Among the many eye rolling questions of this election season, the one that may make my eyes roll most is… are we safer? Well, unless you believe in a parallel universe, the only honest answer is… who knows? But the more important point is that the question is specious because it is not a serious one, nor is it seriously asked. Its only objective is to embarrass its recipient, not to find the truth, because the truth in this case is unknowable. True safety from terror will take decades. Most of us know that, but many of us don’t want to face it. Yet only by facing safety’s extraordinary difficulty is there any help of achieving it.
That is why I find the people who ask that question dangerous or at the least highly disturbing. They are either deceiving others or deceiving themselves or both. Some of them are impatient that the situation hasn’t been resolved in eighteen months, that there have been numerous ups and downs. Well, I have news for them – the situation wasn’t resolved in eighteen months and it is most likely not going to be resolved in eighteen years either. If they think the ups and downs we have seen in the last eighteen months are troublesome, that misjudgments were made, wait until they see some real ones. We are dealing with a mindset that blew up a railroad station in Madrid a few months ago and referred in their statements to the Reconquista of 1492. Eighteen months? Eighteen years? How about six centuries?
Naturally, this is anxiety producing in the extreme and we all want to go back to “business as usual.” Desperately. Some of us will run around pretending, or rather hoping, that the situation is only a “nuisance” – or could be. If only. This is gut check time in all our lives, even if we are not on the front lines. We have to be honest with our friends and relatives and, more treacherously, more complicatedly, we have to be honest with ourselves. Traditional ways of viewing things no longer hold. But human nature is conservative. Hardly anyone likes change – even the most “revolutionary” of us, sometimes they most especially. So we should not be surprised when we see some of our heroes of the last few years retreat into positions they held before September 11. Many already have. This will happen again and again and again.
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22 Comments
1. Bruce W.:Roger: FYI, something is wrong with your quote marks and apostrophes…perhaps it will affect this too so I will try not to use any. And I do so love contractions.
I have always believed that the hardest part of this WoT (or more, correctly, this War on Islanimals) for the political leadership of this and other freedom loving/supporting countries is the lack of patience of their respective electorates.
Oct 12, 2004 - 8:23 am 2. Morgan:Roger, I agree wholeheartedly. First, the question “are we safer now than we were x years ago?” is the wrong question to ask. The correct form is “Are we safer now than we would have been given some other set of decisions in the intervening years?” Fail to specify that set and you haven’t asked a reasonable question. But even then your query would be specious. It implies that the short-term consequences of an action are a good indicator of its long-term consequences. It’s a distinctly linear view of cause and effect, and not well suited to acting in the real world.
Anyone who believes that the path to a more peaceful, safer world necessarily means a linear path through ever-increasing levels of peace and safety lacks any grasp of the nature of complexity – and the world
Oct 12, 2004 - 8:31 am 3. Terrye:I am afraid this will be protracted like the cold war. However, since it does not entail a country like the Soviet Union so much as a fascist and fanatical philosophy that makes it more difficult for people to see it as real.
Speaking of real, does anyone think that perhaps the price of oil is being used as a weapon against the administration in this war?
Oct 12, 2004 - 8:33 am 4. Roberts:I’m a big history buff and my wife, after more than 20 years of me, tends to roll her eyes a lot when the subject drifts to historical events. So she probably was only half listening all the many times I referred to the Spanish Reconquista, Andalusia, and OBL’s obsession with “Christian / Islam” conflict over millenia. Until she recently got interested in Spain and picked up a history book that described the events I’d referred to.
She is all the more convinced that this election is about whether or not a completely ignorant, vain and dangerous man will be elected President or if the President is reelected.
Oct 12, 2004 - 8:34 am 5. Brian O'Connell:I think this is an apt comparison: Were Americans safer in 1944 than they were before Pearl Harbor in 1941? Certainly more Americans were being killed in 1944. Does this mean that WWII could be called a failure in 1944? No.
When you finally begin to engage the enemy, you’re going to suffer more casualties short-term than if you hadn’t, with the hope that you’ll be much better of long-term. In the short term, the enemy’s going to fight back of course. Long term, we anticipate their defeat.
Behind questions like “Is there more or less terrorism now?” and “Are we more or less safe now that Saddam is gone?” is the assumption that the war can only be considered to be going well if there’s a constant decrease in terrorism or increase in “safety”. But victory may not be possible via a linear route. It may be that the only or best path to victory is over that statistical hump.
