(IPS) analysis - This week's terrorist attacks are widely described as a second Pearl Harbor. The comparison is meant to evoke a loss of US innocence, a surprise declaration of war by foreign attackers.

But like the fateful bombing of the US Pacific Fleet 60 years ago, the latest strikes were borne of huge miscalculations - on both sides. And just as at Pearl Harbor, the consequences for both sides could be at least as monumental.

The assumption - and it remains an assumption, however compelling - is that this time around, the 'other side' is Islamist radicals.

Pearl Harbor, in which some 2,400 military personnel and civilians were killed, was a watershed not only because it was the first time foreign military forces had attacked US territory since the British burned down the Capitol building here during the War of 1812. It also abruptly ended 150 years of US isolationism, propelled Washington into World War II - which itself would end with the detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and rationalised the post-War creation of a permanent national-security state.

Whether Tuesday's attacks - in which an estimated 5,000 people were killed, almost all civilians - will have a similar impact remains to be seen. That Pearl Harbor has been the historical analogy most often cited by scholars and politicians, however, suggests that the consequences for both the United States and the rest of the world may be staggering.

Completely underestimated

As was the case with Pearl Harbor, Washington, despite its vaunted intelligence capabilities, has been taken completely by surprise.

It had picked up hints of some kind of attack, to be sure, but officials assumed that US facilities overseas, like the ill-fated embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the USS Cole, would be the targets, not commercial aircraft and prominent landmarks in the continental United States itself.

While intelligence and counter-terrorist specialists have been warning since the 1991 Gulf War about possible use by terrorists of weapons of mass destruction, such as biological or chemical arms, no one in authority thought that Islamist groups, such as prime suspect Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, had the experience, sophistication, reach or personnel to simultaneously hijack four US commercial aircraft and fly them into buildings. And even if they had, how could such a complex operation escape detection?

So it was with Pearl Harbor. While military planners considered a Japanese attack on the Pacific Fleet as a hypothetical possibility, top brass simply dismissed the notion as fanciful, saying that Tokyo lacked the aircraft to carry out such a raid and that, even if they had, their near-sightedness (which they attributed to the shape of the Japanese pilots' eyes) ruled out the kind of accuracy in bombing required to carry out a successful raid.

But if those planners completely underestimated Japanese capabilities, Tokyo made its own fatal miscalculations.

Slink home

The ease with which it expanded its empire, first by defeating China and Russia a generation before and then by acquiring vast chunks of China in the 1930s, convinced Japan's military leaders of their own racial and martial superiority.

By disabling the US Pacific Fleet, the military believed it would knock Washington out of East Asia for enough time to permanently consolidate its hold on the region - particularly the oil-producing Dutch East Indies, needed to fuel Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. If Washington were still determined to go to war, they thought, it would take years for it to rebuild a fleet capable of challenging them.

It was even possible, according to Japanese military planners who saw whites as a fundamentally cowardly race, that the Pearl Harbor attack would so shatter US confidence and morale that Washington would slink home, confine itself to reinforcing 'Fortress America,' and wait out the war.

Of course, the Japanese had completely underestimated the US reaction. Instead of destroying morale, the attack galvanised and united the nation like no other event before or since.

Virtually every able-bodied man and many under-aged boys volunteered for the military within days of the attack. The moral outrage provoked by the 'sneak attack' fueled a brutal war that ended with the incineration of two of Japan's largest cities less than four years later - although not before more than 405,000 US citizens lost their lives.

It may well be that, if indeed Islamist extremists like bin Laden and his associates were behind Tuesday's attacks, they have made a similar miscalculation based on similar assumptions.

Like Japan, they have overcome enormous odds and defeated powerful enemies, notably the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan. They also see themselves as morally superior to the West, and especially the United States, which bin Laden in particular has long depicted as something of a paper tiger.

''With small capabilities, and with our faith, we can defeat the greatest military power of modern times,'' he says on a two-hour videotape which circulated widely in the Arab world last summer. ''America is much weaker than it appears.''

Turn tail

In some ways, recent events appear to support that assumption.

After all, US forces withdrew from Somalia after one firefight in which 18 soldiers were killed. The War in Kosovo confirmed that Washington would fight only from a safe distance.

Deadly terrorist strikes in East Africa provoked only the launch of several dozen cruise missiles on suspected training camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum. The results appear only to have bolstered bin Laden's standing in the Islamic world without substantially diminishing his capabilities.

Washington has yet to respond to the suicide bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 US sailors and also was blamed on bin Laden's network. Last June, when rumours circulated about another attack on the Fifth Fleet in the Gulf region, it abruptly put to sea, out of harm's way.

In this context, bin Laden or others might have concluded that a visually and lethally spectacular strike at the two greatest symbols of US economic and military might - and at the heart of two of its greatest cities - could be just the blow needed to shatter Washington's morale and make it turn tail in the Gulf.