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I would like to give praise to express my agreement with the spirit of this post.
(Attacking Afghanistan made sense... but much of the rest of what was done, militarily and otherwise, was sheer overreaction.)
I would argue that that our reaction to 9/11 was not a uniquely bad use of the military, but that most of our wars were mistaken (as were most domestic reactions like locking up dissenters in WW1 or Japanese in WW2). It saddens me that otherwise intelligent people see restraint as indications of being a crackpot.
Despite your post being entirely correct, if for a moment we ignore the welfare of humanity and consider the welfare of the United States alone, there is a good chance that this irrational overreaction will be remembered, and that it will serve as deterrence to any aspiring attackers for a hundred years to come.
Sometimes irrational wrath pays, especially if you can inflict pain much more effectively than you need to endure it.
The cost to humanity is probably dominated by some 1,000,000 deaths in Iraq, but the cost to the U.S. at least in terms of deaths is comparatively smaller. The Iraq deaths are an externality.
As a non-US citizen, I can state that the irrational over-reaction was exactly the response that the terrorists were aiming for. Lots of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt - lots of panic and mindless reaction... it has also greatly debilitated the effectiveness (and no doubt the profitability) of the entire world's air-transport system, without actually enhancing security thereby.
There is no deterrent here
IMO this would not in any way discourage future attackers - but encourage them.
As a non-US citizen, I can state that the irrational over-reaction was exactly the response that the terrorists were aiming for.
I concur. Terrorists. Want terror. Got terror.
I remember when I heard "They hate us for our freedom" I immediately thought, "Don't worry, soon we'll have much less of those". Turns out they still hate us, probably for bombing their country and replacing their democracy with dictatorships in the name of democracy.
Despite your post being entirely correct, if for a moment we ignore the welfare of humanity and consider the welfare of the United States alone, there is a good chance that this irrational overreaction will be remembered, and that it will serve as deterrence to any aspiring attackers for a hundred years to come.
On the contrary, this now teaches someone that if they want to do damage to the United States they can easily get it to engage in an autoimmune disorder along with a few oversea adventures.
Moreover, this isn't the only example. Look at how one of the most successful post 9/11 attacks terrorist in the last few years was by many metrics Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. In terms of lost time and productivity in responding to his unimpressive attempt, literally millions of people every day need to take off their shoes, run them through already busy x-ray machines, and then put them back on.
An unrelated but creepy thought: my first reaction to type in some sort of full-fledged assent was immediately dampened by a queasy post-Patriot-Act thought (of, admittedly, a very IT-illiterate person), "If I openly write something like this, will They know and will They care and will I ever come to regret it?" Or maybe it's not such an unrelated thought -- the not always irrational fear of Big Brother did, after all, turn out to be a significant part of the more-than-ten-times-worse assessment of things to come.
denis bider, the people who perpetrated the 2001-09-11 attacks died, and knew they were going to die, so others like them won't be deterred by the likelihood that the USA will go after them personally. It doesn't seem like the US's overreaction to those attacks has been all that effective in harming al Qaeda (I mean, bin Laden is still alive so far as anyone knows). It doesn't seem like it's been all that effective in making people who might have been sympathetic to groups like al Qaeda less so.
So I'm wondering how you expect the overreaction to deter other people who might be considering similar attacks.
In the weeks after 9/11, my colleague Roger Congleton, who had some expertize on terrorism, did a number of radio and other interviews where he argued that 9/11 was a unlucky aberration, and warned against overreacting. It wasn't a message people wanted to hear then, and his being right early wins him nothing in today's media game.
You're right, and the thing that depresses me is that we can see this and yet at least I have barely any notion of what to do about it. Actually... (Well, actually, the relevent thought belongs on the Open Thread, so I'll go there...)
g,
Or, one could do what noted Law scholar and hero of secular humanists Alan Dershowitz calls for, which is destroy the families, homes and towns of the attackers. He has explicitly argued that Israel should destroy the entire town of every Palestinian attacker.
