Is the rest of the world braver than the US?

Great Debates
1

Even with all the doubts I had for the past months, it can’t be denied that the Iraq election was a massive success. And the credit goes solely to the Iraqi people, who braved all the threats and were proud to show their inked fingers.

And this got me thinking. Even with all the bombings and killings, the Iraqi election was a massive success. Bombings are fairly regular in Israel, and the people there don’t hide in fear. They accept it as a possible risk of life and they go about their business. In WWII, the Germans bombed London at night, and people continued going to work in the morning.

How many people do you think would have turned out to vote if our presidential election was scheduled for the day after September 11th, 2001? I’m thinking 5% would be an extremely optimistic figure. I understand that it was a fairly shocking thing to occur here, but with all the points being made about “going about our lives or the terrorists have won,” we didn’t. Our country’s functionality seemed to completely shut down for a week, and with all of the scares and color changes, it seems that we have continued to live in a perpetual state of fear since. Granted, some of it may be politically motivated, but a large number of people seem to fall for it regardless.

So why is it that the rest of the world can stand so defiantly in the face of terrorism and we cannot?

2

I say 70%. Prove me wrong.

Sorry, but I haven’t a clue how you’ve derived that 5% figure. Can you give any factual support to it at all? If you do, I’ll have to concede, because I pulled mine straight out of my bum.

While it is true that a New York state primary election scheduled for the day after the attacks was postponed, IIRC this was mainly due to the logistical difficulty of moving about in New York City at that time.

Re: your other point, firstly, outside of airline transportation, Manhattan and possibly parts of Washington, DC the US did not in fact shut down for a week after the September 11th bombings; I certainly worked all that week, including September 11 itself, and most everyone I know did too. What shutdown there was, IMO, was in part because the US could afford to. That is, the US was not at that point in a shooting war with a major power, or fighting a widespread insurgency on its own soil and thus not at immediate risk of destroying its economy or opening itself to invasion by an aggressor.

Your OP fails to establish that this is the case.

3

We can only hope a thing like that never has to be proven.

I didn’t even know about the primary elections being scheduled for the next day.

Well, this is where the argument gets pretty opinionated I suppose, but that’s why this is in GD and not GQ. Since 9/11 the airline companies have suffered severely because people were too afraid to fly. Waits at the airports were 3 or 4 hours, and, from what I hear, often still are (I wouldn’t know first hand, I wasn’t much of a flyer before 9/11 and I don’t see my interest in flying increasing anytime soon). The level of detail to which some people have to endure searches sounds pretty ludicrous. Color changes in our national security level seem to have been used as a political tool in the months leading up to our last election. The Patriot Act was passed which threatens many of our privacies.

Cheney actually went as far to say that Kerry winning WOULD result in another attack. Bush frequently mentioned terrorism, the threat of more terrorism, and the events of 9/11 while running against Kerry. He used those fears to promote a preemptive strike against a country that was in no way affiliated with the people that attacked us. In the list of things that people fear, terrorism seems to be towards the top, despite the fact that the only things that happened after 9/11 were a few scattered anthrax scares.

People don’t seem to accept that sometimes shit happens. Timothy McVeigh was not a Muslim extremist, and neither were Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. But they were equally capable of committing acts of terror. People don’t seem to want to accept that there IS no sure fire way of being completely safe from any harm. Terrorism is still a large fear in this country, even though that is the thing you are LEAST likely to die from if you were to die tomorrow.

That doesn’t seem much like “standing our ground” in the face of terrorism to me. It seems more like a frightened cat being backed into the corner and clawing at anything that comes near.

4

I hate to pick nits here, but the courage of the Iraqi people has been bolstered by American soldiers, tanks, planes and guns. Keep in mind that this is the first free election in 50 some-odd years, not to take anything away from them, but if they were as brave as you make them seem, this election would have come by force many years ago. Rather, it took the combination of our might and their perserverance to make this election a reality

IMO, Americans are soft. They haven’t had to deal with the problems of the rest of the world because our military has shielded us from the really, really bad stuff. That, and because our country is so very large, and so very spread out, it makes true military occupation damn near logistically impossible.

