Say Anything Blog

Five plus years out from that fateful day David Bell, writing in the L.A. Times, isn’t quite so sure it was that bad.

IMAGINE THAT on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism.

It also raises several questions. 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?

Obligatory outrage over the trivializing of 9/11 (and believe you me that ticks me off plenty), let me say that if anyone is guilty of overreacting in the aftermath of 9/11 it is the left in it’s response first (and less vociferously) to the invasion of Afghanistan and second to the invasion of Iraq.

The left, and their allies in the media, have painted a picture of Iraq as some sort of desperate engagement that our country is on the verge of not being able to sustain any longer.  Yet that’s just not true.  Not to trivialize the sacrifices made by the soldiers fighting the war and their families (not to mention the taxpayers footing the bill for the war), but in historical terms the war in Iraq has cost us very little.  In nearly four years of conflict we’ve spent almost $400 billion dollars and lost just over 3,000 soldiers, but in other terms we’ve spent a fraction of what we spend every year in this country on government entitlements and lost a number of soldiers that would have been a day’s tally in other wars like WWII, the Vietnam War and the Civil War.

For the size and scope of the war, the mission in Iraq has actually cost us quite little.  And for what it has won us - the liberation of Iraq, a toehold for democracy in the middle east and a front for the war on terror that isn’t within our borders - that cost has been worth it.

Yet that cost has been blown way out of proportion by the anti-war left and the President’s political enemies.  To hear some tell it, the mission in Iraq has been all this country can handle militarily and we should just give up and come home.  Which is the real post-9/11 overreaction, given that if our country doesn’t have the will to complete a mission like the one in Iraq we are in more serious trouble than anything Islamic terrorism portends.