LEFTIST PROF SAYS 9/11 WAS NOTHING COMPARED TO SOVIET LOSSES

You've got to hand it to the extreme left. When they let it all hang out, they let it all hang out.

In today's Lost Angeles Fishwrap, Johns Hopkins Professor of French History David Avrom Bell opines that the atrocities of September Eleventh weren't really all that bad. He thinks we're over-reacting:

IMAGINE THAT on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism.

What's so beautiful about his opening paragraph, is that he reveals his hard-left background in the choice of his comparison.

If you wanted to compare the number of American casualties on September Eleventh to some other, far higher figure, it would be possible to choose the total American casualties in World War II, or the total United States and Confederate States casualties in the War Between the States, or any number of other conflicts.

But the real homeland of the hard left will forever be the "Soviet Union." Thus I surmise that Professor Bell developed in a hard-left milieu. How he must have loved writing "the Soviet Union." I wonder if the copy editors at the L.A. Times edited out his references to the "heroic sacrifices of the Soviet working class" in the "Great Patriotic War." Can't you hear the strains of the "Internationale" in the background? Or is it "Meadowlands?"

No, nothing the United States has suffered will ever match the christlike agony of the heroic Soviet commissars, and until the United States does suffer like the Soviets did, leftist professors like David Avrom Bell will have no sympathy with their own country and their own government.

What Professor Bell is suggesting is of course an idiot's program, anyway. The whole point of a vigorous and proactive defense strategy is not to wait until half the country is bled away by the Islamist murderers, but to act forcefully to eradicate the menace before it gets any worse than it is. As it is, America's failure to react forcefully to the kidnapping of our Embassy in Teheran in 1979, to the Iranian-Hezbollah attack on the Marine Barracks in Beirut in 1983, to the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, to the Iranian-Hezbollah bombing of the Khobar complex in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the bombings of our Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, to the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 -- our unwillingness to confront the escalating campaign of open warfare against us emboldened our enemies, and convinced them that they could get away with a mass-murder attack on American soil.

Now of course Professor Bell does recognize the seriousness of the threat that our enemies think they are making:

Certainly, if we look at nothing but our enemies' objectives, it is hard to see any indication of an overreaction. The people who attacked us in 2001 are indeed hate-filled fanatics who would like nothing better than to destroy this country. But desire is not the same thing as capacity, and although Islamist extremists can certainly do huge amounts of harm around the world, it is quite different to suggest that they can threaten the existence of the United States.

What Professor Bell does not realize is how "fourth generation warfare" has changed the rules in this new age of Islamist terror. Before the advent of true weapons of mass-destruction and the concentration of Western economic control in a few highly-networked centers, it would have been impossible to destroy the United States without a large mechanized army, a huge navy, and an air arm, and all of it backed by an eight-cylinders-pounding engine of an industrial economy. Nowadays, however, a few well-placed low-level thermonuclear weapons would deliver a devastating blow to the nation's economic capital, and the information infrastructure on which so much of our economic life depends.

More importantly, the hard left already wants us to surrender to the Islamist jihadists. Professor Bell thinks that you and I are over-reacting:

Yet a great many Americans, particularly on the right, have failed to make this distinction. For them, the "Islamo-fascist" enemy has inherited not just Adolf Hitler's implacable hatreds but his capacity to destroy. The conservative author Norman Podhoretz has gone so far as to say that we are fighting World War IV (No. III being the Cold War).

So what Professor Bell is saying, is don't kill the serpent that has just hatched from its egg. Let it grow. Let it kill tens of millions of innocent Americans. THEN he thinks we would be justified in all-out war against it.

Well, let me clue you, Professor Bell. The whole point of a credible defense strategy is to prevent that from happening. But of course, hard-leftists like Professor Bell want America to be defeated. They want America to be humbled. They want American power and influence to disappear.

Think I'm kidding? Professor Bell has another opinion piece on the web this week, published in the hard-left British Guardian. In it Professor Bell has this to say about how he thinks the "War on Terror" began with the over-reaching of the French Revolution in the Napoleonic period (I know the juxtaposition is bizarre, but early 19th century French history is his fach, so you can't blame him for dragging it in whenever he can. It makes it seem as if he knows what he's talking about.) This is what Professor Bell has to say:

Guided by these arguments, the leaders of revolutionary France willingly leapt into the abyss of total war. And ever since, western leaders from Bonaparte to Bush have found it all too easy to present wars of conquest as apocalyptic contests between civilization and darkness. Meanwhile, the earlier regime of restraints has proven difficult to resurrect. It is enough to make us ask if we are really quite as enlightened as we like to think, and if we might not have something to learn from the aristocratic warriors whom the philosophes derided as walking anachronisms.

Got that? He is arguing that the "War Against Terror" is a War of Conquest. The best that this historical cracked pot can come up with is warmed-over Marxist-Leninist claptrap, imperialism, and blood for oil. A war of conquest for oil? When Saddam was begging and scheming with the UN to sell as much oil as he could to anybody who would buy it, we had to go to war for oil? Only an over-educated Marxist-Leninist professor could believe such crap.

Oh, and it certainly isn't a war of civilization against darkness. No way.

For of course from the standpoint of a die-hard Marxist-Leninist (and you'll have to admit that any Marxist-Leninists who are still standing tall in the 21st century, after the abject failure of every Marxist "worker's paradise" on earth must be pretty die-hard) with an ingrained propensity to excuse the tens of millions of murders and tortures carried out by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the rest of that insane and criminal gang, the beheadings, stonings, mass-murder bombings, and mass-murder gassings of the Usama Bin Ladens, the Saddams, and the rest of that insane and criminal gang just don't seem like "darkness." For a hard-core leftist, that's just all in a day's work, because, as Walter Duranty used to say, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. UPDATE: complete round up at MEMORANDUM.