Have we over-reacted to 9/11?
Dave Schuler
You might want to take a look at this op-ed in the LA Times dispassionately comparing the attacks on 9/11 (and our reactions to them) with historic parallels. Warning: take blood pressure medicine before reading.
It seems to me that there are a number of possible interpretations of the data other than the one profferred by the professor—that we've over-reacted. John Donovan's is that we've under-reacted. Another possibility is that the Soviet leaders did not value the lives of their citizens as we do (historically indisputable).
Or, perhaps, he's using the wrong yardstick. We took far more civilian casualties on that day than we did in the incidents that precipitated our entry into World Wars I and II combined. We also took more than $1 Trillion in physical and financial damages—again, far more than the precipitating incidents in World Wars I and II combined.
Contrast this to 9/11, or any terror attack, where there is no mutual declaration of war: no armies, flags, uniforms, or rules. I mean at least the Japanese had the decency to aim at a military target. By no stretch of the imagination could you consider the WTC to be a military target in the same way that, say, Tokyo, Dresden, or London were during the world wars. The situations are totally different, and our responses have been as well.
Sheesh. What a maroon...
Everytime we bow to extremist demands, we're overreacting. Every time we fail to criticize, wage war against, imprison or kill the members of political organizations that make credible threats against our families and our communities, we're overreacting. If we had consistently allowed ourselves to respond to terrorism in reasonable ways, terrorism would not be a threat, or a billion dollar underground economy, today.
One of the many, many things going on in the op-ed is that it's a case of what I call “boot-strapping”; he's using his PhD in French History to give credibility to his pronouncements in an area outside of his expertise.
The general point about professors pontificating about things they know little or nothing about is certainly true, although I'd observe that the pontifications of entertainers are even less likely to be based on knowledge...
I lived through World War II. My older cousins and younger uncles served in the US Marine Corps and US Army ground and air forces during that war. My own father had served in World War I and was too old for World War II. So I have an appreciation for what "reaction" and "over-reaction" actually imply.
Any of you who don't have such an appreciation shouldn't even try to feed me bullshit about the way the people of this country respond to attacks on our soil by foreigners. At least when they get pissed off enough to want to kick ass the old fashioned way.
And just don't push the political correctness to far. Because that mood may come again to the American people one day.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Old joke: Artificial intelligence is something that's used when you don't have real intelligence.
Ironic.
That said, I think the professor makes a good point; indeed, I've said most of the same things many times myself, including on this blog.
The answer is: First off, if we aren't more vigilant, we will see more attacks like 9/11. Second, increasingly we are seeing development of technologies that will make mass killing by the thousands cheaper and easier than ever for lunatics. Third, we have to face the fact that there are regimes which sponsor terrorists and do something about it. Fourth, while it sounds bloodless, it's just a fact that the damage to commerce is as big a part of this as anything; if our cities are not considered safe, then all our lives are affected. (When America went to war with the Barbery Pirates, it's doubtful that more than a few hundred American lives were ever at stake, but the cost to our commerce system was substantial.)
This is why 9/11 required fundamental changes at multiple levels--which it changed everything. I'm finding it depressing that we have to rehash those arguments all over again but perhaps we do.
I'm relieved to know you would consider this overreacting, as opposed to the proper, measured response. Some days I can't tell with you.
And I agree: if another major attack happens, we're going to come pretty close to what you describe. That's part of why I'm so strongly hoping that our current efforts succeed. I think that if we're pushed into escalation, we will survive, bruised and battered; but our enemies won't, and a lot of innocents will go down with them. I would rather see the difficult and unsure path we're on succeed than see us take the swift, sure path.
Our current population level is only sustainable due to our current economic and technologic infrastructure. Damage that enough, and deaths will follow; and in the process, major societal upheaval will come as well. Nothing bloodless in recognizing that, just a grasp of the larger scope of the conflict -- a grasp that our enemies seem to have more than some of our citizens do.
Fascinating. I wonder how consistent Professor Bell is in this view.
For example, I can only assume that he believes the Palestinians to have overreacted against Israel. Whatever Israel has or has not done, have Palestinians died in numbers comparable to the Soviet losses on the eastern front? Ha. And they've reacted not by fighting a regime-change war, but via terrorism directly aimed at innocents, which is worse, as I assume the good professor would agree. Overreaction, right Professor?
IIRC the tribute that was demanded was equal to about a third of the total national treasury.
This is an honest question and I'm not trying to "one-up" you or anything, but where does he say in the article that we should do any "waiting" before we attack? After reading the article, all I get from the guy is that there's over-exaggeration of the perception of recent terrorists, not so much our response. He says that too many people are seeing this is an "apocolyptic conflict" of sorts, when in reality, it's very much within the control of the US (as far as the kind of things we can stop and hopefully prevent).
