Was 9/11 Really That Bad?

But on the other hand, I'm unconvinced that there's any value in discussing it in the media. Will anyone be convinced to take a more nuanced or distanced view of 9/11 and terrorism? Is it even possible to discuss the issue rationally in the public sphere?

Or will the idea just stir up an unnecessary mess (ala "CHOMSKY BLAMES AMERIKKKA") and sell a ton of books for Ann Coulter down the road.

that said, 9/11 didn't change the way most americans lived their lives - it wasn't pearl harbor by any means.

it's not so much 'overreaction to 9/11' as 'cynical use of 9/11'. the comparison with russian losses in ww2 is pretty spurious, given that that's like the highest death toll for anything ever.

pearl harbor resulted in the mobilization of the vast majority of the american populace, and the war that followed left the country ultimately changed almost beyond recognition. you def can't say that of 9/11.

put it this way: were any of you in NYC or DC at the time of the attacks? thought not.

fuck knows. not a closed topic!

pearl harbour, or its repercussions, had a far greater effect on the US economy. the expansion of arms-related industry in ww2 puts any increase in military spending post-9/11 in the shade.

The point this columnist is trying to make, which I kind of agree with actually, is more productively and provocatively summed up with this headline, which appeared less than a week ago over an article in the Guardian about how the head of the Crown Prosecution Service (sort of like the Attorney General, I guess?), Sir Ken Macdonald, feels about it:

"There Is No War On Terror."

I'd like to paste a copy of his speech but I can't find it. It's the best I've heard it put about what terrorism actually is, and the best way to deal with it (both pragmatically and psychologically).

London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, 'soldiers'. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a 'war on terror', just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs'.

The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement.

and no my defn doesn't start on 9/11. the semi-war-type-thing on drugs has been going on well before then.

it doesn't matter if they represent a 'constituency' (wtf anyway, wars are fought on democratic principles now?!) or not.

It may be old fashioned but it is the correct, limited definition of it. War on an abstract noun is a very bizarre concept.
-- Ed (dal...)

there's no 'correct' here. and war against an abstract noun is no more weird than war for an abstract noun (ie 'german/italian unification' or 'democracy' or 'human rights').

xpost

The same constituency as any other agent or enforcer or soldier: those who pay their bills. In the case of the US Marines, that's everybody who pays taxes. In the case of the 9/11 hijackers, the bill payer is the trust fund established with Osama Bin Laden's dad's construction company profits, if I understand it correctly. Calling 9/11 "an act of war," as I think John McCain was the first to make a point of, tacitly dignifies the delusional fantasies of these people. It's like calling the Columbine killers warriors who must be quashed. Before 9/11, suicide bombers represented an extreme, tiny minority of opinion, and after, even less. Until US politicians started treating these dealth-cultists like warriors.

no it wasn't as bad as ww2 or a lot of other things. and yes we clearly over reacted, playing right into the perpetrators' hands. but to try to quantify 9/11 purely in terms of body count is, at least, partially missing the point.

once again, it doesn't matter how many people's opinion is represented in something like 9/11 for it to be something a government is virtually compelled to 'do something about'. in most cases that would mean a cathartic bout of killing afghans via tomahawk strike, but not for this administration.

UART variations mostly OTM except for "gaywads"

Suicide bombers were taking orders from the President of somewhere?

once again, it doesn't matter how many people's opinion is represented in something like 9/11 for it to be something a government is virtually compelled to 'do something about'.

This I have been agreeing with all thread. The difference appears to be that you think sending the Army or cathartically letting off a few tomahawks is the solution to a few violent wingnuts. Let me ask you something: if the 9/11 hijackers really were the kind of elite advance martyr guard for a glorious rising-up of Islamic resistance to Western culture that they imagined themselves to be, what kind of response would play right into their hands? If the paranoid hypocrites who hijacked those planes really wanted to assault the foundations of the Western politico-legal system, what kind of response would it take to actually start doing that? I can't believe I have to say this sub-Freedlandesque shit!

