“Make no mistake,” the National Review’s sometimes rational (but not this time) David French warns us in light of the recent Manchester bombing, “there is an emerging bipartisan consensus that a certain amount of terrorism is just the price we have to pay to live the way we want to live. Now, to be clear, very few people will come out and say this explicitly, and national-security establishments do their best–within certain, limited parameters–to stop every single terror attack, but more than 15 years after 9/11 it’s clear that there are prices our societies aren’t willing to pay. And neither our nation nor any of our European allies is willing to pay the price to reduce the terror threat to its pre-9/11 scale.
"Consequently, an undetermined number of civilians will die horribly, at concerts, restaurants, nightclubs, or simply while walking on the sidewalk. It almost certainly won’t be you, of course, but it will be somebody. And they’ll often be kids.”
Dave’s fussy first paragraphs represent a variation on a favorite conservative gambit, to announce that “liberals would probably rather die than come out and say it,” before “explaining” what liberals “really think,” though they somehow never say so themselves. Over at the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf graciously agrees with Dave–“sure, Dave, that’s what I do think”–though Conor first points out that if you change “terrorism” to “gun ownership”, you get a pair of grim paragraphs that probably won’t be appearing in the National Review any time soon.1
As Conor explains, more seriously, we “tolerate” a lot of things that we could put a stop to, or at least control far more effectively than we do now. “[I]f you favor allowing cars to drive faster than 25 miles per hour, or allowing kids to ride in them, then you are willing to say that a certain amount of deaths are the price we pay to live as we want.”
More words of wisdom are available regarding Manchester and terrorism over at (appropriately enough) “Reason”, where Ron Bailey points us in the direction of this article in UK’s venerable Telegraph: “According to The Telegraph’s comprehensive analysis, 90 people died in Britain between 2000 and 2015 as a result of terrorism [most of it due, not to Muslims but the Provisional Irish Republican Army–AV addition]. The Telegraph notes that more than 1,000 people were killed by terrorists in the U.K. during the prior 15-year period—basically a reduction of 90 percent. That decline can be attributed to the abatement of IRA terrorism after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and the inclusion of 271 deaths from the Libyan bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988.”
Even if you take out the Lockerbie bombing, we’re still looking at 90 deaths versus 750. According to Wikipedia, the total number of deaths inflicted by the IRA, from 1972 through the 1998 agreement was more than 1,800, including over 1,100 British security personnel. These figures look even larger when you consider that the UK has a population of about 65 million, compared to a U.S. population of about 300 million.
The struggle strained democracy in the UK, but it also strained the UK’s relationship with the U.S., because most of the funding, and many of the weapons, that sustained the IRA came from here. Throughout this period, the IRA openly engaged in fund-raising in areas of the U.S. with heavy Irish populations. Illegal weapons shipments, particularly from New York, were common as well.2 All of which suggests that the terrorist activities of al Qaeda, ISIS, and similar groups, while hideous, are far from unprecedented and, most importantly, do not require the abandonment of our fundamental freedoms, as Dave would like to suggest that they do.3
Rather amazingly, Dave argues that there was a time–back in the Bush days–when Uncle Sam had balls and wasn’t afraid to do what needed to be done. Under Bush, we had 27 terrorist incidents or “plots”, while under Obama, we’ve had 67.4 Case closed!
Well, no. In the first place, most terrorist “plots” have been phony, under both administrations. Every FBI agent knows that “terrorist plot = promotion”, so it’s not surprising that they’ve been proliferating. Because the FBI has been inventing them. Furthermore, Dave entirely overlooks (that is to say, conceals) the fact that murders attributable to Islamic terrorists constitute nothing more than a drop to the bucket of the thousands of violent deaths that occur in the U.S. every year, about which French would do nothing, because he sees there no political profit–no political profit and no opportunity for reducing basic American freedoms–in the name of “security”.
Remarkably, Dave (quite stupidly, it seems to me) even goes to the length of praising George Bush for “taking the fight to the enemy”, invading Iraq and incurring tens of thousands of American casualties (which somehow don’t count in Dave’s figures). Some of us are even so skeptical (so wicked) as to believe that the invasion of Iraq is directly related to the emergence of ISIS5, that Bush’s “War on Terror” was entirely duplicitous, unnecessary, and indeed ultimately counterprodcutive, helping to spread the scourge instead of removing it.
The “War on Terror” in both the Bush and Obama administrations have cost hundreds of billions of dollars and consumed thousands of American lives. And none of this has made us “safer”. On the contrary. At the same time, while there have been a few bloody incidents of Muslim terror in the U.S. during the Obama Administration, the loss of life is almost trivial–to the extent that violent death can be trivial–compared to any number of other categories of needless death. And David French’s diagnosis is that we allow ourselves too much freedom. There is more than a whiff of fascism in all this–white shoe fascism, to be sure, but fascism nonetheless. And it’s disappointing that a “thoughtful” voice on the right would argue so mendaciously against the principles for which the United States supposedly stands. “They hate us for our freedom? Then we won’t be free any more! That’ll teach ‘em!”
Afterwords
In an earlier “Reason” article, Brian Doherty pointed out that in continental Europe, as in the UK, deaths from terrorism were far higher in the past than now.
- Of course, Conor’s alternative would only apply the U.S. When it comes to guns, our “European allies” are willing to bite the bullet in a way that we sissified Americans aren’t. ↩︎
- Remarkably (to me, at least), the deep involvement of the U.S. Irish community in support for IRA terrorism was the subject of a (again) remarkably pointed episode of the generally “lovable” TV detective series Columbo, “The Conspirators” (1978), in which a pixiesh “fund raiser” turns out to be a cold-blooded murderer. I guess you can never tell about those Irish. ↩︎
- Terrorism on the scale of 9/11 is not tolerable. But Dave doesn’t talk much about 9/11 itself (because it happened on Bush’s watch?). In any event, 9/11 could have been prevented by using locking steel doors for airliner cockpits, which are in fact now standard. ↩︎
- Davie gets his data from the scrupulously non-partisan Heritage Foundation. ↩︎
- Michael Kinsley argues this point in Vanity Fair. ↩︎