The fact that Dershowitz can say something so obviously hateful and still be considered a sane member of society is another manifestation of the spiral of hate that has gripped this nation.
It doesn't seem like the US's overreaction to those attacks has been all that effective in harming al Qaeda I disagree, if we count the invasion of Afghanistan in there. It seemed to have quite effectively smashed al Qaeda proper so that they could not pull off any attacks since (remember that they attacked the U.S.S Cole, two embassies in Africa and bombed the WTC in the years before) with the remaining terrorists who call themselves "al Qaeda" franchises being quite buffoonish.
rukidding wrote: now you're claiming brainwashed (if not drug-induced) suicide of defenseless and unsuspecting people isn't the height of cowardice. Is there a reason you can't work on your OWN biases?
I agree with you on two points, ru, (1) that the overall thrust of this post by Eliezer is strong, and (2) that cowardice is a fair and accurate descriptor of the hijackers.
I understand Eliezer's point about the folly of tossing every kitchen-sink insult at the Enemy even when it's inaccurate. I think he just chose a bad example. The definition of cowardice ...
Well, I wouldn't have the balls to hijack an airplane and crash it into a building. If they're cowards, what does that make me?
America has one of the largest and best-equipped armed forces in the world. Only an idiot would attempt to confront it directly and according to the "rules of war".
Reality check: when openly declaring war and restraining one's tactics will inevitably lead to defeat, breaking the conventions is not only canny but necessary. There is simply no branch of the contingency tree where playing by the rules leads to a benefit in such a scenario.
I think that militarily President Bush under-reacted to 9/11. The U.S. faces a tremendous future threat of being attacked by weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, before 9/11 it was politically difficult for the President to preemptively use the military to reduce such threats. 9/11 gave President Bush more political freedom and he did use it to some extent. But I fear he has not done enough. I would have preferred, for example, that the U.S., Russia, China, UK, Israel and perhaps France announced that in one year they will declare war an any ot...
"I'd say they were cowards. Suicide isn't an act of bravery."
R U Kidding, I agree in this particular case.
If they had lived, we would have caught them and slowly tortured them to death. They were taking the easy way out by dying. Similarly with palestinian suicide bombers. By dying they avoid the treatment they'd get as prisoners of the israelis -- they get off easy.
"I still remember a kid who hit me from behind on the street once, because he was too much of a pussy to come up to my face about it."
He was expressing his feelings. Did he ...
I know this comment is very old, but I'm a bit incredulous at this.
If they had lived, we would have caught them and slowly tortured them to death.
If they had lived, they would have been among the highest profile prisoners America has ever seen. Torture is officially illegal in the United States, and whatever we get up to out of sight and off our turf, the government doesn't like to show the public how we torment our hated enemies.
Timothy McVeigh got a lethal injection, one of the most painless methods of execution which we can contrive. This was, controversially, allowed to be witnessed on broadcast by those closest to the victims of his attack. Perhaps one might argue that torturing the bombers to death for preventative or retributive reasons would have been a good idea, but it's simply not realistic that we would have done it.
Some very vehement responses.
If you believe invading Afghanistan was a correct choice then I'm not sure how you could say Iraq was a complete mistake. The invasion of Afghanistan was aimed at eliminating a state that offered aid and support to an enemy who would use that aid and support to project power to the US and harm her citizens or the citizens of other western states. Denying that aid and support would hope to achieve the purpose of reducing or eliminating the ability of the enemy to project power.
Any other state that might offer aid and support to ...
"I would have preferred, for example, that the U.S., Russia, China, UK, Israel and perhaps France announced that in one year they will declare war an any other nation that either has weapons of mass destruction or doesn't allow highly intrusive inspections to make sure they don't have weapons of mass destruction."
James D. Miller, I think your idea has possibilities. However, it would be very hard for it to succeed with israel on the list of nations that has nukes but denies them to others. Israel would have to be one of the nations that would be ...
