Suppose They Gave a War...

By way of a book review, Brian Doherty over at Reason.com, makes a point about fighting terrorism, fighting any enemy for that matter, that simply has to be answered.  The book is in part about the "first war on terror", that is, the fight against the terror practised by anarchists and associated radicals during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  As Doherty sees it, that war, like today's, was largely unnecessary.

In the late 19th century, as today, a terrorist cabal detonated bombs in the heart of the Western world. Judged by the number of successful attacks on politicians and royalty, that force was more directly threatening to the inner circles of power than today’s radical Islam.

This episodic violence, loosely associated with the extremist wing of the anarchist movement, lasted roughly from 1880 to 1910. It claimed the lives of only about 150 private citizens but also killed a president, a police chief, a prime minister, a czar, a king, and an empress. Yet the wave of terror eventually receded. No one has lived in mortal fear of bomb-throwing, dagger-clutching anarchists for nearly a century. Will citizens in 2110 view radical Islamic terrorism as a similar historical curiosity, useful mostly for colorful storytelling?...

...To the powers of the time, the anarchist threat was not to be downplayed or doubted. After the anarchist-linked Leon Czolgosz assassinated U.S. President William McKinley, McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, issued a pronouncement that presaged George W. Bush’s rhetoric about the post-9/11 threat of radical Islam: “When compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance.”...

...As history has shown, Roosevelt was wrong about the significance of the anarchist threat. So was George W. Bush when he used the jihadist threat as an excuse for policies that may have done far more to damage America and elsewhere than they did to prevent attacks.

I've seen more and more of this kind argument lately and there is a huge, glaring, problem with it.  That is, you cannot prove a negative.  Noone can say anything about what would have become of anarchist terrorism had it not been resisted.  Similarly, no one can say what the world would look like today had the US in effect shrugged its collective shoulders after 9/11.

When it's not motivated by liberal self-loathing (which in this case it may well be), the temptation to this kind of thinking is, somewhat, understandable.  It's certainly predictable.  It goes something like this:

The anarchists did not succeed in the early 20th Century, nor have the jihadist successfully attacked the US since 9/11.  So maybe we over-reacted, in fact, maybe we didn't need to react at all.  Moreover, we know that all big endeavors are accompanied by inefficiency and outright waste.  We also know that when the big endeavor involves the use of armed forces, sadly, that waste includes not only treasure, but human life as well. 

But, while the costs of taking action are, or at least become, obvious, the costs of doing too little or nothing at all are not so.
.