The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Are you safer?

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by

mongreldogs
in

In today’s NY Times, Richard Cohen writes a piece that praises Hilary Clinton for having the “courage” to assert “I believe we are safer than we were” (before 9/11). Mr. Cohen lambastes what he sees as the knee-jerk reaction of her Democratic rivals, who (he says) reflexively bash everything associated with Bush, even those things that are true or good. We are safer, Mr. Cohen asserts, and we should be willing to say or hear this.

Problem is, he’s flat out wrong. More below the fold.

We are less safe — far less safe, catastrophically less safe — and it is largely the result of policies of this President. I wrote a response, reproduced below, addressed to Mr. Cohen to lay out my perception of his mistakes.

Mr. Cohen--

I read with interest your piece in the NY Times today. I believe you are fundamentally in error. You cannot reason solely from the fact that no comparable attack has occurred to the statement that such an attack is less likely. By that reasoning, we were "safer" after the first World Trade attack, because for the subsequent eight years no one else attacked the homeland. But of course we know that this is false; we were not "safe", just lucky.

While this President certainly didn't invent suicide bombers or fundamentalists intent on attacking the US, he has just as certainly increased their numbers significantly. He has also created a "farm system" for terrorists where they can go, learn how to kill Americans, and then move on to the "big leagues" -- here. As I am sure you are aware, there is some evidence that exactly this is occurring.

Meanwhile, are we really all that much safer at home? Most cargo is still not inspected in port -- because that would cut into the profits of the businesses that support this President. Dangerous chemicals are still shipped by rail through densely-populated neighborhoods -- because rerouting them would cut into the profits of the businesses that support this President. Although air travelers have to remove their shoes and throw out their toothpaste, airport workers still breeze through unsecured doors after undergoing absolutely minimal background checks -- because a more effective screening-and-control policy would cut into the profits of the businesses that support this President.

Apparently you feel safer (though I can't see why). That isn't the same as saying you are safer. I believe you are not. I believe none of us are -- at least, none of us who cannot disappear to an undisclosed location at the first sign of danger. Worse than insecurity is a false sense of security -- a call for complacency that pretends that the dangers we face are acts of God or nature and not the result of deliberate policy.

Are we safer? No, not by a long shot. We are indeed much less safe.

With respect,
-=-Bernard HP Gilroy
Princeton, NJ

Comments

2 responses to “Are you safer?”

  1. Doug Natelson Avatar
    Doug Natelson

    Of course we’re safer. It’s just like this great knick-knack that I picked up that wards off tiger attacks. I haven’t been attacked by a tiger since I found it, so clearly I’m safer than I was before.

    Lousy logic. One could’ve used that reasoning to declare, on Sept. 10, 2001, that we were safer than we had been in 1996 because no one had tried to blow up the WTC since then.

    Garry Trudeau is about as subtle as a sledgehammer sometimes, but he often does make good points with his humor. He’s the one that pointed out how car accidents had killed easily 10x the 9/11 deathtoll every year (see http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/), but we haven’t spent trillions of dollars and restructured our whole civilization to make cars safer.

  2. Stephen Rider Avatar
    Stephen Rider

    “we haven’t spent trillions of dollars and restructured our whole civilization to make cars safer.”

    It might not be trillions, but you can hardly suggest that cars aren’t a _hell of a lot_ safer than they were 20 years ago. These days, people commonly walk away from major accidents.

    Beyond that, car accident statistics are different from terrorism in that one is a deliberate act of mass murder, and the other is the amalgamation of thousands of individual events. These are very different things on many levels.

    I’m not making a point here about our safety (or lack thereof) from terrorism — simply pointing out that automobile accidents are a bad analogy. Terrorism kills a lot of people… car accidents kill a lot of people… Aha!!!! The comparison makes as much sense as believing the knick-knack protects you from tigers. 😉

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