"If you believe invading Afghanistan was a correct choice then I'm not sure how you could say Iraq was a complete mistake. The invasion of Afghanistan was aimed at eliminating a state that offered aid and support to an enemy who would use that aid and support to project power to the US and harm her citizens or the citizens of other western states. Denying that aid and support would hope to achieve the purpose of reducing or eliminating the ability of the enemy to project power.
"Any other state that might offer aid and support to the enemy would e...
Any other state that might offer aid and support to the enemy would enable the enemy to rebuild their ability to project power.
By that 'reasoning', invading Switzerland would have been a proper response to the 9/11 attacks.
I've always used motorcycle fatalites as the yardstick to put it in perspective; 9-11 came up just short.
I suspected we might be in trouble when they floated the story that Bush didn't return to Washington because of a credible threat to Air Force One, a threat in which, the supposed terrorists were more concerned with establishing credibility than carrying out their attach and thus used some sort of code word that only someone with inside knowledge would have.
It was perfectly reasonable for Bush to put a half dozen states between himself and the most like...
"We will be safer after we conquer every potential enemy."
There are limits on our physical and moral capacity for making war. My post was simply pointing out that failing to respond to someone who actually attacks you can have increasingly dangerous results over time. That enemy leeches at your resources and learns how to become better at attacking you, while you gain nothing. There are plenty of potential enemies out there who aren't attacking us and may never attack us. They aren't gaining actual experience at attacking us. Their knowledge is o...
And maybe suicide can be viewed as cowardly, but not many people are capable of slitting someone's throat with a boxcutter. See a MR blog (and the linked book chapter): http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/11/violence-a-micr.html
The one point where I think Eli goes off the rails is assuming the response would be completely disproportionate. I agree with those who've said that the Afghanistan campaign was just about right (from the perspective of the government). Unfortunately, this even happened when the New American Century crowd w...
Comparing the lives lost in 9/11 to motorcycle accidents is a kind of moral calculus that fails to respect the deeper human values involved. I would expect people who die on motorcycles to generally understand the risks. They are making a choice to risk their lives in an activity. Their deaths are tragic, but not as tragic. The people who died in the WTC did not make a choice to risk their lives, unless you consider going to work in a high rise in America to be a risky choice. If you're doing moral calculus, you need to multiply in a factor for "not b...
rukidding: And one of the possible ramifications of the Iraq invasion is an end to the escalation of terrorist actions. How does the causality work there?
childish and hateful number I have never read any of those two adjectives precede that noun.
how does anyone here know that there wouldn't have been more deaths if Saddam had remained in power? Look at a graph of deaths under Saddam, assume any current trends continue. It's not certain, but it's a reasonable guess.
Why is the board so determined to think that being anti-bias should only mean being anti cons...
Well its more or less an empirical question isn't it? On the one hand maybe 9/11 was a fluke - in that case the best option would be to just rebuild and carry on, like Eliezer says. But maybe it wasn't - maybe the people behind it were/are both willing and capable to successfully launch more attacks. In that case it seems to make sense to wager, or at least consider wagering, some amount of lives to prevent greater losses in the future. It all depends on the information available: what are the resources/intents of your enemy? Would it be at all possible to...
Afghanistan and iraq were stupid mistakes. The bush administration simply fed off the people's desire for revenge and gave them afghanistan, which in turn let bush build a case for plundering oil rich iraq. All this was exactly what al quaeda wanted, to show the infidel empire attacking the moslem lands. End result, massive polarisation of moslem opinion against america and the creation of a whole new herd of terrorists and sympathisers across the world. America should have gone after Osama and only Osama and avoided any impression of a crusade. Special fo...
I don't believe in heaven, so for me it would take a lot of courage to commit suicide, but I don't know if it's the same for a devout religious person, because I can't get in to their head. Probably there would be some sort of fear response on the biological level, even for them, so at the very least they would have to achieve "mind over matter" and probably bravery also, but I can't say for sure the last.
As for 9/11, I think the correct response would have been to attack the organization "Al Qaeda," and to ask all other governments in ...
Leif makes strong and good points.
