Fear on the Home Front
What leaps out most powerfully, though, comparing then and now, is the visceral fear that this time war will admit new horrors into our own lives. In the reporting of 1991 you find occasional mentions of a possible terrorist backlash, but they are hypothetical. Americans then, four years before Oklahoma City, were mostly innocent on the subject of terror. This time, when the C.I.A. predicts that invading Iraq will provoke new assaults on our cities, Americans know in our stomachs what that means.

These anxieties are amplified by doubts about the president who leads us. Some Americans question Mr. Bush's very legitimacy as president and as commander. I doubt anyone ever referred to his father as a "chicken hawk," or to the first Bush administration as a "junta." These are insults, not arguments, but they add heat to an opposition that is more passionate this time.

Our uncertainty about whether we are in safe hands has been compounded by Mr. Bush's own leadership. We have the skewed priorities of an administration that bids $26 billion for Turkish basing rights but shortchanges local emergency preparedness, that declines to call for any sacrifice, even from those who can best afford it. We have Mr. Bush's manhandling of our partners in security — beginning with the gratuitous decision to take a project that could have been framed from the beginning as the enforcement of United Nations resolutions and elevate it to an America-first doctrine of pre-emptive power. We have the loopy alarums of the Department of Homeland Security — what Garrison Keillor calls the Department of Scaring People Into Staying Home — which is prescribing duct tape one day and Prozac the next.

What most of all animates our national anxiety, I think, is the fear that war will backfire. Most people did not imagine themselves anywhere near the front line in 1991. Now the front line is where we live, and we are afraid.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/22/opinion/22KELL.html?pagewanted=all&position=top