Was 9/11 really that bad?

We all knew this day was coming. The sting and raw emotion of September 11th, 2001 would numb through the passing of the years. Eventually the fall of the Twin Towers would be nothing more than an event that backed up traffic in Manhattan for few days. The hatred from the left towards George W. Bush would grow to a level that has liberal questioning the very foundation that the whole war on Terrorism is founded on...the attacks of 9/11/. Leave it to the LA Times and writer David A. Bell for leading the way:

Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?

The people who attacked us in 2001 are indeed hate-filled fanatics who would like nothing better than to destroy this country. But desire is not the same thing as capacity, and although Islamist extremists can certainly do huge amounts of harm around the world, it is quite different to suggest that they can threaten the existence of the United States.

Yet a great many Americans, particularly on the right, have failed to make this distinction. For them, the "Islamo-fascist" enemy has inherited not just Adolf Hitler's implacable hatreds but his capacity to destroy.

But it is no disrespect to the victims of 9/11, or to the men and women of our armed forces, to say that, by the standards of past wars, the war against terrorism has so far inflicted a very small human cost on the United States. As an instance of mass murder, the attacks were unspeakable, but they still pale in comparison with any number of military assaults on civilian targets of the recent past, from Hiroshima on down.

In a recent book, for instance, political scientist John Mueller evaluated the threat that terrorists pose to the United States and convincingly concluded that it has been, to quote his title, "Overblown." But he undercut his own argument by adding that the United States has overreacted to every threat in its recent history, including even Pearl Harbor (rather than trying to defeat Japan, he argued, we should have tried containment!).

Yet as the comparison with the Soviet experience should remind us, the war against terrorism has not yet been much of a war at all, let alone a war to end all wars. It is a messy, difficult, long-term struggle against exceptionally dangerous criminals who actually like nothing better than being put on the same level of historical importance as Hitler — can you imagine a better recruiting tool? To fight them effectively, we need coolness, resolve and stamina. But we also need to overcome long habit and remind ourselves that not every enemy is in fact a threat to our existence.

Well there you have it, America overreacts. The fact that Bell includes someone's assessment that the American response to Pearl Harbor was wrong completely blows away any credibility I may have given the rest of the article.

And according to Bell the only thing we need to combat terrorism is "coolnees, resolve and stamina." What the fuck does that mean? Give the terrorists the Sears Towers filled with people?

Five years...five short years...

Forget all the other issues I disagree with Democrats and liberals on from abortion to taxes to minimum wage to socialized services, it's their aloofness to the threats facing this country that truly bothers me. Maybe to Bell 3,000 deaths isn't a lot, but it demands context.