Posted on 01/28/2007 10:29:05 AM PST by paulat
Was 9/11 really that bad?
The attacks were a horrible act of mass murder, but history says we're overreacting.
By David A. Bell
January 28, 2007
IMAGINE THAT on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism.
[snip]
Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?
[snip]
The people who attacked us in 2001 are indeed hate-filled fanatics who would like nothing better than to destroy this country. But desire is not the same thing as capacity, and although Islamist extremists can certainly do huge amounts of harm around the world, it is quite different to suggest that they can threaten the existence of the United States.
[snip]
Even if one counts our dead in Iraq and Afghanistan as casualties of the war against terrorism, which brings us to about 6,500, we should remember that roughly the same number of Americans die every two months in automobile accidents.
[snip]
So why has there been such an overreaction?
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
LOLOL!!! Isn't this guy incredible??
I'm sad to say, though, there are many people who think like him...
It is sad and I wish those people would wise up and face the facts . ~~Pandora~~
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"By David A. Bell, David A. Bell, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and a contributing editor for the New Republic, "
I pity his students. No wonder people are so screwed up with professors like this one teaching them.
I'm simply astonished at the kinds of articles that appearing in the papers this week. "9/11 wasn't all that bad" and "the aftermath of pulling out of Iraq prematurely won't be that bad" and on and on. Not to mention John Kerry's comments that Iran has the "right" to nukes.
I feel like I'm in some kind of strange, through the looking glass world where instead of white rabbits and mad queens, we have Dr. Strangelove and his apprentices holding forth. I just don't recognize this country, or much of the rest of the world, either.
But is we will be attacked as a result, it will be "all Bush' fault".
Liberals are worse enemies of the US than the terrorists because they are destroying us from the inside.
Pure crap.
Congressman Billybob
Latest article: "Announcement: I'm Not Running for President"
So, either America itself is a quagmire, or Iraq isn't. Which is it, Prof and Slimes?
Excellent point!
Yet as the comparison with the Soviet experience should remind us, the war against terrorism has not yet been much of a war at all, let alone a war to end all wars. It is a messy, difficult, long-term struggle against exceptionally dangerous criminals who actually like nothing better than being put on the same level of historical importance as Hitler — can you imagine a better recruiting tool? To fight them effectively, we need coolness, resolve and stamina. But we also need to overcome long habit and remind ourselves that not every enemy is in fact a threat to our existence.
... seems like the sane version of what I think he was trying to say. He would still be wrong, because global caliphate would absolutely threaten our existence, but he wouldn't sound like the worst mix of Ward Churchill and Neville Chamberlain.
Don't confuse Bell's arguments with those he himself criticizes as "tired, predictably ideological". Among these he includes, as an example of their invalidity, John Mueller's book "Overblown" and its assertion that the US "overreacted" to Pearl Harbor.
Which doesn't make Bell's point anymore sensible, of course.
-snip-
And, in place of congratulations for their brilliant "containment" of Saddam, Washington was blamed for UN sanctions and systematically starving to death a million Iraqi kids - or two million, according to which "humanitarian" agency you believe.
Continuing this policy would not have come cheap for America. It would also have cost more real lives of real Iraqis: There's a net gain oF 100,000'S civilians alive today who would have been shoveled into unmarked graves had Ba'athist rule continued. Meanwhile, the dictator would have continued gaming the international system through the Oil-for-Food program, subverting Jordan, and supporting terrorism as far afield as the Philippines.
Yeah yeah, you sneer, what about the only WMD? Sorry. Don't care. Never did. My argument for whacking Saddam was always that the price of leaving him unwhacked was too high. He was the preeminent symbol of the September 10th world; his continuation in office testified to America's lack of will, and was seen as such by, among others, Osama bin Laden: In Donald Rumsfeld's words, weakness is a provocation. So the immediate objective was to show neighboring thugs that the price of catching America's eye was too high. The long term strategic goal was to begin the difficult but necessary transformation of the region that the British funked when they cobbled together the modern Middle East in 1922.
The jury will be out on that for a decade or three yet. But in Iraq today the glass is seven-ninths full. That's to say, in 14 out of 18 provinces life is better than it's been in living memory.
Diplomats use "stability" as a fancy term to dignify inertia and complacency as geopolitical sophistication, but the lesson of 9/11 is that "stability" is profoundly unstable. The unreal realpolitik of the previous 40 years had given the region a stability unique in the non-democratic world, and in return they exported their toxins, both as manpower (on 9/11) and as ideology. Instability was as good a strategic objective as any. As Sam Goldwyn used to tell his screenwriters, I'm sick of the old cliches, bring me some new cliches. When the old cliches are Ba'athism, Islamism and Arafatism, the new ones can hardly be worse, and one or two of them might even buck the region's dismal history. http://steynonline.com
For example, a suicide bomber attacking a school may succeed in killing "only" a half-dozen children. To parallel the Professor's argument, what's a half-dozen children compared to the thousands killed by, say, drunk driving? Well, that isn't an argument that is likely to appeal very much to their parents, for one thing, but the objective wasn't to kill the kids, it was to place the fear of a similar activity into every parent's heart. It was to destabilize the existing society by proving that it cannot protect its constituents.
Now, a true believer in "proportionality" would respond by saying that assigning surveillance and SWAT teams and locking down schools is a disproportionate expenditure of resources in response to "only" a half-dozen dead children, and that a proportionate response to such a "low" number of casualties might properly be no response at all.
And that is where the argument from body count breaks down entirely. It implies that an aggressor who proclaims his intention to attack but who can only kill a few people must be tolerated. That is the nexus of the Professor's argument here, and it is the grand swindle of the entire "proportionality" approach - it means that a terrorist who tunes his attacks to take place under a specific threshold will be safe to continue them indefinitely. That isn't an academic argument, it's the way it actually has been for decades now.
Modern terrorism counts on this. In order to combat this evil game the response must be disproportionate. Two buildings down, two governments taken down. And Iran's frothing at the mouth despite, nobody wants to take the third building down at the cost of being the third government. And that's one reason nobody has. Disproportionality is absolutely the answer against terror and it demeans the value in human life of its victims to imply that they're only worth so much in the grand scheme of things.
I agree there has been an overreaction to the casualties in Iraq compared to past conflicts that make some want to "cut and run" because they view it to be a "meat grinder". But our reaction to losing two massive buldings in NYC and 3000 people in a few hours to islamofascists was measured and restrained. We did not nuke Mecca. We carefully assembled an army to go after the perpetuators. We invaded Iraq after 10 years or so of patient diplomacy.
If there was another attack of this magnitude I doubt Bush would react in such a measured and patient way.
This, from the people who brought you -
"No Justice, no peace!"...
Some people really need an extreme defenestration to bring some perspective back into their lives.
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