I blame the media for asking such simplistic questions and the politicians for supplying answers everybody wants to hear. If a politician were to give a more reasoned answer, the press and the opposition would call “Gotcha! – we’re less safe!” This happened with Dean on Saddam, and with Bush a few weeks back. Unfortunatley, at the candidate level, there can’t be any real discussion of these matters.
Oct 12, 2004 - 8:38 am 6. Fausta:Excellent post, Roger.
I also feel the need to ask, who wants to be “safer”? Safety is a nice warm feeling, just as “peace” is, just as sleep is, yes, but should we even want to be “safe”?
We all felt safe in the 1990s, in spite of the many signs that we ignored along the way. Were we right to feel “safe” then? There was “peace” then, or was it that we just didn’t wake up until 2001? Bin Landen, in one of his videos after Sept. 11 2001 talked about Spain and wanting to return it to the Caliphate.
Safe are the dead in their graves.
Oct 12, 2004 - 8:51 am 7. Dulce:All of which is precisely WHY we so desperately need a President with a long historical view, who is capable of some structural, as opposed to incidental and purely pragmatic, reasoning. History has taken one of its categorical turns and things will never again resort to “business as usual” in its former sense. Kerry seems utterly incapable of understanding this shift.
And a little off the topic–I’m bewildered by the tendency of American Jews to support Kerry. Yeah, I know all about the historical roots of Jewish liberalism, etc., and I was raised in a liberal Jewish environment myself. But you’d think that it would behoove Jews of all people to adopt the long view. And especially now, when the religious/power nexus of the world is in flux once again.
Oct 12, 2004 - 8:57 am 8. bdog57:This question reminds me of the question posed by Michael Moore in his interview with Bill O’Reilly; it was something to the effect of “would you sacrifice your child for Fallujah?”. Not a real question, precisely because Bill wouldn’t be the one making it. It would be his child’s decision to volunteer for the military, knowing full well the risks that can be faced by a member of the Armed Forces. Really wish O’Reilly would have busted him on this one.
The same type of question was posed to Cheney in the Vice-Presidential debate: “How will you set out, Mr. Vice President, in a way that you weren’t able to in these past four years, to bridge that divide?” The fundamental premise -that the partisan divide wasn’t bridged and it is the fault of the Presidency- is subjective. Again, I wish that Cheney would have said so, but he’s too polite for that (despite his “attack dog” persona).
Maybe I haven’t always been paying attention, but these “gotcha” questions seem to be more prevalent nowadays. Even the 2nd Presidential debate had a couple of them -I actually think that Kerry got the worst ones (the “no new taxes” pledge question and the abortion question seemed to be a little unfair…maybe that’s just me, though). Of course, maybe Bush just handled his hardballs a little better (he knocked the “respected in the world” question out of the park).
Whatever. I can’t stand these types of questions, but I refuse to stop reading the news and watching TV. I’m my own worst enemy on this one.
Oct 12, 2004 - 9:12 am 9. bdog57:Zell Miller sums up the mindset behind these questions in an article in the Washington Times today.
Oct 12, 2004 - 9:15 am 10. jerry:ChamberlainÃs decision to go to war in September 1939 made Britain less safe in September 1940 then it was in August 1939. Does that mean than Chamberlain was wrong to take Britain to war? The logic of the safety argument says Chamberlain should have continued to appease Hitler in the hope that either (a) Hitler becomes satisfied or (b) some internal process removed Herr Hitler. The decision to go war means accepting that you will be less safe today then you were yesterday in the hope that tomorrow will be safer then the day before yesterday. Kerry, despite his polish doesn’t get it. It is probably because Kerry considered himself pretty safe in the pre-9/11 world.
I once posed the question to Hollywood [where has he/she gone?] about how much terrorism would be acceptable. A 9-11 every couple of years; A Madrid once a year; a bus bombing every 6 months; or a MacDonald’s once a month. Hollywood dismissed the question as irrelevant. Now we have Kerry explicitly expounding this approach. The question is what is Kerry’s nuisance level? Given his desire to return to the normalcy of September 10, I suspect that he is quite willing to accept several hundred Americans killed each year in the United States as just a necessary price of peace.