Or am I reading it wrong? I can't exactly tell, he's really vague. He doesn't seem to emphatically say that he disaproves of our "long, messy, difficult" struggle against terrorists, he just seems to be telling everyone to put it into perspective.
You may be right about his intentions; but the choice of the word "overreaction" implies that he's critiquing the response, not the perception. I did indeed go too far in assuming that he felt the right response was waiting; but since he doesn't say what he thinks the right response would be, he leaves a vacuum in which it's easy to speculate.
From the op-ed:
The clear implication is that only an existential threat is worthy of a response of any significant scale and existential is taken in a very narrow sense i.e. complete extermination.
Martin, above, is skeptical of the prudence of waiting until such an existential threat is certain in the light of the greatest attack on our soil in our history.
Others, also above, have pointed out that “existential” should not be so narrowly defined and actually extends to issues like way of life, standard of living, etc.
An example of this is the American Civil War. The South did not pose an existential threat to the North in the sense that they would kill every man, woman, and child and raze all of the North's cities. But the act of secession itself was an existential threat to the Union.
Sadly, this kind of idiocy is pretty much par for the course. Half the world sees 9/11 as our Reichstag fire.
All they know is what they read in the papers and that's an alibi for their ignorance.
Oddly enough it's the same half that believe the Nazis should have "finished the job."
Not decency so much. The Japanese had no problem targeting civilians (see Nanking, Rape of) when it suited them. The US Pacific fleet was a threat, Pearl Harbor was a battle to eliminate the threat.
Which (it must be said) more-or-less missed. They really wanted the carriers. They should have attacked the fuel farm - without THAT the entire fleet would have had to retire to the West Coast until the facilities were rebuilt and replenished.
That's how you respond to negative behavior. Whatever you do, you don't reward negative behavior, even through excessive negative attention. Instead, you address it immediately and quickly, do whatever you can to prevent it from occurring again, and then smile and say, "Let's not have any more of that unpleasantness. Who wants a Diet Coke?"
We've pretty much done the opposite. We've allowed terrorists to control our lives far too much, given them far too much attention, and at the same time, not responded with enough violence given the initial provocation.
The message should've been loud and clear after 9/11: ANY mass terrorist attacks on American civilians in the 50 states will result in massive, disproportionate, virtually insane levels of retaliation that will threaten to erase your people from history, permanently. If on the other hand you refrain from attacking us on our homeland, we will respond proportionately. In other words, attack us overseas, we wrestle. Attack us here, and we obliterate you from the air using any and all weapons in our arsenal and then go have lunch.
I know people think I'm bloodthirsty maniac when I say things like this, so I've stopped arguing it. I supported the president and still do as he tries to save people from themselves. However, if he fails, the essential lesson we needed to send in 9/11 will have been lost; in fact, the terrorists are on the verge of teaching us that we truly lack the will to fight them overseas, and that we will tolerate a certain amount of terrorism at home. We may even capitulate, politically, if the Dems get strong enough.
After all, Bin Laden has said he wants about seven things from us, most of which, had they been written by others, wouldn't seem totally unreasonable. He wants us to stop supporting Israel, stop supporting corrupt dictatorships in the Muslim world, to leave the Muslim world alone, to stop backing China and Russia's crackdown on Muslims, to stop manipulating oil prices, and to stop polluting the world with our depraved pop culture. While I would take serious issue with some of these, many within our own country would agree with one or more of these things. If we are not willing to fight seriously, many Americans may eventually force us to capitulate to these terms.
My two cents. YMMV.
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!).
Yeah, that would have worked out well. Yes, Professor Bell--John Mueller is well ahead of you in the Moron Sweepstakes: congratulations about that.
But I didn't think the article was moonbat-leftist raving. I thought it was rational and presented an argument that is worth listening to. I don't agree with it, but I don't think it is idiotic. And it was generally free of Bush-bashing rhetoric too. I'd guess most of the anti-war crowd think the article is pretty lame. I mean, I didn't even see one mention of Halliburton profiteering or Dick Cheney's shotgun.
Late Sunday morning on 7 Dec 1941, as Fuchida's aerial striking forces were landing on the decks of the six fleet carriers of Kuda Butai (the Fleet Striking Force), there were almost no operational aircraft available to stand off additional Japanese attacks, and only two US fleet carriers anywhere near Pearl Harbor. Lexington (CV-2) was some 480 miles east of Midway island carrying a squadron of fighter aircraft to the US Marine garrison their. And Enterprise (CV-6) was about 200 miles west of Pearl Harbor after completing a similar mission to Wake island.
