This can’t go over well with his colleagues on the Corner:

Second-lamest line (I am working here from Cheney’s appearance on MTP yesterday): the one about how SH was so involved in terrorism, because he was paying money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. This is deeply unconvincing. Any secular-Arab dictator looking to do a little triangulation with the religious elements in his population & neighborhood would have done the same. And these folk were blowing themselves up in Israel, not the U.S.A. I don’t approve of suicide bombers, in Israel or anywhere else, but to advance this as evidence that SH was hunkered down in conference with people planning attacks on the U.S.A. is, again, lame.

It’s worth saying that, pre-war at least, this business about the suicide bombers was a kind of double-pronged ridiculously. On the one hand, we were supposed to believe that Saddam’s bucks for martyrs was indication of a looming Baath/Qaeda terror threat against the United States. On the other hand, we were supposed to believe that Saddam’s financial support was the key driver of Palestinian terrorism and that Palestinian terrorism was, in turn, the sole driver of the Arab-Israeli conflict. No more Saddam, and the whole problem would just go away. The road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad. Absurd. Just absolutely ignorant and absurd. And yet this kind of thinking has been the official basis of national policy for five years and will continue to be for years to come.

I think John Mueller’s “False Sense of Insecurity” argument about terrorism goes two far in a couple of respects, but it’s mostly correct and overwhelmingly provides a crucial counterbalance to the tendency toward alarmism that’s overtaken the country in recent years. Thus, it’s great to see that he’s written the lead essay for the 9/11 anniversary edition of Cato Unbound. The specific argument he makes in this new piece I agree with more-or-less entirely.

“We haven’t been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically — and that’s where wars are won and lost.” So says an Army officer summarizing a new report by the US Marines’ top intelligence guy about the situation in Fallujah. It’s an odd habit of the American Army to even bother making the distinction. If you’re losing a war politically, you’re losing the war.

Let me also pass on a point I heard Robert Pape make last week, namely that even though a certain number of the bombings you see in Iraq are genuine core instances of terrorism — just blowing up civilians for being members of some targeted group — most attacks are more narrowly focused than that. You see a lot of this kind of thing where people trying to sign up to work for the Iraqi government get killed. Just as liberals tend to point out that the United States government and other western powers can often be well-served by a policy of deliberate restraint, this is also true for irregular combatants in Iraq. The most over-the-top, randomest, most terroristic attacks in Iraq tended to be perpetrated by Zarqawi and his people who had a rather unsubtle view of strategy. His absence from the scene may actually wind up hurting out cause in Iraq, simply because it will let smarter, less brutal leaders step up to the plate.

An anniversary post is, under the circumstances, unavoidable. But what to say? Maybe something on a personal note. From the time when I was about five years old onwards, my family lived on 12th Street with south-facing windows. Our apartment was really quite a bit north of the World Trade Center, but due to the lack of intervening tall buildings we had a very clear view of the Towers and they would totally dominate the view. Dominate it, that is, on clear days. Like distant mountains, our view of them was pretty highly sensitive to the weather. Haziness or fog would obscure them somewhat. On the heavier days, they would entirely fade out of view and the sky would look strangely blank.

By the time the towers fell, I was in college and wasn’t living full-time in that apartment anymore. As a result, I’ve never quite gotten used to the new view. What’s more, there isn’t much of anything that was tall enough or close enough to be revealed by the towers’ absence. It’s just a blank sky. To me, it looks as if the city’s descended into a perpetual fog.

The Towers were one of those New York landmarks that I barely ever actually visited in practice. I went there once, I think, in high school when I had a French exchange student living with me. And I was in the vicinity a couple of times to go to Century 21. But I think I’ve been to the Ground Zero site more times than I was ever inside the building whose absence it marks. Giant skyscrapers simply have a way of dominating the experience of people who live in vaguely in the vicinity even if you never really go there. Which, I suppose, is the point. And that’s really the extent of my practical connection to the events of 9/11. Nobody I really knew died there, though of course like all New Yorkers I had various connections of some kind of another to some of the victims. Still, in an odd way I took those murders personally and when I think back to it I still do.

Read more