Was 9/11 really that bad?

Protecting His Comrades
Photo by Sgt. Martin K. Newton January 26, 2007

Pfc. Pedro Rangel, 1st Cavalry Division, provides security with his M240B machine gun from a rooftop while fellow Soldiers build a new combat outpost in Ghazaliya, Iraq, Jan. 14.

That's the title of an OpEd in the LA Times by a Professor David Bell.

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?

Probably. The problem is agreeing on what that insight is. As Professor Bell and I look at the same event, but reach different conclusions based on the biases (oddly enough, both historical) we bring to the table.

As ever - you should read the whole thing, not just my snippets.

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.

I've made that point before, too - if not for this purpose. It's the point of we're practicing an immense amount of restraint, vice the manner in which other wars - existential wars - have been conducted. And now Professor Bell almost gripes at us about it, in the sense that he uses it to hone his rhetorical scalpel.

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!).

Give the man credit, he's not being screedy!

He then moves on to how our prosecution of this war is in fact... a unintended consequence of a huge flaw in Western Civilization - The Enlightenment. Bear with me - there is actually some fire with this smoke, especially when you look at the political paradigm adopted by the Republicans and Democrats.

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.

Which leads to this....

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).

Now for the kicker:

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.

Okay, let's recap. Professor Bell says we're over-reacting, citing the rhetorical requirements of going to war in a democracy birthed from the Enlightenment. Okay. Then he cites the horrors of wars, as practiced by the West as a result of the world-view acquired as a result of the Enlightenment. He then goes to assert, with that slightly condescending tone used by much of the residents of the Ivory Tower when speaking to the unwashed, (yet Enlightened) that this isn't really much of a war, after all. And it almost sounds like that annoys him.

Snerk.

Well, it strikes me, that if he's annoyed about the Unintended Consequences of the Enlightenment, and how that has shaped the Western Way of War, he's missed an essential conclusion. In this war, we have fused the rhetorical requirements of Enlightenment thought with the rather more pragmatic restraint of pre-Enlightenment forms of conflict resolution. In other words - he should actually be pleased we are conducting this war with such restraint - though I don't really think that's what he's after. In other words - President Bush et cie have managed to break the link, and are perhaps avoiding the Great War paradigm, even as they couch their actions in the rhetoric of the Enlightenment. Enlightened Conflict, perhaps?

Flip side - a question I've asked before. Granting that Islamofascists don't necessarily have the capacity (an arguable point on the issue of economic impacts of a successful nuke/chem/bio attack on Wall Street for example, but I'll accept the point for argument's sake) to constitute an existential threat to the United States, neither did Adolf Hitler when he sent his Army in to re-occupy the Rhineland. If Daladier had acted as he was authorized to under international law - and kicked the German army out of the Rhineland, and Hitler had fallen from power - what would the verdict of history be? Don't assume it would be a sigh of relief. Because WWII would not have happened as it did (though there still would have been a war in the Pacific at least, and who knows what the Soviet Union might have done in the late 40's and 50's had WWII in Europe not occurred as it did) would not Daladier most likely be reviled for stepping on the legitimate aspirations of the Germans? Vice the man who saved Europe from a 7 year Urban Removal Project?

One of the great problems with history - what looks so neat and tidy after the historians have parsed it all out was never *nearly* that clear to the participants who had to make their decisions based on the incomplete information that they had at the moment. It is one of the conceits of historians that gripes me the most - the smug "but of course they should have done this" aspect that derives from perfect knowledge.

As I said - you should read the good Professor's whole piece, alone, without my interjections. I just find it interesting that he and I look at roughly the same data set - but interpret it differently.

Afoot with the Artillery Photo by Staff Sgt. Bennie Corbett January 26, 2007

A curious Iraqi child observes Sgt. Ilhoo Lhondohomoilhoo of the 2nd Battalion, 15th Field Artillery, 10th Mountain Division.

I admit - the good Sergeant's name tickles me.

For a view of Dr. Bell's Op-Ed (and the right-wing reaction to it) from the Left - go see The Mahablog. Read all the way through - there are points worth pondering there.