Grant’s bottom line is that irrational fear has blown the WOT’s justification out of proportion.

Exactly. Irrational fear has blown this out of proportion when we consider that many more lives could be saved with relative ease but few people seem to even care about those things. Irrational fear has people scared of something that, at most, has killed a few thousand Americans in any one year while we overlook many much easier to handle issues that kill tens of thousands of Americans every year.

This doesn’t mean the WOT shouldn’t be fought. It just means that we should take things in persepective. By the end of this year, we will have added over $400 billion to our national debt over this issue. It’s debatable whether that money was well spent. However, what shouldn’t be debatable should be whether it would be wise to spend a small fraction of that kind of number to save many more lives than that money and the associated effort will save.

PING:
TITLE: Fear, necessity, freedom, despair, and hope
BLOG NAME: Independent Christian Voice
Jack Post writes a quite thought-provoking piece for The Moderate Voice, one so poignant that it was re-posted a second time. It’s well worth the read. Here’s an excerpt:
September 11, 2001 did not change the world, it merely changed our …

I love the gist of your article but did you honest just compare Robertson to Daily Kos?

Are you fucking kidding me? That comment is either a result of your complete ignorance of Daily Kos or you are just being a disingenious hack posing as a moderate.

They are not even remotely comparable.

Want to reduce highway deaths? Reduce speed limits. Little money spent, great savings in lives. No need to reduce WOT spending for that.

Did anyone say we SHOULD reduce WOT spending? The idea I took from this, which is one I have been trying to state for some time, is that we should keep threats in perspective. 40,000 Americans die every year in traffic accidents. Compared to the number of Americans who die every year from terrorism, that’s an astronomical number. With even a fraction of the money and effort we put toward saving Americans from terrorism, as you point out, we could save many more Americans from traffic accidents. Reduce speed limits and enforce them. It could end up generating as much money for local governments as it costs and could save thousands of lives every year.

I doubt Jack was suggesting that we put a halt to the WOT and I surely am not. However, we should consider putting things in perspective. We have spent $326 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan as a result of the loss of less than 3500 lives. What are we doing as a result of the loss of over 160,000 lives since that day?

This isn’t meant to downplay the severity of 9/11 or suggest that any one of the people who were lost on that day are less important than victims of traffic accidents. It also isn’t meant to suggest that the WOT is not a meaningful fight. However, if we’re going to spend $326 billion (so far) as a result of 3500 lives lost, why is little to nothing being done about the tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives lost every year that could have been saved with much less money and effort?

But that’s not the issue. There’s an rough indifference running through the post that’s troubles me. Take this: “Suppose that in 2011, terrorists get a nuclear weapon, and they get another in 2021, and each weapon kills approximately 100,000 (based upon the crude bombs used at the end of World War II) …” And maybe this: “yet, in total, how many people were affected [on 9-11]? Less than 3,500 for all the events in the last months of 2001.”

To me, these statements are akin to the over-the-top example for which William Bennett was roundly criticized last summer.

Presumably we “accept” 40,000 US highway deaths because the cost of driving is far outweighed by the benefits of driving- we all understand this. Where is the comparable cost-benefit analysis for terrorism?

You’re talking as if his proposal was do away with terror vs. do away with driving. It’s not.

We have spent how many billion dollars in reaction to a few thousand deaths in one year? How many thousands of lives could have been saved had we spent that money on making our highways safer?

Look at the cost-benefit analysis this way. If we spend half of the money we are spending on fighting terrorism to make our highways safer, we could easily double the number of lives we save every year. How about that cost-benefit analysis? Half the money spent, more than twice as many lives saved.

But let’s assume that the Yardstick is a valid measure of determining the relevance of events. Then why’s everyone in a big toot about Iraq? It doesn’t even register using the Yardstick’s measure. Vietnam? No biggie- barely 1.25 Yardsticks over a 10 year period. Pearl Harbor? Gimme a break!

Do we really want to quantify our measure of events this way? I think not.