The Los Angeles Times has stirred up controversy with an op-ed provacatively titled, "Was 9/11 really that bad? The attacks were a horrible act of mass murder, but history says we're overreacting." The piece, written by Johns Hopkins history professor and New Republic contributing editor David Bell, is a scholarly analysis of the Pentagon and World Trade Center bombings as placed in a larger historical framework. Bell argues that, while the events of September 11th were traumatic for Americans, the casualty levels, and subsequent significance in the greater human scheme, were modest at best compared to greater conflicts and trajedies like the 20 million killed in the Soviet Union during World War II. He then sketches out a chronicle of the West's post-Enlightenment juggling of the "dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of modern total war" to contextualize the 9/11 bombings in relation to events like the Napoleonic and World Wars, concluding that "the war against terrorism has not yet been much of a war at all, let alone a war to end all wars."
Though the bare statistics support his thesis, Bell's argument fails to address some pretty key issues. First, there's the point that the strong reaction to 9/11 has been fueled by its resulting increase in awareness of our domestic vulnerability. Bell dispenses with this argument by suggesting that readers "glance at just about any thriller from the 1990s" to prove that "we were hardly ignorant of these threats before." While pop culture may indeed provide a window into a society's collective unconscious, citing cheap paperbacks as evidence that the majority of Americans (and the U.S. government) actually believed that we were vulerable to an attack of such magnitude is a stretch. And while he concludes that Americans have since overreacted to the perceived terror threat, nowhere does Bell mention the constant stream of reports from security officials stating that the U.S. terror threat remains high and a future attack a near certainty.
Another problem is that Bell's analysis only considers the attacks themselves without touching the greater "War On Terror" and its ensuing body count. He cursorily acknowledges the additional conflict with the following: "Even if one counts our dead in Iraq and Afghanistan as casualties of the war against terrorism, which brings us to about 6,500, we should remember that roughly the same number of Americans die every two months in automobile accidents." His exclusion of the estimated 34,000 Iraqi casualties in 2006 alone notwithstanding, Bell's point in limiting the discussion is unclear: Is he including the government's invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and restrictions on civil liberties as part of our perceived overreaction? If so, how does history show that these acts were unwarranted? Simply asserting that the 9/11 attacks were historically insignificant because the death tolls were a fraction of Hiroshima or Stalin's purges offers a lesson in statistics but little else. We know that the World Trade Center numbers are lower than the World Wars, or the French Revolution, or Rwanda, or the Spanish Inquisition, or for that matter the Tsunami and the bubonic plague. But in the context of the country, time and political spectrum, the fact remains that it was a significant event, with significant casualties (not to mention the looming spectre of nuclear capability, which would really give Bell his numbers). Bell is correct that, in the larger blueprint of human existence, the death toll on September 11 was low. Beyond that, his piece does little to measure up to its provocative title.
This post originally appeared on Eat The Press.