Harbinger or aberration? A 9/11 provocation.

• Author: Mueller, John

THE TERROR attack of September 11, 2001 was quite literally off the charts: ne other single act of terrorism has ever done remotely as much damage. Over the course of the entire 2Oth century, fewer than twenty terrorist attacks managed re kill as many as one hundred people, and none killed more than four hundred. Until September of last year, far more Americans were killed in any given grouping of years by lightning than by all forms of international terrorism combined. Of course, such data beg the central question of the post 9/11 world: Will we revert to the relatively benign levels of the past, or have we really entered a new and nasty era?

Most observers hold to the latter, believing that the September 11 attacks represent a sort of historical step function--the "everything has changed" point of view. Accordingly, they suggest that such extensive destruction to life and property will become common or even routine, particularly if the United States and its allies fail to respond vigorously to the threat. This is hardly a baseless supposition. It is clear that the convergence of certain political and technological trends gives such concerns real logical traction. However, a case can be made that rather than foreshadowing the future, the attacks may turn out to have been a statistical outlier, a kind of tragic blip in the experience of American national security.

One reason to take the outlier thesis seriously is simple enough: There have been several extreme and highly alarming events in recent decades that seemed to imply future patterns, but failed to do so. Indeed, near the beginning of every decade since at least 1930 there came a major shock that many people presumed to mark the beginning of big and very bad trends. The Depression had convinced many by the early 1930s that capitalism was in terminal crisis. At the beginning of the 1940s came World War II; around 1950 came the shock of both the Korean War and the maturation of the balance of thermonuclear terror; in the early 1960s the trauma of the Cuban missile crisis; then the oil crisis and malaise of the early 1970s; then the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on the very cusp of 1980; then a decade later the seeming prospect of major ethnic warfare around the periphery of former Communist Europe--and now 9/11. It is worth reviewing this record in a bit more detail, and recalling w hat people had to say about these and other alarming events at the time.

Crying Wolf?

WORLD WAR II was the most destructive war in history. It has yet to inspire a sequel, but that is not how it looked to most in its immediate aftermath when historian Arnold Toynbee confidently argued, "In our recent Western history war has been following war in an ascending order of intensity; and today it is already apparent that the War of 1939-45 was not the climax of this crescendo movement." (1) After V-J Day, Ambassador Joseph Grew, one of America's most perceptive diplomats, concluded that "a future war with the Soviet Union is as certain as anything in this world." (2) Soviet dictator Josef Stalin concurred: "We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years and then we'll have another go at it." (3) Relatedly, when the Communists successfully fomented a coup in democratic Czechoslovakia in 1948, there were great fears in the West that this would be followed by further Communist takeovers in Europe, especially in Italy and France. Public opinion polls conducted in the United States in the mid-1940s characte ristically found 30 to 75 percent opining that, on account of such trends, the next world war would occur within 25 years. (4) Even decades later, the prominent political scientist, Hans J. Morgenthau, announced that "the world is moving ineluctably towards a third world war--a strategic nuclear war. I do not believe that anything can be done to prevent it. The international system is simply too unstable to survive for long." (5)

But something was done to prevent it: It was called the containment policy, carried out more or less skillfully by successive U.S. administrations in the context of the NATO alliance. And thanks in large part to the Marshall Plan, Italy and France were not suborned by Communists.

Communist aggression in Korea in 1950 was deeply alarming. As President Truman put it, "The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that Communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent...