Via Attywood I discovered a rather ridiculous column in the Philadelphia Daily news by one Stu Bykofsky: To save America, we need another 9/11

ONE MONTH from The Anniversary, I’m thinking another 9/11 would help America.

What kind of a sick bastard would write such a thing?

A bastard so sick of how splintered we are politically - thanks mainly to our ineptitude in Iraq - that we have forgotten who the enemy is.

It is not Bush and it is not Hillary and it is not Daily Kos or Bill O’Reilly or Giuliani or Barack. It is global terrorists who use Islam to justify their hideous sins, including blowing up women and children.

Iraq has fractured the U.S. into jigsaw pieces of competing interests that encourage our enemies. We are deeply divided and division is weakness.

If I may say, it is unclear to me that America needs “saving” per se–despite a lengthy list of problems, we are doing just fine, thanks. And while the public debate is often rancorous, the degree to which there are deep divisions that we must be saved from is rather dubious. Witness the FISA debate in Congress last week–despite a great deal of rhetoric over the issue, it didn’t exactly lead to a constitutional showdown.

Beyond that, I would note that a good bit of the damage/splintering of late that we have suffered, whether we are talking about debates over the powers of the president, domestic surveillance or the Iraq policy, flowed directly out of responses to 9/11. As such, it is not so clear to me that another massive terrorist attack would do us a lot of good, and indeed would liken deepen many of our current divisions. Sure, we would be more unified for a moment in time, but those moments fade.

Indeed, from the beginning I have found these arguments about how we lost something after 9/11 that we should seek to regain in terms of unity (whether it be internally or with other states) has always been based on sentimentality rather than reality. For example, many have argued that we had the world on our side after 9/11, usually followed by a reference to the Le Monde headline that stated “Today We are All new Yorkers” and so forth. Of course everyone came to our defense and was sympathetic towards us, we had just been attacked without provocation. It was hardly a surprise that there was a groundswell of support, much of which was based on emotion. But emotions are transitory. To expect that sentiment to persist was foolish. And yes, we had national unity after the attacks, but that is what happens to families where other members are attacked, or when there is a death. Families come together and rally around one another. However, once the immediate threat is gone, or once the death has been mourned, families go back to remembering why the other members of the family annoy them so much, and the internal fighting resumes. If you have ever been to a wake for a family member, you will know what I am talking about. Everyone is sad that Grandma has passed on, and in a shared moment of grief you feel closer to that cousin, aunt or brother who normally drives you nuts. That feeling does not persist–and nor should we expect it to.

I have heard numerous pastors and religious figures mourn the fact that right after 9/11 there was a swell in church attendance that subsided. Hardly a shock: people react to a crisis, and then as the effects of the crisis wane, they move on.

Anyone who gives this any thought should recognize that it was totally natural and normal for the post-9/11 unity to fade and they should further recognize that the same thing will happen again if there is another attack.

Going beyond the 9/11 business, the following a line of “reasoning” that I keep hearing from time to time that I think is largely nonsense and misdiagnoses public sentiment towards the situation in Iraq:

Americans have turned their backs because the war has dragged on too long and we don’t have the patience for a long slog. We’ve been in Iraq for four years, but to some it seems like a century. In contrast, Britain just pulled its soldiers out of Northern Ireland where they had been, often being shot at, almost 40 years.

The issue in Iraq is not the length of the engagement, it is the fact that it hasn’t been very successful and the prospects for success remain rather dim. If we were taking years to root out an entrenched WMD program whilst rousting the terrorist cells that Saddam had harbored/trained in the midst of successful policies to build the physical and governmental infrastructure (or, really, any one of the three) then I suspect that there would be far more patience. The problem is that there is a perception, grounded in reality, that we are fighting int he middle of a country that doesn’t know how it wants to define itself against terrorists who are fighting primarily because we are there and, oh yeah, there are no (and never were) any WMD to speak of. As such, the vast majority of the American population looks at the policy and wonders why we are wasting the lives and limbs of US soldiers, not to mention billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars. Further, they look at this situation in the context of rosy scenarios being oferred by persons whose previous rosy scenarios (i.e., soldiers greeted with flowers and oil revenues that would fund the reconstruction) didn’t exactly pan out.

As such, we are not looking here at a situation in which American simply are unwilling to hang in a necessary fight. Rather, we are looking at a situation in which objective reasons for optimism are few and it is unclear what “victory” would even look like in Iraq in any realistic sense. And, I would note, the word “realistic” is especially key in that sentence. Conjuring unrealistic definitions of “victory” is quite easy, but then again I’d like a sportscar and a giant raise (so long as we are wishing…).

Bykofsky also goes on to talk quite a bit about remembering who the enemy is. I don’t think anyone has forgotten who al Qaeda is, and what they did. The question, however, that we really haven’t addressed, is exactly how severe a threat that they are. The degree to which they should be treated as a existential threat to the US in the same way the nuclear missiles of the USSR were treated is a dubious proposition, I would argue, but that seems to be what Byofsky thinks.

He makes this rather odd claim

:

Is there any doubt they are planning to hit us again?

If it is to be, then let it be. It will take another attack on the homeland to quell the chattering of chipmunks and to restore America’s righteous rage and singular purpose to prevail.

Since when, even immediately after 9/11, did we have a “singular purpose”? I am not sure we had one of those during the Cold War. Perhaps we did in WWII, but that is an especially poor analog to the current situation. If anything, I would submit that rage, righteous or otherwise, is a terrible state in which to make public policy of any kind, and most especially the kind where the coercive powers of the state are involved.

Sphere: Related Content