I disagree with your assessment. I think the number would have been greater than 5%, but with the outcome potentially different, if the election would have been held at all. We shut down for a week because this kind of thing was new to us. We’ve never been attacked like that before. To paraphrase Charles Bukowski
“Our cities had never been bombed, and our mothers had never been told to shut-up”. Most of the alerts and warnings and color changes are, IMO, just political posturing. If they keep the populace afraid, they probably will not mind the hemmorhaging of money for wars that we we duped into funding.

The rest of the world has experience.

5

5%? Shit. Had the election been 9/12/01 it would have been the highest turnout ever. Maybe you would have stayed at home and hid, but I daresay most Americans would have seen voting as a way to flip off those who hate us.

There aren’t enough :rolleyes: for this one.

What are you SMOKING?

What planet have you been living on?

Who, pray tell, has been leading the war on terror?

Here’s a hint: not Spain.

6

Aah yes, the war on terror. I forgot that 12 of the hijackers were from Iraq.

Oh wait, none of them were.

Why haven’t we pursued terrorists in Saudi Arabia yet?

7

I don’t know why you think everyone was so paralyzed on 9/11 and 9/12. I went to a job interview THAT afternoon. I got a hamburger on the way home from the interview. I went to work the following morning. I took my girlfriend out the following night. The weirdest thing was seeing NO planes in the sky, and if you’re from the Dallas/Fort Worth area, you’ll remember how odd that was. (I can routinely count 15+ planes in the air at dusk, FWIW)

In other words, I didn’t do a damn thing differently afterward that I wouldn’t have done beforehand. Neither did anybody I know. All the stores were open, and it was business as usual on 9/12.

I’m with El_Kabong, in that I think a higher than average percentage would have voted on 9/12 if there had been some kind of election.

I think that one thing to keep in mind about the OP is that the 9/11/01 terrorist operations were spectactular in a way never before seen. There’s a huge difference between what happened then and relatively small-scale truck bombings or suicide bombings, such as what happen in Israel and used to happen in the UK. I rather suspect that if another nation had such a spectacular terrorist attack, they’d probably be a little stunned, and gun-shy afterwards too.

As for the airport security, I’m not sure who they’re placating- everybody seems kind of pissed while waiting in those lines, and realistically, any terrorists aren’t going to try that method again anyway.

8

<Dilbert> Don’t step in the leadership. </Dilbert>

9

Americans just aren’t used to being attacked. They have the benefit of geographic isolation from their enemies. But that’s not the same as being ‘soft’. Maybe ‘lazy’ is a better term. Because I think if the U.S. faces a truly existential threat like a nuclear attack or biological terror, you will see overwhelming support for a good ass-whuppin’. And if they get attacked back and killed in large numbers, they’ll do what any other threatened population does - fight harder.

Look at WWII. That’s what Democracies are capable of when facing a real threat to their existence. Total warfare. Carpet-bombing cities. Taking on entrenched enemies on their home islands in close combat, hand to hand… And losing thousands of men on the process. No one called Americans weak in that one. And they’re not calling them weak today. Remember when the Americans had a reputation for being weak, paper tigers? That’s not the case any more.

One of the reasons I was in favor of this war was because I felt that it was inevitable, and by delaying it we were only going to increase the size of the impending conflagration. A war with an Iraq ten or twenty years from now, after Saddam or his sons had two decades of sanction-free revenue to rebuild a military and work on WMD, missiles, and nukes, would have been one hell of a lot uglier than this one.

10

Actually I’ll mostly agree with you on that point, in that people generally have great difficulty accurately judging degrees of risk. Also, as a somewhat frequent flyer (and someone who loathes being touched by strangers), I find the current airport screening system highly invasive and frankly unnecessary, and would be more than happy to see it relaxed.

Nevertheless, I don’t think the responses to 9/11 necessarily represent cowardice, so much as they do an inability to accurately assess risk. Nor is it that much out of line with the resonse to other such outrages in other countries. Anecdotal, I know, but I was living in Paris during the mid-90’s, when a small cell of Algerian terrorists detonated a number of improvised bombs in that city, and I don’t think the French reaction at the time was any different in kind or degree from that of the US post-9/11.

