I decided to chime on on
paulp's blog. Some people made the point I was going for a lot better than I did. But I did like my analogy.
The entire thread.
His post and some responses: the unanswerable questionExcerpt from
Live and Let SpyWhich brings me to this week's scandal about No Such Agency spying on "Americans." I have difficulty ginning up much interest in this story inasmuch as I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East, and sending liberals to Guantanamo.But if we must engage in a national debate on half-measures: After 9/11, any president who was not spying on people calling phone numbers associated with terrorists should be impeached for being an inept commander in chief.With a huge gaping hole in lower Manhattan, I'm not sure why we have to keep reminding people, but we are at war. (Perhaps it's because of the media blackout on images of the 9/11 attack. We're not allowed to see those because seeing planes plowing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon might make us feel angry and jingoistic.)Among the things that war entails are: killing people (sometimes innocent), destroying buildings (sometimes innocent) and spying on people (sometimes innocent).That is why war is a bad thing. But once a war starts, it is going to be finished one way or another, and I have a preference for it coming out one way rather than the other.In previous wars, the country has done far worse than monitor telephone calls placed to jihad headquarters. FDR rounded up Japanese — many of them loyal American citizens — and threw them in internment camps.So "we are at war." The war to which she refers is not the war in iraq, it is the "war on terrorism." We are at war with terrorists, and apparently all manner of once unacceptable measures are necessary to win this war.
My question is this: how will we know when this war is over? This question cannot be answered with any kind of generalities. I want to hear an extremely specific list of criteria for when this war will be over and I can go back to complaining about the government spying on US citizens without any oversight without my being considered a terrorist sympathizer for so doing. If these measures are temporary, if we are making allowances so as to win a struggle that has an end to it, if we are only taking the low road long enough to get back on the high road: well, such claims cannot honestly be made unless the end of the war is well-defined with testable criteria.
So does anyone know how we will know when the war on terrorism is over? I am also curious about the war on poverty and the war on christmas. Oddly the war on drugs could be won in a single day with the stroke of a pen, but it is a mighty heavy pen.
Of course, this is assuming I'm talking to people from the world of the normal. In the Democrats' world, there are two more options. Violate no one's civil liberties and get used to a lot more 9/11s, or the modified third option, preferred by Sen. John D. Rockefeller: Let the president do all the work and take all the heat for preventing another terrorist attack while you place a letter expressing your objections in a file cabinet as a small parchment tribute to your exquisite conscience."If you're not with us you're against us."
Remember that scene in The Last of the Mohicans where Magua turns on the British troops while he's escorting them through the woods? A bunch of Native Americans jump out from behind the trees to ambush the British, and the British soldiers respond by lining up in their rows and firing on command.
Of course, while we're watching that we can see how ridiculous it is that they'd think that was the best response to the attack. Yeah, group all of you together in your bright red coats so they can aim at you easier. Then fire all at once on command so they'll know exactly when to duck for cover. It was painfully obvious that the British military was built for a different kind of fight.
Is it appropriate to spy on American citizens? Should our military torture people? Does this war have an end? Should we even be calling it a war?
Those are all important questions, and people seem to answer based on their party affiliations. But we don't have real answers to them yet because we've never dealt with anything like 9/11 before.
War was always against a well-defined enemy who lived in a specific geographic area and wore the same colors. Most Americans understood that there was a general code of what was acceptable in war. Just like the British had a different code of conduct for war. But that code was made for a different era, and while we debate the details we're risking lives.
9/11 was an unprecedented attack that revealed a different kind of enemy who fight by different rules. I don't know what the right response is. But I don't fault our leadership for taking unprecedented action in response to an unprecedented threat, even if some of it offends people. Hopefully as we continue to deal with this, we'll come to a better understanding and start to figure out some good answers to those questions. Ideally we'll be able to maintain all the liberties we've valued. But maybe some of those liberties are bright red coats that make us easier to hit, and we'll have to switch to camouflage.
9/11 was an unprecedented attack that revealed a different kind of enemy who fight by different rules.
9/11 wasn't even remotely unprecedented. Asymmetric warfare has existed for an extraordinarily long time, and is a common tactic when your enemy has greater military might.
