On Sun, 4 Nov 2001, Nathan Newman wrote:
> Or an even more on target comparison of relative precautions taken or
> not taken, more people will die in preventable accidents on the drive
> to the airport than from terrorism in air travel.
Well, actually, now that you mention it, I think people's fear of airborne travel is the one fear the left should capitalize on before it poo-poos it. I think when people ask What is to be Done? we should answer: make air travel perfectly safe. It's something that can be completely accomplished. We know how to do it. It just costs money and inconvenience. And interestingly, it's the one thing this administration seems to be against. While they wage a war across the world to distract us the air is no safer than it was before. And it could be.
Following much of what Gar said, I think the left should argue that this isn't a sudden change in the universe, us being the target of Islamic terrorists. Rather it's a sudden spike in a war that's been going on for 10 years. For 10 years, ever since the Meir Kahane assasination in Brookyn in 1991, the same related network of terrorists who committed 9/11 have been making attacks on US soil and US installations. Sometimes they succeed and kills 10s, like the first world trade center bombing, the Khobar towers, the Cole. And other times they get caught and their nefarious plots come to naught, like the plan of Sheik Omar to blow up the WTC, the George Washington Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, the White House etc. Or Ramzi Yousef's plan to bomb a dozen different planes over a 5 day period flying from the West Coast to Asia. They both got caught before anything happened and were put away for life.
What happened on 9/11 was that they hit upon what is in retrospect the huge fatal link: planes as missiles. It was horrible. But there are two main lessons to be drawn from it. (1) Close that door, so it can never happen again; and (2) realize that except for that lapse, we've been pretty much winning the war on terrorism without half trying. The incidents I've mentioned were terrible for the people affected. But for the nation, they barely registered on our collective radar. They made the news and then were forgotten. And for good reason: because as a nation, they didn't affect us much. And while 9/11 was a big jump in destructiveness, it did not evidence a huge jump in our opponents' resources. It was rather an amazing leveraging of same limited resources they've been displaying all along -- limited compared to what the US has to offer in defense. So *if we close that one fatal door* then there's every reason to think we'll be in pretty good shape. If we've been able to smother these guys so well for 10 years without half trying, we have good grounds for confidence that we'll do even better going forward if we make a serious effort. When people say "Well, that's some lapse" the answer is: Yes, but it's no accident: that's something that couldn't be fixed without getting serious.
And at that point we've switched the discourse from justice to harm prevention, and to the Administration's weakest point: that they don't really care about keeping people safe. That they are actually against it. That they'd rather spend billions of dollars waving their plonkers on the other end of the globe like the neadrathals they are. That they don't want to spend money and effort doing what we know works. Instead they want to spend even more money doing something they have no idea whether it works -- all they can tell us for sure is that no one's ever fought a war like this before, which means no one's ever won one. And on the surface it sure looks like all it's doing so far is creating exactly the kind of social unrest that is the natural fermenting pit for Death to the US ideology. In which case the poor people there are dying in more than vain. They are being made human sacrifices to anger, just like the people in the towers.
I think we should emphasize both that airplanes are the only means these people have ever shown for killing more than 10s of people at a time. (As Gar has argued, if they could had any WMD, they woulda used them, and it will get harder from now on, not easier, for them to get them.) And that it is an avenue that can be completely closed off, if we want to spend the money and effort -- El Al being Exhibit A that zero incidence is possible no matter how high the threat.
(Of course, people might argue they didn't want to arrive three hours early every time they took a plane. But then they have already entered the game of trade-off and acceptable risk. And you can point out that the planes as missiles part is actually the easy part to stop -- the 3 hours is to deal with everything else.)
And that once air travel has been made as safe as we want it to be, which can be done within months if people demand it, being killed by a terrorist will return to being rarer than being hit by lightening. Traumatic for the people it happens to. But not something for the rest of us to lose sleep over.
And then we can protest this awful war and campaign for a juster world in peace.
Michael __________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com