As nasty as the OKC bombing and Columbine shootings were, these did not, in the end, give off the aura of coordinated, multi-pronged attacks that were likely to have a rapid follow-up that the Paris and 9/11 attacks did, nor did they cause anywhere near the death toll or physical damage of the 9/11 attacks. While I feel the US public response has been extreme and overly repressive, I can at least understand where it’s coming from due to the spectacular and highly televised nature of the outrages that caused it.

11

<bit of a rant here…blame it on that 5th scotch I had for dinner tonight>

I have to admit I’m scratching my head on this one. I wasn’t born in this country, but I’ve learned enough about my adopted nation to basically snort with derision at the notion that American’s are weak or cowardly. Soft perhaps, asleep for sure, oblivious to the world around them most definitely…but weak or cowardly? I can’t see how anyone could even think this after even a cursory examination of US history.

American’s are some of the most vicious people out there if riled…in fact, I think they are THE most violent people on earth, taken as a whole. If they think they are right and their cause is just they will never quit until they have burned down your house and pissed on the ashes. And they feel that they are in the right just about always. Kick them in the nuts (like Pearl Harbor and 9/11, or like when the South attempted to leave the Union) and they are going to come over to your house and kill you in your own kitchen…along with your entire family, any stray pets hanging around, and probably your neighbors too (for you non-hispanic types, this is a bad thing :wink: ).

For as long as there has been a United States other peoples have continually underestimated the US…especially in Europe. The British originally underestimated the US resolve to follow through with their revolution…and then underestimated them again in 1812 at a little place called New Orleans.

(sorry btw, but you can’t say that American’s have ‘never’ known what its like to have their cities burned or civilians killed in war…its just been a century or so since the last time it happened on a large scale).

During WWI and WWII the Europeans on both sides of the conflict underestimated the US’s resolve to fight…not just our ability (which, granted, was pretty poor…the US has always tried to just make money and let our military lapse into near uselessness…until the next critical emergency comes up and we have to throw young boys into the meat grinder with shit for equipment and little or no training. At least this was the case until fairly recently in our history), but our resolve to sustain casualties and not just tuck tail at the first sight of blood and run. The Japanese, with a few exceptions, also underestimated the US’s resolve to fight when faced with adversity.

The North Koreans and Chinese (and probably the Soviets too) underestimated the US’s resolve when the South was invaded…they expected us to tuck tail and bolt, especially when everything was going so badly and our military preparedness was so shitty (again, gut the military after a war to save money…at the cost of lives).

Only the Vietnamese probably gaged America’s resolve correctly (they obviously gaged the French resolve correctly too, but thats another story)…at the cost of several million Vietnamese and over a decade of vicious fighting to finally break it.

Saddam underestimated the US’s resolve in the first gulf war as well…and set the stage for eventually becoming the unwitting focus of America’s wrath. I’d say that ObL underestimated the US as well (to put it mildly)…he woke the sleeping giant by kicking it squarely in the nuts, and his buddies the Taliban payed the price by having a ton of bricks land squarely in their laps. I’m sure he figured to get us into another Soviet invasion of Afghanistan scenerio and bleed us white for a while, forcing us to tuck tail and leave him alone to build his little empire in the ME. It didn’t quite work out that way. And I’m starting to think that even though Iraq was a mistake for the US to invade, thats not going to work out so well for AQ either in the long run…in fact, it might just be the straw that breaks the camels back. Time will tell there.

A bewildered Saddam underestimated what was coming his way after 9/11, and instead of doing the smart thing and taking his large bank account and son’s and heading for milder climes chose to try and bluff it out…big mistake. Any fool could see that the American’s still hungered for blood, and that Saddam, rightly or wrongly, was at the top of the target list.

A better question for an OP might be…why do people continually underestimate the American’s? Does no one learn from history? Wouldn’t it be better to let them STAY asleep.