Oct 12, 2004 - 9:34 am 11. Brian O'Connell:The worst example of Gotcha!-fishing by the press I’ve ever seen was the last Bush news conference a few months back. Nearly every question, as I remember it, was an expedition. “Have you ever made any mistakes- if so name them” and “Are we safer now?” and “Will you apologize to the American people allowing 9/11 to happen?” You know that the answer is just fodder for a big front page “Gotcha!”
The Dems and the press (but I repeat myself) are rationalizing these stupid questions by claiming that we need a president who can admit his mistakes and learn from them. Certainly true, but that’s got nothing to do with their asking. Instead of asking questions that might elicit useful information, they ask questions that will fuel the next controversy, thus increasing circulation and ratings. Everyone’s a two-bit Woodward and Bernstein.
Unfortunately, as far as Gotcha! politics goes, the blogosphere actually makes the problem worse.
Oct 12, 2004 - 10:12 am 12. scaramouoche:To all those unthinking enough to be asking the silly question about safety, I would turn it around: Will we be safer with a President who sees terrorism as “a nuisuance” (like athlete’s foot?) and who asserts that terrorism has “acceptable levels”?
Acceptable to whom?
Oct 12, 2004 - 10:27 am 13. Dilys:I was going to post the next paragraphs to the link to Carol Gould’s essay, but it may be as pertinent here, especially in response to Dulce’s bewilderment about Jewish voters for Kerry.
One, Kerry panders to fear and denial on the part of anyone, Jewish or otherwise, who cannot face the terrorist threat, and wishes it would all just go away.
Further, visualize the map on which many Kerry voters emotionally draw the boundaries regarding who is With Us and who is Against Us.
That is, some of Gould’s expatriate outrage is likely based on the media-identified American liberal’s implicit assumption that the foreign intelligentsia will hail them as kin, comes the revolution, and then they will all be jolly and vindicated together whilst the Philistine Know-nothing Lumpen Flyover Redneck Petit Bourgeois Have-a-good-day Other Americans Get Theirs.
Welcome home, Carol.
Oct 12, 2004 - 10:38 am 14. Ray:WE WILL BE SAFER WHEN THE DEMOCRATS ARE ELECTED.
WHY? SENATOR EDWARDS, IN THE FIRST OCTOBER SURPRISE, HAS INFORMED US THAT IF THE DEMOCRATS ARE ELECTED, CHRISTOPHER REEVES WILL RISE UP, PUT ON HIS SUPERMAN SUIT AND PROTECT US ALL.
Oct 12, 2004 - 10:47 am 15. scaramouoche:For all Jewish Americans who are planning to vote for John Kerry, I dedicate the following (posted in my blog today). I call it A Query for Kerry:
When they murdered Israeli athletes in Munich, was that “an acceptable level of terrorism”?
When they interrupted revelers in Netanya with a suicide bomb for the bar mitzvah boy, was that “an acceptable level of terrorism”?
When they strafed bullets through the backs of escaping schoolchildren in Beslan, children who had been raped and tormented for days, was that “an acceptable level of terrorism”?
When they turned a Bali nightclub into a charnel house, was that “an acceptable level of terrorism”?
When they sawed the heads off Daniel Pearl and Nicholas Berg and Ivaylo Kepov and Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley and Kenneth Bigley and, and, and, and, was that “an acceptable level of terrorism”?
When they lobbed a bomb at the USS Cole, was that “an acceptable level of terrorism”?
When they destroyed a Jewish community centre, killing dozens in Buenos Aires, was that “an acceptable level of terrorism”?
When they blew up a synagogue in Istanbul while worshippers were at prayer, was that “an acceptable level of terrorism”?
When they bombed a subway in Moscow and a commuter train in Madrid, was that “an acceptable level of terrorism”?
When they flattened a hotel full of holidayers in the Sinai, was that “an acceptable level of terrorism”?
When they commandeered the airplanes that obliterated the World Trade Centre and thousands of innocents, was that “an acceptable level of terrorism”?
When they aimed two of those airplanes at the very symbols of American democracy, was that “an acceptable level of terrorism”?
They have taunted us, tricked us, threatened us, mocked us, manipulated us, schemed against us, sabotaged us, abused us, debased us, dehumanized us and slaughtered us.
They have turned back the clock to a time of darkness and savagery.
