A Commentary On “Symposium: 9/11—Did the U.S. Overreact?”
The 9/11 attacks were only the most dramatic and visible of the many terrorist attacks that have taken placer around the world, both before and after 9/11/01. Terrorism is an existential attack on modern civilization. And the means of creating and using weapons of mass destruction are both too easily accessed and too easily used for terrorism to be tolerated. Any determined nut group can slaughter innocents by hundreds and thousands – if they think they can gain anything by doing so. An obscure Buddhist cult released nerve gas in Japanese subways. The mostly Hindu Tamil Tigers perfected the suicide belt. Timothy McVeigh and one or two fellow lunatics murdered over 600 innocent people, including toddlers in a day care center. There is nothing to stop, say, the Earth Liberation Front from blowing you up because they object to you driving an SUV or your wife driving a nonelectric minivan. The embracing of this promotion strategy by Islamic extremists only drives home the extreme danger of allowing this tactic to be perpetrated.
It is necessary for all civilized people to combine to stamp out this horror. No, our reaction was not too extreme at all. Those who drag the Iraq war into this discussion are pursuing a narrow political agenda without regard to the larger question, and only demean themselves and the importance of this matter. Let them debate Iraq. But let us do everything necessary to stamp out terrorism.
That involves: killing or capturing the actual terrorists; ruining those who support terrorists; and dealing a blow to any cause that embraces terrorism so severe and so irretrievable that even terrorists will be forced to admit that the cause embracing terrorism was a bad idea. Then, and only then, can there be peace in the world.
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