From various readings and my own observations I do agree 'we'(meaning the Public and the government taken as a whole) have overreacted. On the other hand I wonder how many people think like me and think it's overblown but don't say it because they know it makes them look bad. It's almost assured that the better option is to keep mum rather than risk ire because voicing doubts about our specific reaction(was unpopular then but OK now) or expecially voicing doubts about the severity of the attack itself(still unpopular) is n...
Susan Sontag pointed out that the 9/11 hijackers weren't cowards a week after the event, and took an enormous amount of shit for it. And in fact there were a great many people engaging in relatively sane, measured reactions after 9/11. But they were drowned out by the much louder negative death spiral.
Many conflicts are really formed out of two mutually reinforcing negative death spirals. In this case, our overreaction to 9/11 caused us to take actions that produced more hatred of us in the Islamic world, leading to more conflict, leading to further hatred on both sides. This is a very basic dynamic underlying war.
ego in action, hard to stop, but in conscious circles, the outcomes were already known... ego-driven people are mostly unconcsious
An unrelated but creepy thought: my first reaction to type in some sort of full-fledged assent was immediately dampened by a queasy post-Patriot-Act thought (of, admittedly, a very IT-illiterate person), "If I openly write something like this, will They know and will They care and will I ever come to regret it?"
I see this "omnipotent government" bias all the time. I wonder why.
I remember my initial reaction to the attacks of September eleventh. I hoped our country would do the right thing. Despite this tragic occurrence we would be leaders. We "would not let the terrorists win." We would clean up the mess and rebuild. We would learn from our mistakes. We would reinforce our national security structure, and possibly make a few key intel and military maneuvers.
By no means did I think that this was grounds for an endless full scale war on keyword Terror. If anything the lessons of September eleventh have extended be...
I remember my initial reaction to the attacks of September eleventh. I hoped our country would do the right thing. Despite this tragic occurrence we would be leaders. We "would not let the terrorists win." We would clean up the mess and rebuild. We would learn from our mistakes. We would reinforce our national security structure, and possibly make a few key intel and military maneuvers.
By no means did I think that this was grounds for an endless full scale war on keyword Terror. If anything the lessons of September eleventh have extended be...
You abuse, commas when you, write your blog post. Stop abusing commas, because they make all, your sentences start sounding, just like this. Like William, Shatner. Only, without the, differing intensity levels, between pauses.
hmmm...
Happy Death Spirals, indeed.
No comments on the religious, social and cultural biases that caused a group of extremists to hijack passenger planes and kill as many people as they could.
That reveals a bias in itself, actually. (So much for the scientific method, eh?)
(Hint: They didn't hate us just because we're rich and happy and decadent, or because the last of the Ottoman Empire collapsed during WWI. They don't even hate us because of Western foreign policy.)
Culturally and socially, the world is still a dangerous place. There are still people ...
"If the USA had completely ignored the 9/11 attack - just shrugged and rebuilt the building - it would have been better than the real course of history."
The World Trade Center was comprised of several buildings -- doesn't everyone know that? The centerpiece was the twin towers, which is what the planes hit. The towers were each a city block square and over 100 stories tall. They were so huge and held so many people they had their own zip code. When they fell, the impact destroyed several other Trade Center buildings in the surrounding blocks, not...
If you want to see an example of a measured response, take a look at the UK's after the London Underground bombings of 7th July 2005. Admittedly the bombings weren't of the same league as the September 11th attacks, but virtually nobody in the UK was saying "let's bomb the f*ers" And a month or two later (at the most) it was as if nothing had ever happened.
"If you want to see an example of a measured response, take a look at the UK's after the London Underground bombings of 7th July 2005. Admittedly the bombings weren't of the same league as the September 11th attacks, but virtually nobody in the UK was saying "let's bomb the f*ers" And a month or two later (at the most) it was as if nothing had ever happened."
Mike K, I tend to agree with you, but....
The fact is, the british empire is gone and the british are ex-colonialists. As a nation they're old and tired and wimpy. It's different for...
"The world is not a 'nice,' quiet, middle-class, suburban neighborhood."