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0815-35.htm

well you seem to be saying that they aren't, so it's kind of moot!

xpost

In this old-fashioned view of war, it was reasonable to conceive of "the enemy" not simply as a hostile army, but as the nation/region represented by that army. And by targeting that nation as a whole (much more culpable than the army itself for the state of war, after all), a hostile army's military power could be minimized. All of which made and continues to make a great deal of sense.

Unfortunately, we remain attached to this nation-enemy view of military conflict, even when we're fighting an abstract entity that has a murky relationship with any specific national government. We fight the nation of Iraq, apparently, because we have a need to concretize our abstract enemy. Israel responds to Palestinan terror attacks as though Palestine were a unified nation engaged in terror as foreign policy (and perhaps it is, but that's another discussion).

It may be fine to conceive of war in new ways, even to do something as tragically absurd as to formally declare war against an abstract entity, but unless we let go of the nation-v-nation mindset in doing this, we're only going to cause more problems.

iraq and the larger war on terror have been an exercise in abstraction to the point of insanity.

Has it ever even been proven that Osama Bin Laden was behind 9/11, by the way?

"Everyone here will come to their own conclusion about whether, in the striking Strasbourg phrase, the very 'life of the nation' is presently endangered. And everyone here will equally understand the risk to our constitution if we decide that it is, when it is not."

Definitely not. "Appropriate" is not just a measure of moral justification (although that is part of it). It's also an assessment of what military intervention could accomplish, what the scale of involvement would be, what the international consequences would be, what the long-term game-plan would be, and so on. I think Saudi Arabia fails most of these assessments.

By the way, to the credit of this country, I think lots of Americans feel pretty uncomfortable when they compare the number of civilians killed in the Iraq war to the number of deaths on 9/11, even ones who really support the war. It'd be wrong to pretend that the public doesn't have some level of self-consciousness about the scale of death here versus elsewhere.

I wonder if this was what the Vietnam era was like for those who didn't enlist/ get drafted.

as is, i know a fair share of ppl who have been abroad in iraq of who have family who have.

I have no idea what this means, but I've been a different "Dee" before but had to change it when my password got screwed up and it said my ID was already taken.

That is a retarded column published by an institution in dire need of attention.

An odd statement, considering that one of the first and most obnoxious overreactions was to declare 'history' (particularly history of Afghanistan invasions!) obsolete.

1) Article is kinda dumb
2) 9/11 response in Afghanistan = inappropriate/ineffective
3) 9/11 response in Iraq = inappropriate/ineffective
4) Iraq war = botched + lies

Yes, though 2 is at least arguable

Of all the achievements of modern civilisation, maybe the most important has been the conceptual separation between war and peace. Day-to-day, killing an outsider is murder, just the same as killing one of your own (not always the case, and see e.g. Rwanda for what lies in store when you lose sight of it). War is a totally different animal. We're not going to get rid of war - but we have at least managed to understand that different rules apply there.

Maybe the most evil thing in islamism is the idea that the division doesn't exist - or, to put it another way, the idea that they are in a state of perpetual war against the west/america/the spanish conquest/jews/apostates/[insert pet hatred here]. The number of people who've acted on it may seem small if you take WWII as your benchmark, but the idea has spread widely. Hence the commonly-expressed view here that "it is wrong to kill muslims". It's intended as a moderate statement, but it reveals that the speaker has taken the islamists' idea as a valid one.

The original post on this thread makes the same mistake. The comparison it should have made really is with Dar-Es-Salaam or Oklahoma, or even Columbine. Not the Soviet Union 1941-45. That's why 9/11 really was that bad. Whether military action was necessary afterwards is a whole different question. We saw a threat from an organised body/threat/movement and went into war mode. It's the only one we've got - it just looks a bit silly when it's against an abstract noun. But see the problem? Call it what it really is ("the war on islamism") and people who don't want to see the difference between islamism and islam have a field day. And the islamists' idea entrenches itself that bit further.

Recognise what the idea is doing, and why it's worth fighting against. You can project your own feelings onto whomever you like, and feel perfectly justified in killing them. You see 'three thousand people sitting in an office block, tapping on computers', I see 'guilty crusaders who deserve to die'. Add guilty relativism into the mix and it looks like 'potato'/'potato'. It ain't right though.

So, so moving.