The “war on terror” is now almost as long as World War II

Christopher Hitchens writes: “The time elapsed between Sept. 11, 2001, and today’s writing (1,364 days) is only slightly less than the time between Pearl Harbor and the unconditional surrender of Japan (1,365 days). And airport security is still a silly farce that subjects the law-abiding to collective punishment while presenting almost no deterrent to a determined suicide-killer.”

Hitchens’s math is slightly off. Based on a Word macro I have that calculates the number of days elapsed between any two dates, the time from September 11, 2001 to today is 1,335 days, and the time from December 7, 1941 to August 14, 1945 is 1,346 days. So we’re 11 days short of the entire time we spent fighting World War II. Yet Hitchens’s substantive point about our failure to deal effectively with airport security issues is certainly correct. The situation is beyond outrageous. And my complaint goes well beyond Hitchens’s. What we ought to do is remove from America the people who put us at risk. Instead, we patiently submit ourselves to demeaning treatment in airports, as though we were the guilty ones. Under Bush’s leadership, we’re a nation of sheep—sheep boasting about how tough we are.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 08, 2005 11:05 AM | Send