Ethnicity Now

By Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Sunday, September 16, 2001; Page B07

Just 100 years ago William McKinley, 25th president of the United States, died in Buffalo, N.Y., where he had been shot by an anarchist. He was the third American president to be assassinated, the others being Lincoln and Garfield. But the causes involved were internal, withal there were charges of conspiracy.

Sixty-two years later John F. Kennedy, the 35th president, was shot in Dallas I was with a half-dozen or so people gathered in Ralph Dungan's southwest office of the West Wing, awaiting word. The door burst open. Hubert H. Humphrey crashed in; Dungan rose to greet him. Humphrey, barely in control, shrieked as if to heaven: "What have they done to us!" Meaning the American right.

In time a conspiracy theory was to evolve: Havana, Moscow. Indeed it had been argued that Rome was behind the death of Lincoln. But American suspicions remained domestic, with American security agents a preferred culprit.

All that now changes. The world out there is now in here, and nothing will ever be the same. The test now will be for us to get straight just what it is "out there." The answer is ethnicity, but this has proved hard to learn.

Ethnicity was a dominant political fact of the 20th century. The collapse of the great empires in 1918 and 1945 brought about, in the words of the late Harold Isaacs, "a convulsive ingathering of people in their numberless groupings of kinds -- tribal, racial, linguistic, religious, national."

The old "larger coherences" were not replaced; instead the world was "breaking into bits and pieces, bursting like big and little stars from exploding galaxies." Neither of the subsequent superpowers seemed able to grasp this. This destroyed the Soviet Union.

In an address to the American Sociological Association in 1992, Seymour Martin Lipset stated, "The basic question which social scientists have to deal with in reacting to the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union is why they, and, it must be admitted, other non-academic experts such as the intelligence agencies of the great Western powers, did not anticipate that this would happen, or even that it could occur."

But it did; not least as the rulers began to realize how little predictive power the Marxist creed really had. The workers of the world did not unite. Mind, we had our share of delusion: era of the common man, universal declarations. But we did not sit atop an old empire that was bound to break up.

However, to learn nothing of this new world disorder is to invite an equivalent implosion. Islam would seem especially baffling to us. It ought not. At the beginning of the 20th century, Afghanistan apart, it is hard to think of a single Islamic "state" that was not under European rule, counting the Ottomans as Western. Now is the time of revenge; nothing will change this.

Osama bin Laden in his Afghan fastness seems to liken himself to the Muslim Assassins who assailed the crusaders of the Middle Ages. He has spoken of the occupation of the Holy Land by American crusader forces. He will go on until he is destroyed. Until, let us hope, sanity returns.

This can happen. It was 1973. There had been yet another Middle East war. The Americans were organizing yet another peace parley. Whereupon our diplomats commenced to be assassinated; two in Khartoum.

On the morning of Dec. 15, the Egyptian ambassador in New Delhi asked if I could come by his residence, despite the fact that we did not have diplomatic relations. I arrived. He explained that President Anwar Sadat had learned from PLO sources in Cairo that I was to be next target and wanted me to know. We passed this on to Indian intelligence, which picked up the same information in Bombay.

Accordingly, keep in mind that you often have more friends than you think. The terrorists terrify them! So cultivate them. And keep in mind: We are a singularly successful multi-ethnic society. We have a vibrant Islamic community of emigrants from across the world. They will be heard in those parts of the world they come from, and they can speak out.

But most important of all is to follow the counsel of Donald Rumsfeld speaking from the Pentagon on Wednesday: "Do not allow terrorism to alter our own way of life."

The writer is a former Democratic senator from New York and has served as ambassador to India.