways too, the analogy of Sept. 11 to Pearl Harbor is, while emotionally satisfying, seriously misleading. On Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese military forces attacked Americans on American soil. So too, the suicide bombers of Sept. 11, 2001, attacked Americans on American soil. Further, the number of deaths in the two attacks was roughly equal. Thereafter, however, the analogy breaks down. In December 1941, the United States was at war with the two most formidable military powers in the world. The German army had crushed the armies of France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Norway; had expelled the British army from the continent; and had driven back the Soviet army a thousand miles from its border.

After the destruction of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese navy was powerful enough to challenge British and American control of the seas, and the Japanese army used this advantage to overrun the Philippines, Indonesia and Southeast Asia almost to the borders of India. Only a vigorous counterattack could end the threat that German and Japanese military power posed to peoples throughout the world, and over the years from 1941 to 1945 the United States, in collaboration with its Allies, mounted such a military response.

But in the weeks since Sept. 11, it is by no means clear that we face an enemy who can be defeated by military means, and against whom we can therefore wage war, in the usual meaning of that word. The suicide bombers of Sept. 11 set out to show that you don’t need a great army to cause grievous harm to the most heavily armed nation in world history. All you need are 19 determined men armed with box-cutters.

In response to the Sept. 11 events, we have set out to find an enemy that we could attack by conventional military means, and we have identified such an enemy in the Taliban government of Afghanistan. The evidence that Osama bin Ladin’s al-Qaida planned the Sept. 11 attacks seems to me irrefutable, and it is also clear that during the last four years a symbiotic relationship had developed between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban government. But the ease with which a minimal exertion of military force has brought down the Taliban seems likely to encourage in Americans a recurrence of the dangerous sense of omnipotence that we felt after our easy successes in the Gulf War and in Kosovo. But in defeating the Taliban, have we really won the “war against terrorism”? Even with Osama bin Ladin captured or dead, aren’t we as vulnerable as we ever were to the next attack mounted by 20 suicidal men, armed perhaps this time with chemical or biological agents?

The false analogy with Pearl Harbor invites the illusion that our military triumph over the Taliban is somehow equivalent to our military victory over Germany and Japan in World War II. But in the current situation, war really isn’t the answer. So far, the Democrats, theoretically the opposition party, have been understandably reluctant to open up a debate on alternative policies; for as war fever swept the nation, anyone who questioned the assumption that military force is the answer was likely to be accused of treason. But we desperately need such a debate, for the sad truth is that not simply a few lunatics but massive numbers of people in the Muslim world are deeply angry at the west, and especially at the United States; and as long as this anger continues we remain vulnerable to terrorist threats.

The far right senses the problem – thus, for example, columnist Cal Thomas’ monstrous suggestion, at the beginning of our military attack in Afghanistan, that we simply exterminate the people of that nation with nuclear weapons. But I am confident that we will not violate our Judeo-Christian heritage and our innate sense of decency by choosing genocide as a solution to our current problems.

Can we build new relationships with the Muslim world, so that the people of this world will not want to murder us, just because we are Americans? I believe we can, and I offer two concrete suggestions for starters.

First, we must end our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. For our dependence on this oil to power our SUVs has caused us to support such corrupt regimes as the Shah’s government in Iran and the Saudi government today, and much of the hatred toward us stems directly from our efforts to keep these regimes in power. And second, we must recognize that there is a deep hunger for democracy among significant numbers of people in the Muslim world.

There are, paradoxical as it may seem, liberal Muslims, and we must reach out to these people and try to form working alliances with them – as the U.N. is at last doing in Afghanistan, after 20 years in which the United States armed various kinds of religious fanatics, in the specious hope that these people would serve our national interests.

Burton Hatlen is professor of English at the University of Maine.