One morning, I got out of bed, turned on my computer, and my Netscape email client automatically downloaded that day’s news pane. On that particular day, the news was that two hijacked planes had been flown into the World Trade Center.
These were my first three thoughts, in order:
I guess I really am living in the Future.
Thank goodness it wasn’t nuclear.
and then
The overreaction to this will be ten times worse than the original event.
A mere factor of “ten times worse” turned out to be a vast understatement. Even I didn’t guess how badly things would go. That’s the challenge of pessimism; it’s really hard to aim low enough that you’re pleasantly surprised around as often and as much as you’re unpleasantly surprised.
Nonetheless, I did realize immediately that everyone everywhere would be saying how awful, how terrible this event was; and that no one would dare to be the voice of restraint, of proportionate response. Initially, on 9/11, it was thought that six thousand people had died. Any politician who had said, “6,000 deaths is 1/8 the annual US casualties from automobile accidents,” would have been asked to resign the same hour.
No, 9/11 wasn’t a good day. But if everyone gets brownie points for emphasizing how much it hurts, and no one dares urge restraint in how hard to hit back, then the reaction will be greater than the appropriate level, whatever the appropriate level may be.
This is the even darker mirror of the happy death spiral—the spiral of hate. Anyone who attacks the Enemy is a patriot; and whoever tries to dissect even a single negative claim about the Enemy is a traitor. But just as the vast majority of all complex statements are untrue, the vast majority of negative things you can say about anyone, even the worst person in the world, are untrue.
I think the best illustration was “the suicide hijackers were cowards.” Some common sense, please? It takes a little courage to voluntarily fly your plane into a building. Of all their sins, cowardice was not on the list. But I guess anything bad you say about a terrorist, no matter how silly, must be true. Would I get even more brownie points if I accused al-Qaeda of having assassinated John F. Kennedy? Maybe if I accused them of being Stalinists? Really, cowardice?
Yes, it matters that the 9/11 hijackers weren’t cowards. Not just for understanding the enemy’s realistic psychology. There is simply too much damage done by spirals of hate. It is just too dangerous for there to be any target in the world, whether it be the Jews or Adolf Hitler, about whom saying negative things trumps saying accurate things.
When the defense force contains thousands of aircraft and hundreds of thousands of heavily armed soldiers, one ought to consider that the immune system itself is capable of wreaking more damage than nineteen guys and four nonmilitary airplanes. The US spent billions of dollars and thousands of soldiers’ lives shooting off its own foot more effectively than any terrorist group could dream.
If the USA had completely ignored the 9/11 attack—just shrugged and rebuilt the building—it would have been better than the real course of history. But that wasn’t a political option. Even if anyone privately guessed that the immune response would be more damaging than the disease, American politicians had no career-preserving choice but to walk straight into al-Qaeda’s trap. Whoever argues for a greater response is a patriot. Whoever dissects a patriotic claim is a traitor.
Initially, there were smarter responses to 9/11 than I had guessed. I saw a Congressperson—I forget who—say in front of the cameras, “We have forgotten that the first purpose of government is not the economy, it is not health care, it is defending the country from attack.” That widened my eyes, that a politician could say something that wasn’t an applause light. The emotional shock must have been very great for a Congressperson to say something that . . . real.
But within two days, the genuine shock faded, and concern-for-image regained total control of the political discourse. Then the spiral of escalation took over completely. Once restraint becomes unspeakable, no matter where the discourse starts out, the level of fury and folly can only rise with time.
Well its more or less an empirical question isn't it? On the one hand maybe 9/11 was a fluke - in that case the best option would be to just rebuild and carry on, like Eliezer says. But maybe it wasn't - maybe the people behind it were/are both willing and capable to successfully launch more attacks. In that case it seems to make sense to wager, or at least consider wagering, some amount of lives to prevent greater losses in the future. It all depends on the information available: what are the resources/intents of your enemy? Would it be at all possible to eliminate them, and is the cost of such a possibility less than the cost of (reasonably predictable) future attacks? Skimming through blogs and newssites you can get hundreds of different answers to these questions - the problem is that theres no metric available with which they can be evaluated.
And heres the real kicker. Imagine you had perfect knowledge of 'terrorist' activities, and could formulate a prediction of how many future casualties would be sustained if these organizations were to be left alone. Pretend you come up with a figure of, say, roughly 10,000 dead over the next 20 years. Furthermore, you know (with omniscient precision) that you can eliminate the threat at the cost of a minimum 20,000 foreign lives (with minimal losses to your own side in the process). Such a scenario seems to reveal an insurmountable problem with running a nation state: reason seems to dictate that you suck up the losses on your own side (on the assumption that a life is a life and as many should be preserved as possible) but the workings of politics almost certainly dictate that you make the 'sacrifice' of at least double the amount of nondomestic lives.
So when I said that no metric is available to asses a given strategy, I meant that it cannot exist at all, period. There are fundamental differences in how people assign value to the lives of strangers - some Americans would sacrifice 100 Iraqis for one of their own (or even just the possibility of losing one of their own); others would sacrifice 0.
As long as you have nation-states you are going to have this dilemma, since the nature of war dictates that you occasionally must annihilate scores of foreigners to preserve your own sovereignty.
The most frustrating thing about our war is that it is (as far as I know) impossible for the layman to determine if the cost is worth the effort. Is there any definitive (minimally biased) source that we can go to and look up, say, the military strength of al-qaeda, in number and resources, and in both pre and post 9/11 eras? Not that I know of. We (yes, myself included) all seem to have the intuition that damage inflicted by ourstruly surpasses all potential damage that al qaeda could render. But who can really demonstrate that for sure? Are we just playing to the bouquet of biases against the unobservable? None of these questions are meant to be rhetorical, btw.