Was 9/11 really that bad?

What keeps the US banks from crashing?

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2187rank.html

WAR!

... and 9/11 was needed for the war. David Bell knows it. To aviod the implication that 911 was an inside job, he wrote this article (for his other employer, the CIA).

The attacks were a horrible act of mass murder, but history says we're overreacting.

By 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 W

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/opinion/commentary/la-op-bell28jan28,0,1900868.story?coll=la-home-commentary

From: SarahD <sarah1...@hotmail.com>
Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2007 07:08:16 -0600

On Sun, 28 Jan 2007 04:50:27 -0800, Roger wrote:
> Was 9/11 really that bad?The attacks were a horrible act of mass murder,
> but history says we'reoverreacting.

I want to see our country's reaction when the real perps of 9/11 go to
trial.

I know a man involved in the demolition industry. He examined slow motion
video of the building 7 collapse and he says the building was wired with
explosives - no question about it. He also says the building could not be
wired in 8.5 hours. No-way, no-how. There's your smoking gun proving US
government involvement.

From: "Chom Noamsky" <e...@t.me>
Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2007 20:01:00 GMT

Subject: Re: Was 9/11 really that bad?

> and the War on Terror".

All of those attacks still do not amount to a half-day's casualties for
Russia during WWII. You have used this same rationale many times, how US
casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are insignificant when compared to the
casualties suffered everyday from motor vehicle accidents, smoking, etc.
Also, your comparisons were rather silly and irrational in that they did
not
compare apples to apples, while the comparison I posted does.

If this is a truly a "war" then America is up against one of the most
incompetent enemies it has ever faced.

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.politics.bush/browse_thread/thread/a8eb33df85547a99/44f2cd1b9f61547e#44f2cd1b9f61547e