Zakaria Says The Unsayable

By Steve Hynd

Oh, the right wing of Blogtopia is piiiissseeeddd. Fareed Zakaria, in what James Joyner rightly says is a "linkbaiting column", writes that "It's clear we over-reacted to 9/11".

Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden�s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda�s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.

I do not minimize Al Qaeda�s intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities.

Joyner's post is the most thoughtful right-of-center response you'll read today. But despite the hyperventilating from those further right than James, Zakaria is correct. Yet he's touched the Third rail of US national security debate.

It should be pointed out that a "major attack on high-value targets" does not include Madrid 2004 or London 2005 despite the terrible loss of life in those attacks. They simply didn't create enough of an economic shock or enough awe at the choice of target in the way 9/11 did. It would, however, include the IRA bombings of the City of London in 1993 and 1994. Yet neither of those - nor any of the dozens of other attacks by groups like the IRA and ETA over the decades - occasioned a world-wide over-reaction like 9/11 did.

Nowadays, despite the ravings of the US right, Al Qaida is not who we are fighting in Afghanistan (unless you're willing to believe it takes 130,000 NATO troops to fight 50 Al Qaeda supermen) and was only ever a particularly virulent fraction of who we were fighting in Iraq. Yet as Zakaria points out, fear of Osama has fuelled a "homeland security" industry worth tens of billions of deficit dollars every year, a defense industry spending nearly a trillion every year, and has directly caused hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths. Not to mention the poisonous legacy of Abu Graib, Gitmo, torture and illegal rendition. Then there's the proliferation of intelligence agencies tripping over each other to provide reports no-one reads.

Zakaria writes:

In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority, and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is a war without end. When do we declare victory? When do the emergency powers cease?

Conservatives are worried about the growing power of the state. Surely this usurpation is more worrisome than a few federal stimulus programs. When James Madison pondered this issue, he came to a simple conclusion: ..."No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual war.�

The response has costs, in lives and in dollars and in impact upon free, civil, society that utterly outweigh the costs of the original "causus belli". How can we not call that an over-reaction?

The Right's strawman counter-argument is that there have been no more high value attacks because of all this. But it's a strawman because, as one of Joyner's commenters points out, "You can argue that you shouldn�t have been using a machine gun to kill a fly without disputing that the fly is indeed dead."