This idea that 9/11 is vastly different than Oklahoma City, the Second Boer War, the Revolutionary War, or Hannibal's attacks on Rome is flawed at best. In every one of these cases a weaker force used unconventional tactics to gain an advantage that was considered "unfair" by the stronger force.
You are right.
But I'm sure you know that I mean the attack resulted in an unprecedented loss of life on American soil. Even if "unprecedented" is somehow the wrong word in that context, the point is that we hadn't seen anything like that, and many of us probably believed nothing like it would happen here.
And I agree that we should look to history, hence my goofy analogy.
I can think of numerous battles, fought on American soil, which resulted in more death than 9/11. The World Wars mostly resulted in the death of Americans overseas, but I fail to see that as being significantly different either.
9/11 was dramatic and tragic, but even if it happened every year, you'd be more likely to die of:
influenza, cancer, heart disease, drowning, gravity (falling down), car accidents, poisoning, smoke inhalation, diabetes and a host of other "dangers" that we all willingly face every day.
The idea that this one relatively minor risk is somehow special, just because some crazy people did it on purpose is flawed. The idea that our best possible use of resources is to spend a few hundred billion dollars killing people in a faraway land is even more absurd.
"I can think of numerous battles, fought on American soil, which resulted in more death than 9/11."
Are there any that people alive now have seen? If there are, we've certainly forgotten them. Has any battle resulted in more loss of civilian life? I'm genuinely curious. I think I know the answer, but I'm far from certain.
"The idea that this one relatively minor risk is somehow special, just because some crazy people did it on purpose is flawed."
I disagree.
The 9/11 attack revealed in horrible fashion that there are crazy people out there who want to come to where we work and live and kill us. This IS a special case compared to your list of various natural and lifestyle-related killers. Car accidents don't hate us and want to kill us. We choose to get in cars, accepting the risks. We don't have to choose to let people keep attacking us, we can fight back. And they WILL keep attacking us if we don't stop them.
You compared the terrorist attacks to several historical wars that you sound like you know far more about than I do. I agree with those comparisons - we need to think of this as a war. The goal of war is destroying the enemy, and that is what the terrorists want to do - destroy us.
The reason I responded in the first place is beacause often people that ask the kinds of questions Paul asked ("when is the war over?") do so because they don't think this is a war. I don't know if that was Paul's point or not, but Paul's question does point out that if this is a war, it is a different kind of military war than we are used to, in that it is open-ended.
9/11 showed that they are more of a threat than we ever gave them credit for before it happened. And 9/11 showed some of us that terrorism isn't the "relatively minor risk" that you think it is. No, it didn't kill more people than cancer, but if they got some nukes or dirty bombs they could.
You are right that you can analyze this war in terms of optimal allocation of resources. If our equations are wrong and we're wrong to be at war, we lose hundreds of billions dollars and the lives of soldiers who chose to fight for their country. If we were wrong to avoid this war, we could lose millions of civilians in a WMD attack (and the resulting economic damage would be more worse than the war costs). I prefer the former gamble to the latter.
And by the way, I agree the way we overlook some of the other risks you mentioned is irresponsible. But just because someone smokes a cigarette while expressing concern about terror doesn't mean their terror concerns aren't valid. It means they'd rather die of lung cancer in 30 years than in a blown up building next week, and the weight of the probabilities doesn't compensate for the severity of the preference.
Anyway, I don't often tentacle on Paul's blog but I love reading it. I felt strongly enough about this one to respond, but I've chosen to quickly throw stuff together rather than taking the time and effort to present a tighter argument. But thanks for exchanging your thoughts with me.
To summarize the points I wanted to make:
1. A large-scale attack against civilians on American soil is enough for me to consider this a war.
2. Wars are drastic and ugly and expensive, but sometimes necessary. Whether any one is necessary can be debated, but debating in the middle of it can be dangerous.
3. This is a different kind of war than America is used to fighting, and that should force us to reconsider some things that we've always taken for granted (just like in many of the wars you mentioned, the stronger force should have/did reconsider things in the face of asymmetrical attacks.) Debating things like if we should be spying on citizens in the future is something we should do, but looking back on what has already happened we should give the President the benefit of the doubt because he was faced with a drastic situation that called for drastic action.
4. Debating these matters gets really tricky if we take sides based on the political game, something both sides do way too often.
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