Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Thursday, May 5, 2005

17:14 - Do they give a Nobel Prize for "attempted chemistry"?

(top)

Just a thought, here.

On 9/11/01, two of the four hijacked planes successfully hit the two towers of the World Trade Center. The other two planes and their targets, however, have sort of become a footnote to history, understandably�if only by sheer dint of numbers of casualties and lasting damage to the national psyche.

However: we know that Flight 93, the one that went down in Pennsylvania when the passengers rebelled, had been targeted at the Capitol building; and Flight 77, the one that hit the Pentagon, had a flight path with deviations that suggest that it was originally steering for the White House, but couldn't find it and went instead for its secondary target.

In the years since 9/11, the predictable response has been twofold: from one side of the nation has been the implacable call not just for justice against the actual perpetrators of the act, but for a thorough worldwide cleansing of the ideology that would give rise to people inclined to follow in their footsteps... and from the other, a sense of reservation and reluctance, born of the fact that the buildings that toppled were the World Trade Center buildings, symbols of commerce and American financial dominance and�to some�hives of "little Eichmanns", the people really pulling the levers that directed American actions that they found abhorrent (globalization, investment banking, free trade, capitalism, et cetera). The strike on the Pentagon just sealed the deal (repeat after me: military-industrial complex). In other words, the way 9/11 went down, it's become irresistibly branded as a big blow against America's economic might and hubris�not its political clout or identity as a nation.

The success of the terrorists' mission has to be scored at about 65%�they hit half their primary targets and missed two, but hit a secondary target. The targets they hit differ significantly in symbolic impact from the targets they missed (or hit as second choices). However, this result could have gone any number of different ways, largely dependent on nothing more than accidents of timing, luck, and serendipity.

What, then, if things had happened a little differently?

What if the timing had worked out another way, so that different targets had been hit first, and passengers on different planes had started hearing the news on their cellphones and begun making plans to rebel and overthrow the hijackers? What if the weather or pilot error had forced other planes to make new decisions as to where to aim, rather than the ones that did?

What if it had been the Capitol and the White House that had been hit, and the World Trade Center had been missed entirely?

How would that have affected America's response to 9/11? How would we have reacted if, instead of it being a symbol of our financial global dominance and a privately owned office building full of thousands of civilian employees of regular companies and tourists that had been destroyed, it were the symbols of America's political power that bore the attack's full brunt? What if, in the months following 9/11, nobody thought�for there would have been no outward reason to suspect it�that the "little Eichmanns", whose buildings were still standing intact there in Lower Manhattan, had anything to do with the terrorists' motives? What if, instead, on the evening news each night we found ourselves staring at two shattered national monuments in Washington D.C., the graves of hundreds of Senators and Representatives and possibly the President?

Would we have reacted differently? Would we be asking ourselves "Why do they hate us?" Would our youths be protesting in the street against military response? Assuming he survived, would they be calling Bush Hitler? Would they be talking about appeasement and understanding and compromise?

And if not... why the hell not?

Better yet: since we live in a world where these things didn't happen... why the hell do they?

People discussing issues like hate-crime laws make lots of airy claims that "intent shouldn't be a factor" when determining how to punish someone�an act of murder is an act of murder, regardless of the motivation, right? Only the commission of an act should be punishable�not the attempted or intended commission of that act. If someone's convicted of attempted murder, it's pretty typically a lesser sentence than for successful murder. Seems to make sense, but... not if you think about it too hard.

Because if we treat 9/11 only on the basis of what the terrorists successfully accomplished, we run the risk of missing the whole point of the act, and reacting in a manner that attempts to solve all the wrong problems.

We have to measure our response according to the symbolic and concrete impact that 9/11 would have had if the terrorists had succeeded in hitting all their primary targets. Because that's what they would have done if only they'd been able to. They didn't choose to hit only the buildings full of "little Eichmanns" and our military headquarters, and leave our representative government and its symbols intact. If Allah had been on their side, they'd have taken out both towers of the WTC, the Capitol Building, and the White House. And we'd be reacting today based on the aftermath of that kind of horrific spectacle that would have been all the more dreadful than 9/11 already was in the real world.

Some people are able to cloud their moral judgment by justifying 9/11, to some degree, as a righteous attack upon America's economic hubris, rather than upon us as a people. Yet I don't think they'd be able to do that if it were our national symbols and monuments, the historic and irreplaceable buildings that Americans of all political stripes revere as the home of politicians among whom just about anyone can find representation in past or present history, that had been turned into rubble-filled craters. There'd be no denying who it was that was the attack's targets. And there would be no confusion or equivocation as to the appropriateness of the response.

Imagine that none of the buildings pictured here, or the people inhabiting them, existed anymore. Not just half of them, or well-armored substitutions for some of them that are easily rebuilt�none of them. Imagine all of them going up in the same plumes of smoke that covered Manhattan for that week in September.

Go on: imagine it.

That's the world in which those people live who back the War on Terror. Not the world where nature and humanity conspired to turn the attack into something subtly different in symbolic character, and considerably less horrific, than what it was intended to be.

Hell, if all the planes had missed, even if miraculously nobody had died, even if the plot had been foiled at the ticket counters�we should still be reacting the same way, with the same far-reaching plan to reshape the Arab world and snuff out Islamic fundamentalist terrorism by spreading secular democracy. Yet imagine how intense the domestic and international resistance would have been then.

Just a thought, but�why should there be any difference?

UPDATE: Yeah, I know the "hate crimes" thing is a bit glib. Go too far into the "punish intent rather than deed" direction and you're in Big Brother territory; yet too far in the other direction and you end up adjudicating things solely on the basis of body-count, and the judicial system becomes some sort of non-sentient organism responding to stimuli in a coldly linear manner, which just isn't a sensible way to deal with humans and all their irrationality. Then there's the "intent should matter when deciding punishment, not when deciding guilt" argument put forth by South Park, which seems to make sense, but takes some mental gear-grinding. The point is, we don't have to do any psychological tricks in this case to find out what the terrorists' dream outcome was, and we'd be deluding ourselves to proceed on any other basis.

UPDATE: I also realize Bush was in Florida on 9/11; but that, too, was dumb luck. It's not like the terrorists could really have planned around that.

UPDATE: Greetings, Rantburg patrons�and thanks for the kind words!