DAR AL HARB: LEE HARRIS RESPONDS TO DAVID A. BELL & HIS ARTICLE "PUTTING 9-11 INTO PERSPECTIVE"

So, Did America Overreact to 9/11?
by Lee Harris

This is a question that is much in the air today. Consider, as one example, the essay that recently appeared in the Los Angeles Times written by David A. Bell, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins. The title of the piece is "Putting 9/11 into perspective," and its by-line reads: "The attacks were a horrible act of mass murder, but history says we're overreacting." But does "history" in fact tell us any such thing?

Simply put, Bell's argument goes as follows: There have been wars in the past, global wars, in which millions have died: 50 million, for example, in the Second World War. On the other hand, if you compute the number of Americans who died on 9/11, and "even if one counts our dead in Iraq and Afghanistan as casualties of the war against terrorism," this yields only 6,500 dead Americans. Then, as a way of putting this figure into perspective, Bell says that "we should remember that roughly the same number of Americans die every two months in car accidents."

There is a bit of history in this argument, though the number of people who died in World War II is not exactly a trade secret of historians; but where exactly is Bell's logic? For example, let us suppose a man comes into your house and shoots your favorite dog in cold blood. You explode in rage and fury, whereupon a calm Professor Bell appears to inform you that during WWII whole families and their dogs were brutally murdered, or that in America thousands of dogs are run over by cars each year. Now both of these facts are true. No point in trying to deny them. But does either of these facts put "into perspective" the wanton killing of your beloved pet? Upon hearing Bell's recital of these indisputable facts, would you immediately say to him: "How right you are, Dr. Bell, and how wrong I was to fly into a rage over the killing of a single statistically insignificant dog. Thank you for putting the matter into perspective for me."

If a madman chops your hand off, will you be appeased if he tells you, "Well, be grateful. My previous victims, and there have been hundreds of them, had both their hands and both their feet chopped off. You are lucky, indeed, that I was so merciful." Would his words persuade you to take a detached view of your detached hand?

When a person or a group suffers an unprovoked attack, their first thought is seldom, "Let's put this into perspective." Instead, there is an adrenaline rush of outrage and anger, and this automatic reaction has been programmed into our species by what Charles Darwin called the universal struggle for existence. The famous Fight or Flight response has been designed to assure our long term survival. One may well die fighting or perish by fleeing; yet both responses are far more conducive to survival than waiting for a professor to put the attack into "historical perspective" four years after it occurred. It may be true that others have suffered even more outrageous attacks than the one you have suffered. But what's that to you? The only attack that concerns you is the attack that you must immediately defend yourself against. You must respond now, or never.

Professor Bell argues that the 9/11 attack did not genuinely endanger our national survival, and that the terrorists lack the capacity to "threaten the existence of the United States." Now if by this Bell means that they cannot kill us all, or even more than a few thousand at a time, then history seems to have proven him right—at least, so far. But what Bell overlooks is that in the struggle between human groups, it does not require a threat to the survival of the whole group to activate the Fight response. Far from it—groups begin fighting for reasons that strike outsiders as trifling or absurd. Is this irrational? To professors ensconced in the comfort of a university no doubt, but not to those who have to exist in a dog-eat-dog world.

The inmates of any jailhouse know that even mildest acts of aggression must be instantly and firmly challenged. If you are a newcomer and another inmate demands that you give him your candy bar, the worst thing you could possibly do would be to try to put the incident into perspective. You cannot say, "Well, it's only a candy bar, after all. No big deal," because, in this context, your candy bar is a big deal. It means everything. If you hand it over on demand, then you have also handled over your dignity. You have thereby informed not only the inmate making the demand, but all the other inmates watching you give into his demand that they too can all walk on you at any time. They too can take from you anything you have. They too can make you their flunkey or slave.

Of course, in defending your candy-bar, you may have to risk your life. But it is absurd to say that you are risking your life "only" for a candy bar when you are in fact risking it to maintain your autonomy and independence. The danger in such a situation is not overreaction, but, paradoxically, the failure to overreact.

The same principle applies to groups, tribes, and nations. If any group wishes to preserve its dignity and autonomy, there will be times when it is forced to act like the inmate defending his candy bar. In terms of a cost analysis, this kind of "overreaction" will seem utterly irrational. Is the candy bar really worth risking your life over? But to you, the refusal to take this risk involves a loss that cannot be measured by statistics—namely, the loss of your status as an independent moral agent that others will be careful not to push around or walk over.

Professor Bell wants us to believe that history tells us that America overreacted to 9/11. What history tells us, on the contrary, is that men have repeatedly gone into brutal and bloody wars over the moral equivalent of mere candy bars. The casus belli of the Franco-Prussian war was the fatal Ems telegram. The First World War began with the murder of a Crown Prince. The American Revolution began with a tea party.

It is far too early to be invoking the august judgment of history on America's response to 9/11; it may well turn out that the USA, instead of overreacting, failed to react strongly and forcefully enough. 9/11 as an act of unprovoked aggression is without parallel, and those who celebrated it throughout the Muslim world did so with complete impunity. In the eyes of our enemy, our failure to respond immediately and indiscriminately to the attack has not been chalked up to our humanitarian zeal, but to our weakness. Like the inmate who hands over his candy bar without protest, those who were watching us for our reaction to 9/11 may be drawing conclusions about us that we did not intend to convey to them, and that are not in our long-term interests.


Lee Harris is da man ! ! !


Putting 9/11 into perspective
The attacks were a horrible act of mass murder, but history says we're overreacting.
By David A. 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?

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.

David A. Bell, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and a contributing editor for the New Republic, is the author of "The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It."


Pertinent Links:

1) So, Did America Overreact to 9/11?

2) Putting 9/11 into perspective