LATimes editorial: We overreacted on 9/11

[GaryC 7]

Putting 9/11 into perspective

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!).

Seeing international conflict in apocalyptic terms — viewing every threat as existential — is hardly a uniquely American habit. To a certain degree, it is a universal human one. But it is also, more specifically, a Western one, which paradoxically has its origins in one of the most optimistic periods of human history: the 18th century Enlightenment.

Until this period, most people in the West took warfare for granted as an utterly unavoidable part of the social order. Western states fought constantly and devoted most of their disposable resources to this purpose; during the 1700s, no more than six or seven years passed without at least one major European power at war.

The Enlightenment, however, popularized the notion that war was a barbaric relic of mankind's infancy, an anachronism that should soon vanish from the Earth. Human societies, wrote the influential thinkers of the time, followed a common path of historical evolution from savage beginnings toward ever-greater levels of peaceful civilization, politeness and commercial exchange.

The unexpected consequence of this change was that those who considered themselves "enlightened," but who still thought they needed to go to war, found it hard to justify war as anything other than an apocalyptic struggle for survival against an irredeemably evil enemy. In such struggles, of course, there could be no reason to practice restraint or to treat the enemy as an honorable opponent.

Ever since, the enlightened dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of modern total war have been bound closely to each other in the West. Precisely when the Enlightenment hopes glowed most brightly, wars often took on an especially hideous character.

The Enlightenment was followed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, which touched every European state, sparked vicious guerrilla conflicts across the Continent and killed millions (including, probably, a higher proportion of young Frenchmen than died from 1914 to 1918).

During the hopeful early years of the 20th century, journalist Norman Angell's huge bestseller, "The Great Illusion," argued that wars had become too expensive to fight. Then came the unspeakable horrors of World War I. And the end of the Cold War, which seemed to promise the worldwide triumph of peace and democracy in a more stable unipolar world, has been followed by the wars in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf War and the present global upheaval. In each of these conflicts, the United States has justified the use of force by labeling its foe a new Hitler, not only in evil intentions but in potential capacity.

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.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/o...1&cset=true

[mawilson 2,133]

Gary - do you support the Iraq war?

[GaryC 7]

Gary - do you support the Iraq war?

Yes. Whether or not the WMD's were there does not matter to me. I was glad to see us go in and I am glad we took him out. I recognized at the beginning that it would take years to establish a new government and I am not surprised with anything that has happened there.

[mawilson 2,133]

Gary - do you support the Iraq war?

Yes. Whether or not the WMD's were there does not matter to me. I was glad to see us go in and I am glad we took him out. I recognized at the beginning that it would take years to establish a new government and I am not surprised with anything that has happened there.

I object to the war purely on financial grounds.

It's just too expensive -- there are better ways to spend 400 billion dollars than take out a useless dictator.

Just imagine how we could have improved national security at home with that kind of cash.

[GaryC 7]

Gary - do you support the Iraq war?

Yes. Whether or not the WMD's were there does not matter to me. I was glad to see us go in and I am glad we took him out. I recognized at the beginning that it would take years to establish a new government and I am not surprised with anything that has happened there.

I object to the war purely on financial grounds.

It's just too expensive -- there are better ways to spend 400 billion dollars than take out a useless dictator.

Just imagine how we could have improved national security at home with that kind of cash.

I have an unpopular viewpoint on this whole thing but I truly believe it. Iraq has attracted the terrorists to a place where we can deal with them. I don't believe that we are making terrorists that would have otherwise not taken up a bomb belt. I see Iraq as a trap for the radicals where we can draw them in and kill them. We are taking them out by the hundreds every week and I want to see that continue.

Before others start the flame war again I am not starting that discussion again. If you want to comment on my view feel free but I am not getting into that again, This is what I believe and it isn't going to change.

[mawilson 2,133]

I have an unpopular viewpoint on this whole thing but I truly believe it. Iraq has attracted the terrorists to a place where we can deal with them. I don't believe that we are making terrorists that would have otherwise not taken up a bomb belt. I see Iraq as a trap for the radicals where we can draw them in and kill them. We are taking them out by the hundreds every week and I want to see that continue.

I like the idea of a honeypot for radicals in the Middle East but unfortunately we can't afford it.

We can't stay in Iraq forever and keep borrowing money to pay for it.

It is also a double-edged sword because ultimately, we want less radicalism, not more.

An imposition of democracy creates the perception of Western, in particular U.S.,

imperialism, and every innocent person we kill radicalises more moderate Muslims.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

It is also a double-edged sword because ultimately, we want less radicalism, not more.An imposition of democracy creates the perception of Western, in particular U.S., imperialism, and every innocent person we kill radicalises more moderate Muslims.

