existential threats

Conor Friedersdorf takes John Tobin at Commentary to task for (of course) inflaming fear of Muslims and beating the drum of panic. Conor does a good job of taking apart Tobin's dismissal of post-9/11 anti-Muslim animus. I want to focus on something a little different. Tobin writes, "The reason why 9/11 was treated as an existential threat to America is that it was."

All these years later, I find that sentiment to be quite common. And it's absolutely nutty. I mean just bizarre. Words have meanings, and to call something an existential threat means that it threatens the continued existence of what is being threatened. The deaths of nearly 3,000 people was an unconscionable crime. But it was nothing resembling an existential threat. The territorial integrity of the United States was never threatened. There was no chance for occupation or the dissolution of our democracy. The day-to-day functioning of the government endured. The average citizen's security, freedom, and prosperity was not in any way compromised. There was literally no chance that Al Qaeda (or terrorism writ large, whatever that means) was going to seriously undermine the American way of life.

The Confederacy was an existential threat to the United States. It represented a future in which the bonds of federalism might have broken at any time, leading to a geographically connected but politically disparate collection of antagonistic fiefdoms that could not work together for economic or military benefit. (To say nothing of the moral case that compelled the war.) The Cold War was an existential threat to the United States. Outside of Red Dawn-style fantasies, the USSR never had the ability to invade the United States. But the power of the militaries, the size of the blocs, and most importantly the destructive potential of the nuclear arsenals meant that the cold conflict represented a genuine threat to the basic existence of the United States. The Axis powers? Yeah. That's an existential threat. Osama bin Laden and his small band of relatively untrained and resource-poor extremists never represented anything resembling a threat to the territorial or practical integrity of the United States.

Andrew Sullivan wrote recently, "I was marinated in the knowledge of Saddam Hussein’s unique evil. At TNR in the 1990s, the consensus was that this dictator truly was another Hitler type (and in many ways, he was)." Sullivan, of course, wrote this in the commission of apologizing for that attitude, and it's good that he's evolved. But it's important to point out here: analogizing Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler is deeply unhelpful, because Hussein had nothing resembling the destructive power of Hitler at his disposal. Hussein was guilty of many horrific crimes. He certainly represented a profound immorality, as Hitler did. But what matters when assessing foreign leaders is their potential for destruction, not their moral character. This slippage, between the moral and the practical, has occurred again and again since 9/11, and to our great detriment. It happens whenever someone confuses the moral and emotional toll of the marathon bombing with its practical effects. Not only is it possible to feel profound anger and sadness about the people killed there while recognizing the insignificance of this attack to our basic security, it is necessary to do both, if you want to be a responsible citizen.

September 11th must be seen as an attack that exploited a particularly egregious vulnerability to greatly increase the destructive potential of a ragged group of violent extremists. By the fourth plane, that very same morning, citizen recognition of what was happening and resistance to it prevented a similar attack. For all of the security kabuki we experience at the airport, the simple act of fortifying cockpit doors has done far more to ensure that similar events don't happen in the future. Immediately after 9/11, this country decided on some facts that it had no credible reason to believe. The most damaging was the belief that terrorism controlled a massive, coordinated, well-armed, focused, and uniquely destructive force. Well over a decade later, it's time to drop our emotionally defensive posture and start reacting based on rationality and facts.