AN UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH about the " war on terrorism " that President George W. Bush called for over the weekend: defeating " terror " will require a Cold War–like commitment of lives and money. Despite America’s unprecedented display of patriotism in the wake of last week’s attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, flag-waving, candle-lighting, and giving blood (as helpful as they’ve been in recent days) will not be nearly enough for America to win this war.

Such a war is likely to focus on Osama bin Laden, the " prime suspect " in the attacks (as Bush put it Saturday) — the Saudi Arabian exile suspected to be the mastermind behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, last year’s attack on the USS Cole, and the African embassy bombings. But war with bin Laden almost surely means going to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which has sheltered him since 1996. It’ll probably mean fighting Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which some believe aided bin Laden in the plane hijackings, as both Reuters and the Boston Globe have reported. It is likely to mean taking on Sudan, which harbors some of bin Laden’s assets, and possibly Yemen, which shelters some of his followers. It’ll also mean going to war with the anonymous bin Laden–allied terrorist cells around the world. The war to come could destabilize some of the Arab and Muslim regimes from whom America will need assistance: Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, and Pakistan — which is a nuclear power. Significant anti-American public sentiment within any of these entities could cause their governments to topple if they lean too heavily in our favor. And such a war will surely stretch well through Bush’s term into the 2004 election — and beyond.

If there’s any good news, it’s that the Bush administration is finally turning its back on the decades-old policy of treating terrorists as ordinary criminals. President Bush made this clear with his declaration Saturday that " we’re at war. " Further, his rhetoric suggested that the United States is in for a long struggle, not a legal battle: " You will be asked for your patience, for the conflict will not be short. You will be asked for resolve, for the conflict will not be easy. "

Throughout the ’90s, the US government essentially treated bin Laden as it has Whitey Bulger: issue an indictment and hope to bring him in without actually doing much to win his capture. But applying this policy to terrorists has failed utterly. The Libyan government, suspected in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, escaped culpability by agreeing to turn over two low-level operatives for trial in the Hague; Libya’s decision also got other suspects, such as Syria and Iran, off the hook. As for perpetrators of other terrorist crimes, their convictions now seem virtually meaningless. The conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing were convicted in the mid 1990s. Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who helped plan the bombing, was convicted in January 1998 and sentenced to 240 years in prison. In 1995, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and nine other defendants were convicted on charges of planning to blow up the United Nations building and other landmarks, and given sentences ranging from 25 years to life. The three men who plotted unsuccessfully to blow up several US commercial airliners in the mid ’90s — Yousef, Wali Khan Amin Shah, and Abdul Hakim Murad — were likewise convicted in December 1996 and sentenced to terms of life or longer. And last June, a federal jury finally convicted Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, a suspect in the 1998 bombing of the American embassy in Tanzania.

And yet none of this prevented last Tuesday’s devastation. So much for the criminal approach.

A military approach may meet with more success than anything the United States has done to date to fight terrorism. Yet the rules that have governed US military policy for decades are no longer relevant. On Sunday, Vice-President Dick Cheney disclosed to Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press that the president had ordered fighter jets to shoot down the fourth hijacked plane, United Flight 93, which was believed to have been headed for Washington, DC, before, as growing evidence suggests, it was brought down by its own heroic passengers. As difficult as last week’s events have been to digest, it’s impossible to imagine the impact on the country had a US military jet shot down a civilian passenger airliner in the name of national defense. And yet this is what the new war has wrought: grotesque scenarios hitherto confined to the imaginations of Hollywood screenwriters.

This is not what the United States military has been trained to do. As Cheney told Russert: " Do we train our pilots to shoot down commercial airliners filled with American civilians? No. That’s not a mission they’ve ever been given before. Now we’ve got to think about that. "

That’s not the only thing the military will have to think about. Above all, there’s the problem of fighting a faceless enemy, dispersed around the globe. Yet debate within the administration is currently focused on one question: should the United States set up a broad coalition to fight terrorism, along the lines of the coalition Bush’s father negotiated before waging the Gulf War? Or should we fight this war unilaterally, with occasional strategic help from close allies such as Great Britain and Israel?

On the surface, a broad coalition has advantages — especially in public relations. If Bush can include Arab and Muslim nations, nobody can say America is singling out Arabs and Muslims for attack. Unfortunately, this is where the advantages of a broad coalition also end.

An anti-terror coalition with even our closest Arab allies — Egypt and Saudi Arabia — is doomed to fail for a host of reasons, not least of them the conflict it would create with these allies’ domestic demands. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak runs his country with a clenched (if not quite iron) fist; he dares not forget the unhappy fate of his predecessor, Anwar el-Sadat, who was assassinated in 1981 by associates of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, an extremist group that would like to overthrow the Egyptian government and replace it with fundamentalist Islamic rule. Mubarak is routinely re-elected with margins in the high 90s, and one way he has managed potential unrest is by displacing anti-government sentiment into anti-Israeli channels. The modern Egyptian Islamic Jihad is the successor group to the one that killed Sadat and, as Cheney stated Sunday, is thought to have close ties with bin Laden’s terrorist Al Queda operation. If Egypt participates too enthusiastically in an anti-terror alliance, there is a good chance that Mubarak’s government will fall.