Hesiod, over at Counterspin, takes aim at the righties, assailing them for using the fact that the overall number of terrorist attacks are apparently down as evidence that we are winning. He is absolutely right to say that this is a really stupid way to measure our success. His point, basically, is that the overall number of attacks means very little if the sophistication or scale of the attacks has escalated (which, one could argue, has happened).
However, he veers off into his own pretty stupid way of measuring our success. Hesiod seems to wants to do a body count. If there are less bodies this year than last, then we're winning, otherwise, not so much. My guess is that he doesn't really mean this. My assumption is (because I like Counterspin) that Hesiod is just reacting to the idiocy of the righties with a little idiocy of his own.
The fact is we can't measure our success in this war based on numbers of dead or numbers of attacks. I don't think there are good numbers out there that allow us to make an honest assessment. One of the reasons I think President Bush's push for a War On Terror is so dishonest is because he has yet to spell out what we should view as terrorism, nor how to defeat it, nor how to tell if we've won. With this kind of War on Terror, we'll be fighting forever.
So maybe the Righties rejoice because there's fewer terrorist attacks. Even so, there were still many many attacks (as Hesiod points out). And maybe the lefties condemn because more people are being killed in ever increasingly devious ways. But even if fewer people had been killed, can we say that terror has been vanquished? How do you fight a war on a tactic, on methods? How do you assess such a war?
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