Translation: a bellicose attitude is to be adopted when dealing with other nations. Preemptive wars, false insinuations about other countries, breaking alliances, CIA-meddling in other nation's affairs, disingenuous overtures of peace, torture, mass imprisonment, black-flag operations and shit-on-you diplomacy is what is called for.
None of us know to what future conflicts our whimsical meddling will lead... very unfortunate. Seeing the US's hopeless bumbling on the internatio...
"The overreaction to this will be ten times worse than the original event."
Those were my thoughts that day too, except for the multiplier of ten. I don't think i put a number on it, but 50 to 500 times was probably close.
It'd give the current administration and all the hawks a blank-check excuse to do all kinds of fundamentally bad moves, that they'd had on their wish-list for a long time. Sadly they have made the most of this possibility and have hardly wasted any time ever since, making the world a worse place and squandering foreign support of the US.
I do so regret not having a blog at that time, as this would've been a 'told you so' so big it's scary.
Okay, I'm totally not understanding the claim that the attackers were cowards. Either the people saying that are using a different definition of "cowardice", or perhaps they're thinking of the attack's mastermind(s) who stayed safely at home. m-w.com defines "coward" as "one who shows disgraceful fear or timidity" -- perhaps the hijackers timidly crept to the front of the plane, and killed or incapacitated the pilots with disgracefully shaking hands?
Or perhaps you mean fear of facing their enemies directly in fair combat, inst...
I've been reading this blog in RSS for a while onw and I was happy to see it on the front page of Reddit!
In "The Fog of War" about McNamara's life, he discusses proportionality when dealing with your enemy. The fact that America invaded Iraq (that had nothing to do with 9-11), enacted the Patriot Act, and will have troops in Afghanistan for decades to come is not a proportional response to a small group of hijackers flying planes into three national symbols.
Many people wanted blood after 9-11 though. My neighbor was a vet student (so he's presumably smart) and he was ranting on 9-11 about the need to show everyone "who's boss." I guess that hasn't worked out so well in hindsight.
So is the propensity to say, "I knew it instantaneously" a kissing cousin of the hindsight bias?
p=.02 the first 3 conscious thoughts were, sequentially: "I guess I really am living in the Future. Thank goodness it wasn't nuclear. and then The overreaction to this will be ten times worse than the original event."
I can see the utility in starting off the post with such a narrative (grabbing attention and establishing svengali authority), and don't doubt those 3 thoughts popped up fairly quickly, in one form or another.
I know it's effective, but I expect a little better.
I think this is the first blog post I have read in years that contains ONLY civil and intelligent response. It makes me hopeful!
Almost all of our responses to 9/11 seem irrational, most of them ineffective. It seems to me that fear informed almost all choices, whether it was fear from the 'terrorists', or fear from domestic political reactions. America became fearful of gels, liquids, underwire bras, breastmilk on airplanes, pocket knives, tshirt slogans, and remarkably, the disapproving eyes our our fellow citizens... we don't want to look unpatriotic...
Warren Bonesteel (is that seriously your last name?): No comments on the religious, social and cultural biases that caused a group of extremists to hijack passenger planes and kill as many people as they could. Eliezer discussed that here.
Eliezer never said the world was a nice place or that people wouldn't try to kill us. He said the reaction was foolish, and judging by the bodycounts we can say worse.
Mike K: If you want to see an example of a measured response, take a look at the UK Didn't they shoot a Brazilian electrician and pass all sorts of Big Brot...
I wish we could draw a distinction between the mess we're in now, as a country, and what was going on a few months maybe even a year after 9/11. But with everything becoming so muddled, it's really hard to accurately look back and understand what was going on, then.
But as rational people, we know that Iraq and 9/11 have nothing to do with each other - and regardless if 9/11 even happened or not, there is an educated chance that, knowing the Bush admin - that we'd end up in Iraq anyway.
To stand idly by though as terrorists blatantly attack and murder people...