This is the point that some fail to understand: We're creating more enemies than we're finishing off.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

It is also a double-edged sword because ultimately, we want less radicalism, not more.An imposition of democracy creates the perception of Western, in particular U.S., imperialism, and every innocent person we kill radicalises more moderate Muslims.

This is the point that some fail to understand: We're creating more enemies than we're finishing off.

I'd agree with that - the various factions we are now confronted with are hardly an organised, regular army with a finite number of troops and resources. The extremist clerics who are recruiting impressionable young people all over the middle east (which is who these suicide bombers are - as I've said before you don't see any of the terrorist leaders strapping explosives to themselves and detonating themselves in a marketplace) thrive on the sort of thing we are currently doing in Iraq. Its a sort of religious nationalism.

As regards to the article - its rather similar to another piece I read some time back, that if you look at the greatest challenges faced by this country, the biggest "threat" to its existence was (by far) the war of independence, and the revolutionary war. 9/11 did significant economic damage and loss of life, but in perspective it doesn't threaten the existence of the nation. In that sense - the years since 9/11 have overexaggerated the nature and severity of the threat against this country. Its certainly capable of doing much death and damage, but the US isn't going to sink "Atlantis-style" beneath the waves because of terrorism. Indeed if history is any indication - we are more likely to bring about the collapse of our society, as opposed to any external threat (save mass invasion of course).

The net result of terrorism (and you can decide for yourself whether this is in evidence in the US of 2006) is that it leads to an upsurge in nationalism (of the negative xenophobic kind). So now you effectively have nationalism on both sides - one side of which is convinced in its moral authority to remove threats to world peace, and the other which is convinced in its moral authority to remove threats to its religious ideology.

For me, news reporting of terrorism stories, as with stories about crime is distortive. Both are generally over-reported (for obvious reasons) the upshot of which is that it gives rise to the impression that it is more widespread than it actually is, and that the threat therefore, is greater than it actually is. Don't you get tired every time there is a train crash, accident at an oil refinery - that terrorism has to be explicitly ruled out.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

It is also a double-edged sword because ultimately, we want less radicalism, not more.An imposition of democracy creates the perception of Western, in particular U.S., imperialism, and every innocent person we kill radicalises more moderate Muslims.

This is the point that some fail to understand: We're creating more enemies than we're finishing off.

I'd agree with that - the various factions we are now confronted with are hardly an organised, regular army with a finite number of troops and resources. The extremist clerics who are recruiting impressionable young people all over the middle east (which is who these suicide bombers are - as I've said before you don't see any of the terrorist leaders strapping explosives to themselves and detonating themselves in a marketplace) thrive on the sort of thing we are currently doing in Iraq. Its a sort of religious nationalism.

Then you have Iran, which has responded to our invasion of its neighbour with increasing militarisation, building new alliances, and by accelerating its nuclear programme.

As regards to the article - its rather similar to another piece I read some time back, that if you look at the greatest challenges faced by this country, the biggest "threat" to its existence was (by far) the war of independence, and the revolutionary war. 9/11 did significant economic damage and loss of life, but in perspective it doesn't threaten the existence of the nation. In that sense - the years since 9/11 have overexaggerated the nature and severity of the threat against this country. Its certainly capable of doing much death and damage, but the US isn't going to sink "Atlantis-style" beneath the waves because of terrorism. Indeed if history is any indication - we are more likely to bring that about ourselves (remember the Weimar Constitution?), rather than any external threat (save mass invasion of course).

The slogan "fight them over there so we don't fight them over here" would seem to be an example of that. Al Qaeda isn't about to go marching up to capitol hill to string up George Bush and behead Aunt May and Uncle Ben

The net result of terrorism (and you can decide for yourself whether this is in evidence in the US of 2006) is that it leads to an upsurge in nationalism (of the negative xenophobic kind). So now you effectively have nationalism on both sides - one side of which is convinced in its moral authority to remove threats to world peace, and the other which is convinced in its moral authority to remove threats to its religious ideology.

For me, news reporting of terrorism stories, as with stories about crime is distortive. Both are generally over-reported (for obvious reasons) the upshot of which is that it gives rise to the impression that it is more widespread than it actually is, and that the threat therefore, is greater than it actually is. Don't you get tired every time there is a train crash, accident at an oil refinery - that terrorism has to be explicitly ruled out.

Edited February 2, 2007 by erekose