Rodent Regatta

LOOKING BACK: Here’s something I originally posted at about 10:30 in the morning on 9/11. It’s held up pretty well, I think:

TOM CLANCY WAS RIGHT: (Reposted from earlier today) And we’re living one of his scenarios right now. Not much is known for sure, but it’s obvious that the United States is the target of a major terrorist assault. There’s a lot of bloviation on the cable news channels, most of which will turn out to be wrong or misleading later. Here, for your consideration, are a few points to be taken from past experience:

The Fog of War: Nobody knows much right now. Many things that we think we know are likely to be wrong.

Overreaction is the Terrorist’s Friend: Even in major cases like this, the terrorist’s real weapon is fear and hysteria. Overreacting will play into their hands.

It’s Not Just Terrorists Who Take Advantage: Someone will propose new ”Antiterrorism” legislation. It will be full of things off of bureaucrats’ wish lists. They will be things that wouldn’t have prevented these attacks even if they had been in place yesterday. Many of them will be civil-liberties disasters. Some of them will actually promote the kind of ill-feeling that breeds terrorism. That’s what happened in 1996. Let’s not let it happen again.

Only One Antiterrorism Method Works: That’s punishing those behind it. The actual terrorists are hard to reach. But terrorism of this scale is always backed by governments. If they’re punished severely—and that means severely, not a bombed aspirin-factory but something that puts those behind it in the crosshairs—this kind of thing won’t happen again. That was the lesson of the Libyan bombing.

”Increased Security” Won’t Work. When you try to defend everything, you defend nothing. Airport security is a joke because it’s spread so thin that it can’t possibly stop people who are really serious. You can’t prevent terrorism by defensive measures; at most you can stop a few amateurs who can barely function. Note that the increased measures after TWA 800 (which wasn’t terrorism anyway, we’re told) didn’t prevent what appear to be coordinated hijackings. (Archie Bunker’s plan, in which each passenger is issued a gun on embarking, would have worked better). Deterrence works here, just as everywhere else. But you have to be serious about it.

For now, the terrorists have won. They’ve shut down the U.S. government, more or less. They’ve shut down air travel. They’re all over TV. But whether they really win depends on how we deal with this; hysterically, or like angry—but measured—adults.

Last night I was reading over the archive pages for the week of September 11. It’s quite shocking to start at the bottom of this page, where the subjects are French coffeehouses with no loitering policies, and disputes about who had the best abs at the Video Music Awards (I still think Alicia Keys should have won), and then scroll up into, well, a whole different world.
But, of course, the world wasn’t really different. While Alicia Keys was sporting her fine abs, people who wanted to build a society where women would be stoned to death for doing that very thing were putting the final stages of their plan into action. We didn’t actually wake up into a different world on September 11. We just woke up. [InstaPundit]