Prof. David Bell, in his piece “Was 9/11 really that bad?”, shows us, yet again, why the left can’t really be trusted with national security:

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.

On the one hand, he’s right, in the sense that there’ve been wars that have killed hundreds, even thousands of times as many people as 9/11.

It also raises several questions. 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?

It might indeed – we’ll get back to that in a moment – but a more interesting question is “if fighting a war over 3,000 is an “overreaction”, where exactly is the threshold.  How many lives are too many to lose before we as a nation act?

We learned in the eighties that one paraplegic in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer (murdered on the Achille Lauro by boatjackers) wasn’t enough. We learned that six (first WTC bombing), dozens (Khobar Towers, USS Cole, Kenyan and Tanzanian Embassies) and even hundreds (the Beirut Marine barracks) weren’t enough to push this nation to take serious, concerted action against terrorists.

So is 3,000 still too low?

Certainly, if we look at nothing but our enemies’ objectives, it is hard to see any indication of an overreaction. 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.

Now we’re making progress; the “existence of the United States” is too high a price to pay.  It’s a start.

Yet a great many Americans, particularly on the right, have failed to make this distinction. For them, the “Islamo-fascist” enemy has inherited not just Adolf Hitler’s implacable hatreds but his capacity to destroy. The conservative author Norman Podhoretz has gone so far as to say that we are fighting World War IV (No. III being the Cold War).

But it is no disrespect to the victims of 9/11, or to the men and women of our armed forces, to say that, by the standards of past wars, the war against terrorism has so far inflicted a very small human cost on the United States. As an instance of mass murder, the attacks were unspeakable, but they still pale in comparison with any number of military assaults on civilian targets of the recent past, from Hiroshima on down.

True.  But damage to a nation isn’t purely measured in lives and property, even though our peoples’ lives are of paramount importance.

Let’s act like liberals for a moment:  if we assume the fringe left is really correct about Bush’s infringements on civil liberties, then isn’t our nation irreparably harmed?  And if you remember who actually started the war, you can see where the damage is coming from – right?

To move into the rational world; it’s possible that terrorists could cause immense damage to this nation without killing a single person.  As the threat, or perception of a threat, escalates then the liberties that make this nation more than just Germany with better cable can erode to the point where a terrorist “takeover” would be more or less irrelevant.  Worried about attacks, the government could mangle the Constitution, infringing free speech, free worship, confiscating firearms, violate equal protection over ethnic differences, change the rules of evidence to speed up terror trials…

This isn’t even partisan; even if you do accept every fringe-left claim about the Administration’s record on civil liberties in the war on terror (and no rational person should), it is a fact that war is hell on liberty; the “War on Drugs”, a bipartisan effort, caused immense erosion in civil liberties, against a threat that is a piker compared to terror (more people die in drug turf wars in a month than die from overdosing on all illegal drugs).

It is overreacting, to counterattack a foe who wants us to either adopt Sharia under duress, or something just as bad out of bipartisan contingency?

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.

But the only rights we’ve lost to that toll are the ones to drive drunk and without seatbelts.  As absolutist about liberty as I am, even I don’t mourn either.

Terrorism is different, no?

Of course, the 9/11 attacks also conjured up the possibility of far deadlier attacks to come. But then, we were hardly ignorant of these threats before, as a glance at just about any thriller from the 1990s will testify. And despite the even more nightmarish fantasies of the post-9/11 era (e.g. the TV show “24’s” nuclear attack on Los Angeles), Islamist terrorists have not come close to deploying weapons other than knives, guns and conventional explosives. A war it may be, but does it really deserve comparison to World War II and its 50 million dead? Not every adversary is an apocalyptic threat.

In the early 1930’s, a news article in the New York Times noted that a certain political movement had perhaps a few thousand members in a population of 80 million, that their impact was minimal and long-term outlook not very interesting.  They were writing, of course, about Hitler’s Nazis.  In 1932, they were not an “apocalyptic threat”.  Seven years later, after tapping into the hatreds and bigotries of a first-world nation, they were. 

So no.  Not every adversary is an apocalyptic threat.  Yet.

So why has there been such an overreaction? Unfortunately, the commentators who detect one have generally explained it in a tired, predictably ideological way: calling the United States a uniquely paranoid aggressor that always overreacts to provocation.

The World Trade Center I (1993).  The Khobar Towers. The Embassy Bombings. The USS Cole.  All passed without riposte.  Hardly “always overreacting”. 

The author’s claim is patently absurd, and the rest of his article should be viewed with that in mind.

Or, for that matter, this next bit here:

In a recent book, for instance, political scientist John Mueller evaluated the threat that terrorists pose to the United States and convincingly concluded that it has been, to quote his title, “Overblown.” But he undercut his own argument by adding that the United States has overreacted to every threat in its recent history, including even Pearl Harbor (rather than trying to defeat Japan, he argued, we should have tried containment!).

Which is a plainly silly argument.  Containment would have left us with an intractable enemy (who killed thousands of Americans in Hawaii and the Phillippines in the weeks after December 7) in control of most of the Pacific Rim, able to conquer and exploit China and Indonesia with impunity, able eventually to challenge us in the two areas that failed it during the war we actually had – resources and industry…

…but what’s the point of arguing when one is dealing with those invested in such deep silliness?From The American Mind

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 12:10 pm and is filed under War On Terror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.