This is one of the truer things I have read since 9/11; I know that because it perfectly matches my own opinions. :) I also had more or less the same three thoughts in rapid succession in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the towers. A previous commentator, 'david', was skeptical about that kind of claim, i.e. that the mental event would have gone down precisely in that fashion. To david, I would concede that certainly in accounts such as this we omit some stray thoughts, such as: "Where's the remote control?" or "I bet nobody's g...
I tend to agree with Eliezer-February-2007:
"If you want to make a point about science, or rationality, then my advice is to not choose a domain from contemporary politics if you can possibly avoid it. If your point is inherently about politics, then talk about Louis XVI during the French Revolution. Politics is an important domain to which we should individually apply our rationality - but it's a terrible domain in which to learn rationality, or discuss rationality, unless all the discussants are already rational."
"I guess we can try to have a debate in the philosophies about appropriate response, but I know if some dude ran a plane into my house, I'd want to kick his ass."
As I keep trying to explain to Bush Plan supporters: that is exactly what we are failing to do, and it is precisely because of the stupidity (or "inappropriateness" if you prefer) of our response to the attack that we are failing to do it.
To put it in terms that the unashamedly "WHUP ASS!!" crowd can understand: the perpetrators have probably become exhausted from rol...
NYC 9/11 Survivor. Generally during a gunfight, it is a bad idea to let the enemy know
he has hurt you. The voices of civilians placed at risk and even the voices of
civilian HEROES, including the building maintenance crew were NOT HEARD.
TV and media focus on Guliani, presidential candidate. His choice of 'command center'
was located at Ground Zero and could not be used. Confusion reigned, according to the
Village Voice.
Fury and folly together is dangerous. Many guys when lost, speed up I am angry I am late.
They rarely consider asking others for direc...
steven: I looked for that same quote. What's happened in comments was so predictable, and Yudkowsky must have known any abstract point about bias would be lost. Even got Truthers scuttling out from under their rock. Maybe he was trying to attract more eyeballs (reddit), fair enough if so, awfully close to trolling.
An personal observation: best for me to learn to address the way of thinking, not the thought.
With that in mind, I thought I'd address a thought or two...
First, the discussion about "bravery" vs "cowardice" is dumb.
One can be brave and cowardly at the same time. You can bravely
perform a cowardly act. Easy.
Secondly, it occurs to me that a "real" war would require a draft.
If this is the Monumental Challenge of the Centuries (as we are told
it is), then why, OH WHY, don't we have conscription? Absolutely no
need for shortages of soldiers...!...draft everyone! Easy.
Of course if that happened, this phoney-baloney war would be over
in 10 minutes.
In essence, this entire worldw...
Burger flipper, as nearly as I can recall, those were literally my first three conscious reactions with no intervening thoughts. Could be retrospective distortion, but I think I summarized those three thoughts shortly after 9/11 (same day?) so it's not quite a first attempt to recall after years. As you say, though, retrospective distortion is subtle. I'd rate the probability higher than 0.02 though. (Doesn't alter the logic of the post either way, except to point up that the overreaction was foreseeable in advance, not just in hindsight.)
Steven and Ce...
Don't know if I can blame bad form on making 78 McSkillet Burritos.
That morning I was a fine display of generalizing from fictional evidence.
Most salient among my initial thoughts seeing the buildings on TV: that looks like the end of Fight Club.
Then on the drive in I was listening to NPR. A reporter was live on air and on site as the plane struck the Pentagon. From that I extrapolated (momentarily) the existence of a far larger plot.
Had this blog only existed back then.
However, the most impressive reaction I'm aware of came from an high school chum of...
"Thank goodness it wasn't nuclear."
Don't thank goodness just yet. It will be. Probably not in Palo Alto, but Washington DC is a good bet.
After that you'll see an "over reaction" to remember.
Rely upon it.
Well I find an underreaction from the people who if they investigated some facts about 9/11 would see it had to be an inside job. No hijackers they weren't on the flight lists. They say they ID'd everybody in the planes including the hijackers. Where did they get the DNA to check that? Go back one day 09/10/01 and goodle Donald Rumsfailed at the Pentagon and see him announce that the Pentagon has misplaced 2.3 TRILLION Dollars. And what luck 9/11 the next day so no more questions about the missing money. We never should have bombed anybody for 9/11 except ...
