Tactical terror: Americans should take a lesson from the past. In Munich, Steven Spielberg shows how a war on terror can backfire.

MORE THAN FOUR YEARS AFTER 9/11 AND THREE years into the war in Iraq, the patriotism and certitude that fueled our country's preemptive attack on Saddam Hussein's regime has dissipated somewhat. Americans have less confidence in the president and the war. Politicians and voters are increasingly troubled by its costs and casualties and by the things our government is willing to do at home and abroad to win it. The Pentagon is finding it harder and harder to find volunteers to battle a tenacious insurgency halfway across the globe. People are asking questions--about Iraq and about the War on Terror.

It's hard to find a more elegant or haunting set of questions than those offered by America's premier filmmaker in his recent political thriller, Munich. Steven Spielberg's dark meditation on the costs of political vengeance closes with a slow pan across the Manhattan skyline, ending with a still shot of the Twin Towers. But this tale about Israeli agents sent to assassinate members of the Palestinian terror group Black September after they killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics is not a reminder of the violence unleashed against 3,000 innocent civilians on September 11. It's a question about the things we have done in response to that terror.

On the surface, Spielberg, the master craftsman, has fashioned a Hitchcock-esque thriller with the grit and terror of a roadside bomb, a classically American adventure about a team of specialists assembled to avenge a grotesque injustice. But inside the workings of this ticking bomb of a film is something darker, more disturbing. Hitchcock's heroes tried to stop assassins and bomb throwers. Spielberg's heroes--though deeply disturbed by this fact--are assassins and bomb throwers, instructed not only to execute suspected terrorists without legal sanction but to wage a war of terror against their enemies. "It is strange to think of oneself as an assassin," one of the team members notes. "Then think of yourself as something else," team leader Avner (Eric Bana) responds. But it is not so easy, either for his colleagues or for Spielberg's audience.

POLITICAL SCIENTIST MICHAEL IGNATIEFF argues in The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton) that the greatest danger a democracy faces in waging a war on terror is that it will surrender and undermine the very values and institutions that make it a free society. In the patriotic rush to avenge or vanquish terror, democratic societies have been all too willing to trample on the laws and rights that protect and ensure liberty and justice for all.

Spielberg raises this question in Munich when Golda Meir justifies Avner's mission by arguing, "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values." But by the film's end Avner is not at all certain she is right. "Jews don't do wrong because our enemies do wrong," he argues. "If these people committed crimes we should have arrested them."

Americans, too, have good reasons to wonder about the compromises our democratic government has made with its values in the War on Terror and in Iraq. In the name of fighting terror we have launched a preemptive and unjustified war, overlooked or ignored the Geneva Conventions on torture, set up secret prisons, kidnapped suspected terrorists and handed them over to known torturers, and spied on our own citizens. As one of Avner's teammates asks, "Do you know how many laws we've broken?"

Spielberg's film also asks what all this killing does to the men and women sent to do it. Late in the film Avner's bomb maker--a former demolitions expert trained to disarm terrorist bombs and now ordered to blow up other people--worries that he and his colleagues have become murderers. "We're supposed to be righteous," he tells Avner. "I lose that ... I lose my soul."

In Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York Review of Books) Mark Danner argues that the greatest scandal of Abu Ghraib was not that people were tortured but that the American people cared so little about this crime. And where was the moral outrage when we learned that the tales of weapons of mass destruction were fiction or that the president had ordered the National Security Agency to spy on Americans? What has the War on Terror done to us?

And what, Spielberg asks, does the vengeance in Munich accomplish? Meir tells her cabinet that Israel must teach the terrorists a lesson, but what lesson is it? As the months and years roll by, Avner and his team see that each suspected terrorist they assassinate is replaced by a number of younger, more radical, and violent extremists who believe the Black September group did not go far enough. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in their assassination campaign, and all the while new terrorists shoot up airports, hijack planes and ships, and lay waste to civilians. Indeed, in time, the terrorists begin to take fresh lives in response to Avner's assassinations.

AMERICA SENT 130,000 TROOPS INTO IRAQ TO make the region safe for democracy, but three years later, with more than 2,200 U.S. soldiers and countless Iraqis dead, Iraq is a more violent place than before we invaded.

In Dying to Win (Random House) Robert Pape shows that terrorism is not stopped by a foreign military presence but fueled by it. Our war in Iraq, which has cost nearly $300 billion so far, has taught terrorists a lesson--it has taught them how to be more deadly. And Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary rendition and secret prisons and spying on citizens have taught the world that America has compromised its own values. These are costly lessons indeed.

Munich holds up a mirror to America's War on Terror and invites us to take a long, sober look at the things we have done to avenge the killings of 9/11. Perhaps it is time to construct a better memorial to those who were murdered by the enemies of democracy and justice.

PATRICK MCCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.