<end of rant>

I think the voter turn out would have been unusually high as American’s basically gave the middle finger to those who kicked us in the nuts when we weren’t looking.

Is the rest of the world braver than the US? What a ridiculous question.

-XT

12

The civil war was, as you say, a century ago. There likely isn’t a person alive who remembers that first hand. Meanwhile, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of WWII vets still exist. Men who know what it was like to have their city or town carpet bombed. Women who lost children to mortar fire on their way to school. No, the horrors of a real, all-out war are not a part of the American psyche anymore, and I’m glad, even though it makes us a bit soft.

13

I don’t think it makes us soft. I think it makes us being hard unnecessary. Americans are trained from childhood about how freedom is worth dying for and how so many had sacrificed their lives for you. It wasn’t a foreign army or a different class of American that dies either. It was your father’s fathers. I may be ignorant of some Americans, (mostly lefties) mainly because I am from the South and now live in the west, but almost everyone I know, including my grandmother, was ready to kick ass after 9/11 and would pretty much spit on anyone who told them to their faces that we need to lay low for a bit till things blew over.

IMO I am pretty sure that most Americans who support Bush, do so because he has kicked some ass despite the contrary attitudes of our so called allies. And I am also pretty sure that those who don’t like Bush are not pissed at Bush for other reasons than his not being a puss.

And, while I agree that the threat levels and teerorist warnings are somewhat political, it seems to me that any who believe Bush and support him don’t get scared and want us to pull back until the meanies go away. They agree with his “bring it on” attitude.

14

That pretty much sums it up! :stuck_out_tongue: [sup]anything else is superfluous.[/sup]

15

Yes because the rest of the world has been soooooo supportive of the war on terror.

Wooo…Europes sooo brave. I’m soooo scared.

I don’t know that they guaged our resolvel. They just wanted it more. And it still took like 12 years.

16

Thank you, you’ve reminded me why so many Spaniards, after 9/11, were saying “where were these guys while WE got bombed? Oh, YES, paying for lawyers for the terrorists!”

Including, for example, the lawyers for the guys who killed our VP in 1973. I would have liked to see what you thought if someone killed your VP, risking the lives of some 500 children in the process. Lots of people were (and still are) more indignant about the kids than about the VP, who was after all a career military man.

Hijoputa.

17

I’d have to say that to a certain degree, yes. Our response to 9-11 wasn’t that of a lazy people spurred to action- it was the action of a people very much used to projecting their power across the globe (quite often very violently) and not prepared for someone ‘projecting’ back.

The cries for bloodletting, the lashing out rather than any sort of well defined policy objectives…it strikes me as very cowardly, especially since many of our allies have dealt with the threat and reality of terrorism for years. It’s the whole ‘when all you have is a hammer…’ conundrum.

I don’t know what 9-11 would have done for election turnout…I think the case could be made either way. Though I doubt that the turnout would have favored any candidates other than the hawks and people willing to engage in the worst forms of demagoguery.

18

FTR, my folks were campaign workers and the primary was actually that very day, Sept. 11th. Around 11:00 am they were told to put the materials in the back of the machines, seal them, and leave the premises. No panic, nothing like that, but trouble is that election HQ was in Lower Manhattan and every cop in the city was called to active duty posts, including the ones who, by law, have to sit and eat donuts and read The Daily News and chat all day and then, at the end of the day, take the official tally sheets down to HQ.

Hell, the bridges were closed so we couldn’t even have gotten the machines to/from the Queens warehouse where they live! It’s the logistics of an election in a large city more than people refusing to come out that would make it hard.

The primaries were just rescheduled two weeks later and were pretty well-attended as I recall.

19

Yeah. Thumbs up to their US overlords.

20

I agree with much of this viewpoint. Had I been president on 9/11 I’m certain I wouldn’t have been reelected or even very popular. I just can’t see terrorism per se as such a threat to national existence as to require an overhaul of our justice system, air transportation system, and requiring a military response of the type used in Iraq.

I think that our massive overreaction with the consequent spending of billions upon billions and the erosion of fundamental civil rights as much more of a long term threat to our system than any terrorist.