A Severe Case
This op-ed from the Los Angeles Times astounds me. David Bell is a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and a contributing editor for the New Republic magazine. And he appears to be trying to reframe 9/11 and the aftermath of that day by arguing it wasn't really all that bad and we're over-reacting. Hell, it was only 3,000 or so Americans. No big deal. Nothing to see, move along.
Good lord.
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……..
…….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.
Bell says it is all Western civilization's fault. The Enlightenment did it. No, really. Bell is arguing the line that this is really a law enforcement issue, not an existential war for survival. Apparently because there isn't enough of a body count yet. Will a crater where an American city once stood be a high enough body count, professor? Will a significant number of Americans turned into incandescent gas get your attention? Will Iran lobbing a nuclear tipped missile at Europe penetrate to the heights of the Ivory tower you inhabit? Assuming your ivory tower isn't at ground zero, of course. Because I imagine that the fireball might get your attention just before you vaporized.
Bell's take is one of the most incredible cases of rectal-cranial inversion I think I have seen recently.
John at Argghhh! takes a little more studious look at the professor's attempt at revisionist reframing. Not that he's any more complimentary. Curt at Flopping Aces is even more angry about this than I am – or at least unleashes more abuse. Punditarian at the Astute Bloggers disassembles Bell and his politics.
UPDATE: Others: The Jawa Report, Flopping Aces, Dr. Sanity, Dean's World, Right Wing Nut House, Jules Crittenden, Macsmind, Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, Dan Riehl, The Hound of Ulster, Jules Crittenden, Greg Tinti,
Insanity, Left Wing, The Ivory Tower, War | Gaius January 29, 2007
Other Links to this Post
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The Mahablog » Unspeakable Truth — January 29, 2007 @ 9:08 am
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The Thunder Run — January 29, 2007 @ 10:07 am
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protein wisdom — January 29, 2007 @ 2:27 pm
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The Heretik : Welcome to My Apocalypse — January 29, 2007 @ 2:53 pm
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The Political Pit Bull — January 29, 2007 @ 5:30 pm
By Guy, January 29, 2007 @ 8:52 am
Good grief! I don’t know who’s worse. Bell or the leftist nut jobs that were on the mall this week-end. The both certainly aproach the situation from different angles.
By TC@LeatherPenguin, January 29, 2007 @ 9:38 am
“…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.”
This numbskull doesn’t truly realize how vicious the “American Street” can get if pushed over the line.
THAT is what can threaten the United States; our hairtrigger getting yanked just a little bit and we collectively decide “to hell with it.” Then, the “international community” would be begging that we bring Bolton and his mustache back to the UN, because those two would look sane in comparison.
By 91B30, January 29, 2007 @ 12:32 pm
Having followed the link to Mahablog and read through some of the lefties “he’s right, what’s the big deal” responses (I guess they feel safe and confident enough now, 5 years on, to make them). I can only post this response (#36 in the thread) to Bell’s foolishness:
Actually if you read the entire article the Professor has some perfectly valid points, and the “overreacting” thesis is only one of the two poles of his consideration of the topic although regrettably it is the one he comes to advance. I think, though, that to consider the matter purely in terms of body count is to miss the entire point of terrorism – it is the expression of the potential of violence, and not necessarily the violence itself, that is terrorism’s objective.
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.
Of course, if we are struck again the loonies will simply blame Bush and do nothing. What loathesome creatures they are.
By 91B30, January 29, 2007 @ 12:35 pm
Hmm-screwed up the italics somehow, but the quote continues until the very last paragraph, which is my closing.