Comments on: A man of war http://antonyloewenstein.com/2006/10/18/a-man-of-war/ Wed, 23 May 2012 14:39:02 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 By: Andrew Worssam http://antonyloewenstein.com/2006/10/18/a-man-of-war/comment-page-1/#comment-16701 Andrew Worssam Fri, 20 Oct 2006 07:01:28 +0000 http://antonyloewenstein.com/blog/2006/10/18/a-man-of-war/#comment-16701 What a poisonous bucket of unquestioning groupthink that lecture must have been. Don't you love how Israel has hitched its wagon so successfully to the War on Terror? It seemed about 5 minutes after 9/11 that Arafat was equated with Bin Laden and off they went from there. For a long awaited (for me) overview of the War on Terror, have a look at the Sept/Oct 2006 Foreign Affairs journal piece by John Mueller, entitled "Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?: The Myth of the Omnipresent Enemy" A sample: "But while keeping such potential dangers in mind, it is worth remembering that the total number of people killed since 9/11 by al Qaeda or al Qaeda­like operatives outside of Afghanistan and Iraq is not much higher than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States in a single year, and that the lifetime chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 80,000 -- about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor. Even if there were a 9/11-scale attack every three months for the next five years, the likelihood that an individual American would number among the dead would be two hundredths of a percent (or one in 5,000)." What a poisonous bucket of unquestioning groupthink that lecture must have been. Don't you love how Israel has hitched its wagon so successfully to the War on Terror? It seemed about 5 minutes after 9/11 that Arafat was equated with Bin Laden and off they went from there. For a long awaited (for me) overview of the War on Terror, have a look at the Sept/Oct 2006 Foreign Affairs journal piece by John Mueller, entitled "Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?: The Myth of the Omnipresent Enemy"

A sample: "But while keeping such potential dangers in mind, it is worth remembering that the total number of people killed since 9/11 by al Qaeda or al Qaeda­like operatives outside of Afghanistan and Iraq is not much higher than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States in a single year, and that the lifetime chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 80,000 — about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor. Even if there were a 9/11-scale attack every three months for the next five years, the likelihood that an individual American would number among the dead would be two hundredths of a percent (or one in 5,000)."

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