Tell me, Mr. Kerry, at what point does the level of terror become unacceptable?
When is it time to say, “basta: enough is enough”?
Half a million dead? A million? More?
What’s your bottom line, your tipping point, your “do not pass go”?
Tell me, Mr. Kerry, because I and millions of other potential terror victims are still dying to know.
Oct 12, 2004 - 11:08 am 16. Birkel:Things that are unknowable?
Roger, you’re starting to sound like Don Rumsfeld. Don’t be insulted, he’s one of my favorite administration officials.
Oh, and cute picture of your daughter and the typewriter yesterday. Truly priceless.
Oct 12, 2004 - 11:28 am 17. Dulce:Thank you, Scaramouche. Very well put.
And Dilys, I think you’re right about liberal arrogance. But Jews with any historical sense at all should know that when the chips are down, the only club we’ll ever be welcomed to with outstretched arms is our own.
Oct 12, 2004 - 1:58 pm 18. Lonewacko:When the SLA blew up an LAPD in 1968, was that “an acceptable level of terrorism”?
No terrorism is acceptable, and there never will be an acceptable level of terrorism. We must fight with all our military might until all terrorism has been erased from the Earth.
Anyhoo:
Brent Scowcroft, who was Bush I’s National Security Advisor, said something very similar a couple years ago. He even used the word “nuisance” just like Kerry.
And, whatever the status of “are we safer,” the related question “could we be safer here in the homeland” is certainly “yes.” Kerry has pointed out many of the ways that Bush is not keeping the homeland secure. And, of course, there’s the small matter of three million illegal aliens who’ll stream over our borders this year. I doubt whether the Bush administration will guarantee that none of them are terrorists.
Oct 12, 2004 - 2:44 pm 19. Terrye:Lonewacko:
And Kerry could?
Oct 12, 2004 - 4:25 pm 20. exguru:Re: “Are we safer… who knows?”
A whole lot of Americans think we are safer, by the looks of our airports. They were ghost towns for months after 9-11, but now have returned to the status quo ante. If you ask the flight crews, however, they will tell you passengers are today watching each other and reporting suspicious people like crazy. This may be the most important of all post 9-11 security changes. But how fragile is it? Can one or two more terrorist hijackings end the current serenity? …who knows?
Oct 12, 2004 - 7:04 pm 21. David Gillies:Roger raises an interesting point about the timeframe of this conflict. Several commentators have styled this conflict ‘World War IV’ (the Cold War being number three). It’s a useful tag, but I don’t think it goes far enough. I think what we’re fighting is World War Zero, the ur-World War. We’ve been fighting it for the best part of 1,500 years. The Islamic Crusaders were driven from Spain in 1492, to be sure, but the truly epochal battle in the struggle against Mohammedan expansionism was 760 years previously: Tours, October 10th, 732 AD. Creasey said it was one of those battles that shaped the world; Gibbon said that but for Tours the dreaming spires of Oxford would have been supplanted by minarets.
Of course we’ve all been regaled with stories of the glorious pinnacle of enlightened civilisation that was the Caliphate, resplendent while Europeans lived in squalor and barbarity. But the fall of the Abassid Caliphate was really the high-water mark in Islamic civilisation, and no matter how bejewelled it may look from 900 years’ distance, we can be sure that it was a far cry from what any of us, even the most blinkered po-mo afficionado, would recognise as civilised. But as a prelapsarian Eden is it seen by the Jihadists, and they want it back.
If ever there’s a unifying factor in nations or groups waging senseless war on their neighbours it’s this snivelling cultural inferiority complex. The ‘root causes’ of Islamic terror delve a lot deeper than the glib shibboleths of the Not In Our Name crowd can acknowledge. Grubbing them out is going to take a lot more than pious talk and wishful thinking.
Oct 12, 2004 - 10:57 pm 22. Tom Grey:David, I read your interesting comment while keeping another thought in mind.
We are in a Human Rights war — and THIS war can end when we have a World Without Dictators.
My post of about a year ago includes:
http://tomgrey.motime.com/1068850240#172420
“Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe.” This sentence, spoken last week by George W. Bush, is about the most jaw-dropping repudiation of an established bipartisan policy ever made by a US president.
Today in WaPo there is An Opening for Arab Democrats
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23012-2004Oct10.html
Oct 13, 2004 - 8:05 am