Moreover, there were few if any US Army or US Navy fighting aircraft still flyable that could have been used to fend off any followup Japanese attacks. Nor could fighter aircraft be ferried 2400 miles from the mainland to Hawaii in 1941.
Would there have been massive use of anti-aircraft fire against a third wave of Japanese attacks? Undoubtedly our people would have tried. But the locations of the oil storage tank farm was as well-known to the Japanese naval air commanders and their men as the Tokyo Ginza.
Moreover, with the fires burning unabated all around Pearl Harbor from the Sunday morning air strikes, Japanese pilots of their high-level bombers would have had no trouble at night finding and destroying all the naval oil supply in the tank farm adjoining the great fleet base; and at the same time, the general darkness would have rendered US anti-aircraft fire all but useless. Equally useless would have been any attempt to use the remaining USAAC P-40 fighter aircraft in night attacks against the light bombers.
Keeping Kuda Butai -- or at least four of the six fleet carriers and their escorts in Hawaii waters after the Sunday attack probably also would have netted at least one of the two US fleet carriers, which, following futile combat patrols to find the Japanese fleet, were rushing back to Hawaii as night fell.
The Japanese bombers, had they come back that very night, would have caught Enterprise, perhaps sinking her in deep water outside the main channel into Pearl Harbor. They could then have set up a net to catch and kill Lexington, the only other US carrier in the region that week. As a matter of fact, a Japanese submarine found Saratoga (CV-3) and put sufficient torpedo damage into her to send her back to San Diego for extensive refits.
Even more significant, although not yet considered as such by the Imperial Japanese Navy, would have been destruction of the great US submarine base at Pearl Harbor. It was in fact the submarines that carried out the main and highly successful effort in driving all japanese freighter shipping from the western Pacific during that war that followed Pearl Harbor. That was the main factor that rendered their island empire impossible to defend against the later US island-hopping campaigns in the central Pacific and southwestern Pacific theaters of war.
Where were the other US carriers that day? Ranger (CV-4 was returning from the Caribbean to Norfolk on the east coast, where it would join Yorktown (CV-5), Hornet (CV-8), and Long Island (AVG-1), a lightweight carrier. Hornet was still fitting out and not ready for use at sea. Wasp (CV-7) was at Bermuda.
(All of the above information, courtesy Paul R Yarnall, NavSource Naval History.)
But vice admiral Chuichi Nagumo, more a conservative and risk-avoiding personality in the stamp of US admirals Frank Fletcher and William Pye in contrast to his own commander in chief, Isoroku Yamamoto, or the great US commander Bill Halsey, Raymond Spruance and Marc Mitscher. Nagumo got cold feet, and steered a course due west to Japan shortly after the last aircraft of the Pearl Harbor strike forces had landed on the decks of his six fleet carriers.
It was a choice he would live to regret, as four of these six carriers were burned and sunk northwest of Midway island on June 4, 1942, by aircraft flown off the decks of Enterprise, Yorktown and Hornet.
Would anything Nagumo could have done in Hawaii waters in early December 1941 have changed the ultimate course of Japan's war against against the western powers?
Possibly. The Japanese target for expansion was not the eastern or central Pacific at all, but was in fact confined to the Netherlands East Indies, British Malaya, Singapore and Burma and French Indo-China.
The Japan naval, air and land forces could simply have ignored the US bases in the Pacific, including Hawaii, the Philippines and various small islands, and concentrated their attacks on the British, French and Dutch colonies. These would have been conquered, occupied and exploited by the Japanese without involving US intervention.
And whether the US Congress would have declared war against Japan and authorized the Roosevelt administration to begin US intervention in a war in far southeast Asia is debatable, considering the widespread isolationist public feelings in this country until December 7th. But after the japanese attack, and especially in considering it having been made without a prior declaration of war or even of intent, all such isolationism was cast aside for the duration of the war.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Suppose I get home after work, and there is a faint smell of mercaptan. Should I react based on whether the smell is strong enough to sicken me, or based on the knowledge that there is a natural gas leak?
Bell's essay is the equivalent of telling me "Get back in there, you wimp. You can barely smell it."
As I analyze the historical events of World War II, nazi Germany could not have finished off Stalin after they lost the great battle of Moscow in autumn 1941. And that occured even before Hitler declared war on the USA three days after the japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in early December 1941. As a matter of fact, the great soviet counterattack along the Moscow front, which shattered and almost destroyed the german armies lined up around the Moscow area, came on December 5, just two days before the Japanese attack.
