February 7, 2004
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Perhaps Jacques-u-mentary
Apparently, Michael Moore's new krokumentary claims that "the typical citizen has almost no chance of encountering terrorists." Having been in the World Trade Center a few hours before both attacks I am either not a typical citizen or an example of misleading vividness.
I'm surprised at how many people seem to have forgotten 1993. But for a few feet of placement or a bit more explosive it might have claimed more lives than 9-11(no time to get out). Did we take comfort in the stupidity of the refund-seeking terrorist?
UPDATE: Steven Den Beste (in the coments) thinks 1993 was far from achieving structural failure.
I couldn't argue the physics of creating structural failure in the WTC. I do recall an engineer speculating that if the bombing had taken a corner of the exterior it might have brought the structure down.
One thing you are missing, however. The explosion did kill 30 people by asphyxiation and/or trampling. You wouldn't have to make the building fall to kill many more in a fire originating from the lowest floors.
Images from that day are pretty vivid in my mind. Of course that day we could actually see the victims as they emerged.
And for those in the comments endorsing Moore's attempt at statistical sense: I'm sort of surprised to see this acceptance of his argument, even from the usual suspects. First, I'm not sure how any statistician can say we have a reasonable sample of terrorist activity from which to extrapolate. Second, the number of people who might be affected by a terrorist act is a function of severity, not just frequency (and it is very difficult to understand the population risks of high-severity low frequency events). Third, as 'pixy misa' points out in the comments, we have a group of people actively planning to maximize severity -fatalities, that is. 2001 was orders of magnitude more severe than 1993. Fourth, as has been discussed in the comments, death is far from the only effect of terrorism. 1993 gave some of us a brief sense of what is possible, 2001 made clearer what is possible. There is a reason we are all engaged in furious discussion about WMDs. This is not healthcare. Backward-looking statistics are poor predictors of the risk of terrorism or the benefits of a strategy to contain it and therefore Moore's comment is useless. Besides, if Moore is so unworried about terrorism, why is he backing the candidate who claims it wouldn't have happened on his watch?
Oh - it also seems some people already know what the targets are! What a relief. Y'all steer clear now.
Upon reflection, the post was more interesting without me clarifying that bit about extrapolating past terrorism frequency (which I thought was obvious - why on earth are we all talking about WMD's?). I was temporarily distracted by miserable pedants. I resolve once more not to let it happen again.
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at February 7, 2004 5:32 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"The deal is though, that every American is at risk of terrorist attack. That's the whole bleeding point. Of course the WoT is not equivalent in any meaningful sense to the Cold War, and that wasn't the point that I was trying to make. The point is that if you make actual dead bodies your metric, then you get all manner of silly results - including turning the Cold War into a non-event, which, it clearly wasn't."
But there ARE people who are hyping this as the next great turning point of history! The Cold War passes to make way for the War on Terror(tm) is the assertion we have heard. Yet this just isn't so as the evidence (which you deride as 'body counts' or statistics) shows. Finally, the Cold War's bodycount wasn't trivial. It includes two hot wars, Vietnam and North Korea which claimed thousands of American lives. It also includes the fact that hundreds of millions of people were *directly* at risk from nuclear war...contrast that with the assertion that millions of Americans are at risk of.....seeing a terrorist attack on TV!
"IN the mythical days of pre-9/11, terrorists were regarded as having far more limited reach than the events of 9/11 demonstrated."
There were no mythical pre-9/11 days. Before 9/11 we had the experience of Tim McVeigh and the first WTC bombing. New Year's Eve 1999 was marked by much heightened security (I know, I was in NYC that night). In fact, 9/11 probably employed the novel technique of suicide hijackers because the 'hardening' of important buildings and landmarks after Tim McVeigh and the first WTC bombing made the truck bomb much more difficult to pull off.
"What does Disney have to do with Michael Moore? If you want to complain about Moore then just complain about him. There's no reason to miss a good movie over it. Free country people...."
Yep. Free to boycott and bitch when a generally respectable company funds such an asinine man. Now, if the government were trying to suppress this movie, I'd agree with you.
You're free to be an ass if you wish. I don't think the idea is very good. If you don't like Moore punish him by not seeing his movies or buying his books. I wouldn't launch boycotts of the companies that distribute his movies or sell his books. IMO its better to fight fire with fire, ideas with ideas. Nothing is served by simply freezing an idea out of the market.
I know, I know, free country so go be an ass and I'm free to point out that you are being an ass.
"You're free to be an ass if you wish."
God Bless America, Boonton, you are living proof of this freedom we all enjoy.
Jim English
Chicago
There's an awful lot of casual assumptions floating about that 9/11 was a one-off. I'll admit the non-occurence of any similar terrorist attack on the US since lends some weight to that view. But arguing post hoc ergo propter hoc that because there have been no attacks means there would have been no attacks in the absence of any response is bogus. The destruction of the Taliban and the scattering of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan is probably the single most important factor in the fact that the US has not been attacked since 2001.
There is no doubt that Al Qaeda and its affiliates have the desire to obtain WMDs. I don't think that at their current level of sophistication, chemical or biological agents represent a serious threat. However, the revelations of the web of nuclear weapon production capabilities that stretched around the world (with Pakistan as the fat malignant spider in the middle) should give everyone cause for concern. If the Islamic world had been able to maintain this distributed weapons production system then it is inevitable that some form of nuclear warhead would have found its way into terrorist hands. The War on Terror is in many ways a discovery process - if nothing else it converts a lot of Rumsfeld's 'unknown unknowns' into 'known unknowns' so that the usual methods of intelligence gathering can be brought to work on them. Witness Libya, for example; no-one really had an inkling that its WMD programs were so advanced, and its capitulation was a direct and unmistakable product of the overthrow of Saddam. It is now obvious that to have left Saddam in place would have been an act of almost unimaginable pusillanimity and folly.
The potential problem is not a 9/11 every month - it's losing 1,000 9/11's worth in a simultaneous nuclear attack on Washington, New York, Boston, Atlanta, London, Sydney and Warsaw - probably followed fairly promptly by saturation nuclear attack on the Middle East, global economic meltdown and ecological catastrophe. Maybe Moore and Jesse think that that's not a sufficient reason to destroy the Islamofascists. I beg to differ.
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