For me, the most moving moment at this year’s memorial services for the thousands killed September 11, 2001, in New York’s World Trade Center was the reading of the names of the dead—on and on and on went the sound of names, like the continuous, solemn tolling of a bell. I wished so much that, along with the names, the countries of origin for each person had been read, perhaps by citizens of the eighty nations whose sons and daughters died along with the Americans. Our mourning would have been joined by the tolling of the nations. We would have expanded a memory of an American defeat into a memorial of the victims of a crime against humanity.

I remembered that at first even America’s leaders used words other than "war" to describe what was happening. All that first day, Tuesday, September 11, 2001, George W. Bush kept using the term, "terrorist attack." It was actually Tom Brokaw who declared on NBC news that the United States was at war—just hours after the slaughter of thousands at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Not until the next day did the President of the United States follow Brokaw’s lead and refer to "acts of war."

For weeks after the mass murders, Bush, and other administration officials often still talked about America’s response to terrorism in terms that sounded like police pursuing and punishing crime. Even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that this "different kind of war" would be conducted as much by bankers in pinstripes, programmers in grunge, customs officials on border patrol, and diplomats in suits, as by soldiers in camouflage uniforms. In other words, the United States would respond as much through the police and courts as through the military. In those early days, before aiming to be a great war president, George W. Bush could still have adopted the realistic goal of being a successful law and order president.

There continue to be both practical and principled reasons for defining the outrage of September 11, 2001, as primarily a crime rather than as an act of war. Describing this act of terrorism as a crime against humanity, not simply as an act of war against the United States, would underscore the fact that people from more than eighty countries were killed. America’s response is not just a defense of itself against enemies, but the action of civilized humanity against those who hate it. If America genuinely and officially regarded these buildings and the people who worked within them as part of a common civilization, people beyond its borders would work with it longer and more intensely to track down the terrorists. Americans would feel in their bones that in planning responses to the perpetrators of particularly this crime it would be appropriate to consult with other nations.

Also as a practical matter, Bush must reduce expectations—for his own good and that of the country. For Americans, "war," promises a moment when they declare victory over the enemy. The awful truth is that terrorism in the United States, like crime, will be reduced in frequency and intensity. But terrorism, like crime, will be contained, not eliminated. By placing terrorism in the category of crime, which Americans know they will always have with them, Bush can climb down from his pledge to "rid the world of evil-doers," a promise he repeated in his National Cathedral speech to "rid the world of evil."

Commentators like Michael Kelley, Charles Krauthammer, and George Will, glory in the breaking of restraints that comes with using the language of war, instead of the language of crime. But Americans have reason to value putting their response to terrorism within the context of justice, law, and order. War values ends. Justice and law are concerned that we use moral means to achieve the ends of security and order. Living according to the rule of law, while pursuing the ends we value, is at the heart of what it means to be an American.

Tragically, when Americans have finally been provoked into waging war, they have achieved their ends, but their means have too often been unjust and immoral. Since the Mongols of Genghis Kahn, history has not seen such a terrible swift sword. In war, Americans slaughter the innocent. In World War II, we helped firebomb German cities, deliberately killing many scores of thousands more civilians than military personnel. In Japan, in just one firebombing of Tokyo, Americans killed some 80,000 civilians. It is estimated that even without Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans killed almost one million Japanese civilians.

With this history, it is deeply disturbing that within days of President Bush adopting the language of war, Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) began saying that Americans were in the midst of "total war," and Paul Wolfowitz, the number two person at the Department of Defense, started talking about "ending states" the America believes harbor terrorists, even if these countries had nothing specifically to do with the September 11 terrorist attacks. Perhaps one of the greatest struggles for the United States is to avoid turning into the Great Satan the terrorists say it is; the struggle is to remain a people who represent civilization, who insist that it punishes the guilty, not annihilate the innocent.

Another moving moment during the memorial services this year at the World Trade Center was the reading of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. With the reading of perhaps the most familiar words in its memory, America was renewing its covenant with itself: "That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Reciting one of Lincoln’s other great speeches might have allowed America to sense an even deeper connectedness with all mankind. Had it remembered September 11, 2001, as not only an American event, but also the site of a crime against mankind, had it remembered this September 11 that the United States had from its beginning declared itself concerned with a "decent respect for the opinions of mankind," perhaps the United States would have seen the appropriateness of reciting passages from one of Lincoln’s other great speeches, the Second Inaugural Address. Just perhaps, it would have been able to expand Lincoln’s words following America’s Civil War to encompass a vision of the healing of the nations, and say:

With malice toward none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the world’s wounds, to care for those who shall have borne the battle; for the widow and orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

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