For the record, as far as my knowledge goes, the reasons George Washington won against the English are:
1) He avoided fighting battles that could lead to a decisive English victory; all he had to do was "not lose" and make the English keep spending resources to try to finish his forces off. Until...
2) Benjamin Franklin was able to persuade France to lend military support. France had a military as strong as England; it was basically the French army that won the American colonies their independence.
Wow, have I gotten off-topic...
One morning, I got out of bed, turned on my computer, and my Netscape email client automatically downloaded that day's news pane. On that particular day, the news was that two hijacked planes had been flown into the World Trade Center.
These were my first three thoughts, in order:
A mere factor of "ten times worse" turned out to be a vast understatement. Even I didn't guess how badly things would go. That's the challenge of pessimism; it's really hard to aim low enough that you're pleasantly surprised around as often and as much as you're unpleasantly surprised.
Nonetheless, I did realize immediately that everyone everywhere would be saying how awful, how terrible this event was; and that no one would dare to be the voice of restraint, of proportionate response. Initially, on 9/11, it was thought that six thousand people had died. Any politician who'd said "6000 deaths is 1/8 the annual US casualties from automobile accidents," would have been asked to resign the same hour.
No, 9/11 wasn't a good day. But if everyone gets brownie points for emphasizing how much it hurts, and no one dares urge restraint in how hard to hit back, then the reaction will be greater than the appropriate level, whatever the appropriate level may be.
This is the even darker mirror of the happy death spiral—the spiral of hate. Anyone who attacks the Enemy is a patriot; and whoever tries to dissect even a single negative claim about the Enemy is a traitor. But just as the vast majority of all complex statements are untrue, the vast majority of negative things you can say about anyone, even the worst person in the world, are untrue.
I think the best illustration was "the suicide hijackers were cowards". Some common sense, please? It takes a little courage to voluntarily fly your plane into a building. Of all their sins, cowardice was not on the list. But I guess anything bad you say about a terrorist, no matter how silly, must be true. Would I get even more brownie points if I accused al Qaeda of having assassinated John F. Kennedy? Maybe if I accused them of being Stalinists? Really, cowardice?
Yes, it matters that the 9/11 hijackers weren't cowards. Not just for understanding the enemy's realistic psychology. There is simply too much damage done by spirals of hate. It is just too dangerous for there to be any target in the world, whether it be the Jews or Adolf Hitler, about whom saying negative things trumps saying accurate things.
When the defense force contains thousands of aircraft and hundreds of thousands of heavily armed soldiers, one ought to consider that the immune system itself is capable of wreaking more damage than 19 guys and four nonmilitary airplanes. The US spent billions of dollars and thousands of soldiers' lives shooting off its own foot more effectively than any terrorist group could dream.
If the USA had completely ignored the 9/11 attack—just shrugged and rebuilt the building—it would have been better than the real course of history. But that wasn't a political option. Even if anyone privately guessed that the immune response would be more damaging than the disease, American politicians had no career-preserving choice but to walk straight into al Qaeda's trap. Whoever argues for a greater response is a patriot. Whoever dissects a patriotic claim is a traitor.
Initially, there were smarter responses to 9/11 than I had guessed. I saw a Congressperson—I forget who—say in front of the cameras, "We have forgotten that the first purpose of government is not the economy, it is not health care, it is defending the country from attack." That widened my eyes, that a politician could say something that wasn't an applause light. The emotional shock must have been very great for a Congressperson to say something that... real.
But within two days, the genuine shock faded, and concern-for-image regained total control of the political discourse. Then the spiral of escalation took over completely. Once restraint becomes unspeakable, no matter where the discourse starts out, the level of fury and folly can only rise with time.
Addendum: Welcome redditors! You may also enjoy A Fable of Science and Politics and Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided.