Should We Treat The War On Terror Like A Natural Disaster?

A week ago I posted on an opinion column which put forth the idea that we should “declare victory” in the war on terror. Yesterday political science professor John Mueller posted similar thoughts on the Cato Institute blog Unbound.
Here’s an excerpt from his conclusion:

The United States is unlikely to be toppled by dramatic acts of terrorist destruction, even extreme ones. As it happens, officials estimated for a while last year that Hurricane Katrina had inflicted 10,000 deaths–the tolerance level set by General Myers. Although this, of course, was not a terrorist act, there were no indications whatever that, while catastrophic for the hurricane victims themselves, the way of life of the rest of the nation would be notably done away with by such a disaster. It is also easy to imagine scenarios in which 10,000 would have been killed on September 11–if the planes had hit the World Trade Center later in the day when more people were at work for example–and indeed, early estimates at the time were much higher than 3000. Any death is tragic, but it is hardly likely that a substantially higher loss on 9/11 would have necessarily have triggered societal suicide.
We already absorb a great deal of tragedy and unpleasantness and still manage to survive. We live with a considerable quantity of crime, and the United States regularly loses 40,000 lives each year in automobile accidents. Moreover, countries have endured massive, sudden catastrophes without collapsing. In 1990 and then again in 2003, Iran suffered earthquakes that nearly instantly killed some 35,000 in each case. The tsunami that hit Indonesia and elsewhere in 2004 killed several times that many. But the countries have clearly survived these disasters: they constitute major tragedies, of course, but they hardly proved to be “existential” ones.
Thus the country can readily absorb considerable damage if necessary, and it has outlasted far more potent threats in the past. To suggest otherwise is to express contempt for America’s capacity to deal with adversity.

I think it’s telling that the folks making this argument minimize the impact of terrorism. In the column I posted about previously the argument put forth stated that because we haven’t had another terrorist attack like 9/11 since 9/11 the threat of terrorism is being overstated. In order to make this argument the authors had to suggest that the terror attacks in London, Madrid, Bali, Beslan, etc. were all of a smaller scope than 9/11 and thus somehow acceptable. The authors also had to ignore that one of the reasons why we haven’t had another 9/11 because we are doing the very things they oppose doing (read: NSA call monitoring, etc.) for the sake of civil liberties absolutism. They’ve forgotten, apparently, that the war on terror they oppose fighting has thwarted attacks on the Brooklyn Bridge, the Holland Tunnel in New York and most recently the plot to blow up about a dozen British planes with liquid explosives.
Mueller’s argument above, however, takes a bit of a different angle. He seems to think that we should deal with terrorism by simply absorbing the damage and destruction they mete out and then move on with our lives. After all, we deal with things like natural disasters and automobile accidents every year, right? If we can tolerate the deaths from those things we can tolerate death from terrorism, right?
Wrong.