By summer 1942, when the german armies had recovered just enough for them to assemble the forces needed to re-open their offensive along just the southernmost end of the eastern front, the Russians had already assembed a vast system of reserve armies. These armies, carefully hidden from the Germans in the depths of Russia, accounted for some 1.5 million men, about 2200 tanks, and many thousands of artillery pieces. These forces, many of which sprang the great trap on the german 6th army and part of their 4th army at Stalingrad in November and December 1942, were in addition to the field armies already in place along the front line.
The fact was, that less than six months after the start of Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, the german war effort already was doomed, and could never be saved unless Hitler could have talked Stalin into ending the war short of the the outright soviet victory that occurred in May 1945.
Moreover, little of that victory depended on anything the USA or Britain did. I am convinced that the western invasion of Europe in 1944 took place largely to make sure the massive soviet armies that already were driving the Germans out of Russia would not simply run right over all of Germany and occupy Europe up to the English channel and Atlantic ocean.
Development of a nuclear weapon by the Germans in World War II was wholly dependent upon Hitler's management and allocation of increasingly scarce war materiel and other resources, including research scientists. Without having achieved a sustained nuclear chain reaction such as Fermi, Szilard, Compton and other US-based scientists accomplished at the University of Chicago in December 1942, the nazi leadership probably never would have concluded that such a vast, expensive and necessarily slow industrial effort such as the Manhattan Project proved to be, would have led to useable weapons in time to change the inevitable result of World War II.
In any case, the scientists who could have developed Germany's nuclear weaponry largely were brilliant jewish physicists, whom Hitler and his henchmen purposely drove out of Europe, and almost certainly would have murdered, had they got their hands on them.
Hitler -- and therefore his entire nazi state apparatus -- were preconditioned to think of nuclear physics as some sort of jewish bag of faked-up tricks, the use of which in wartime would have led to nothing but wasted expenditure on the part of the Germans. The nazi period surely was the closest the 20th century came to an armed political gang with the mentality of a flat-earth society, taking over the government of the most industrialized state in western Europe.
The american nuclear scientists of Operation Alsos, who scoured newly liberated parts of Europe about a step behind the armed forces, found no evidence of any german progress on atom bombs or anything that could have been used to destroy a single city with one bomb.
None of this is intended to say the Nazis failed to develop a suitable delivery system for such weapons, had they existed. The german V-2 rockets were designed to be fired up into the low stratosphere. If they had been designed to carry more propulsion fuel, and with suitable gyro-compass based controls, they could have been used to create intercontinental ballistic missiles. But such weapons are a rather expensive way to deliver a single load of non-nuclear explosives to a target halfway around the world.
The irony of all this is that probably the very people who could have guaranteed their victory in the superwar they started were among those they intended to murder according to the tenets of their racially-defined ideology.
This is one of the reasons I always have claimed that culturally defined predisposition toward particular policies or courses of action are far more meaningful in history than any consideration based on differences among the various human races.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
However, persistent and successful allied efforts either or both to destroy the heavy water plant in Telemark province or to sink the accumulated supply of the heavy water that was being shipped to Germany in early 1944, all doomed any possibility of Germany acquiring the specific materials needed by them to convert plutonium to a potential military use. And the Germans presumably had determined that the use of heavy water for this project was the only one that might have offered them any chance of developing nuclear weapons. Therefore, any such effort was dead in the water, so to speak, from February 1944 onward.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Decline and Fall
Desolation Row
Heavy Water is only required if you plan to build a reactor using natural uranium.
Plutonium extraction can then happen after the reactor is running.
I could get way more technical but that will probably sufice.
Um, Dave, if that's what you took away from what I wrote, I wrote badly.
I don't think I suggested we under-reacted. If anything, I suggested that in the context of Dr. Bell's thesis we "just right" reacted.
The fusion of Post-Enlightenment Apocalyptic Rhetoric with Pre-Enlightenment restraint in combat operations, as we've been in many respects bending over backwards to avoid damage - especially so given our doctrinal impetus to decisive combat operations - an impetus we've been trying to restrain for the last few years.
I also intended to make the point that perhaps our actions in Iraq are comparable to Daladier acting to thwart Hitler early on - possibly avoiding the European disaster that was WWII. I also posit that if he had done that, he would not have been treated well by historians, simply because no one would know the unknowable - i.e., what a tragedy that might have been averted had Daladier acted as international law and treaty would have allowed him to.
I've made the point elsewhere on the blog that we've made massive mistakes and let our hubris blind us to many of the problems we've found ourselves in - but I don't think I've characterized (and certainly not in the linked piece) our proceedings in Iraq as being an under-reaction.
But, since I wrote it late last night, mebbe my writing just sucks and I didn't get the point out. 8^)
Cheers,
John
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.