Thanks to Lawyers, Guns and Money's Robert Farley for
pointing out that
Condoleezza Rice said that al-Qaeda was a bigger threat to the United States than Nazi Germany, in a Q&A session with students. (Yes, it's videotaped.)
Q: Even in World War II facing Nazi Germany, probably the greatest threat that America has ever faced –
RICE: Uh, with all due respect, Nazi Germany never attacked the homeland of the United States.
Q: No, but they bombed our allies –
RICE: No, just a second, just a second. Three-thousand Americans died in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
Q: 500,000 died in World War II –
RICE: Fighting a war in Europe.
Q: — and yet we did not torture the prisoners of war.
RICE: We didn’t torture anybody here either.
So: al-Qaeda is a bigger threat to the United States than Nazi Germany. Think about that one for a bit.
The original blogger argues that "[i]t’s hard not to read this as an admission by our former Secretary of State that terrorism works — or at least it worked on her, to the extent that it induced her to embrace interrogation methods that previous American administrations
prosecuted as crimes. Farley also notes that, "[i]n fact, the German Kriegsmarine sank approximately 600 US and Allied merchant vessels in and around US territorial waters between January and June 1942. These attacks came shortly after Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. Approximately 1500 American sailors were killed in these attacks. I suspect that an attack on an American ship in US territorial waters would be interpreted by just about anyone as an attack on the homeland of the United States."
From Canada, I'd also add the
1942 torpedoing of the
Newfoundland ferry S.S. Caribou, at a cost of 137 dead, as an attack against the Canadian mainland, to say nothing of other attacks on ships the German weather-monitoring stations placed at various points on the Atlantic coast.
What all these means is that, while al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations can do horrible things (assuming that their agents can get past the ever-tightening webs of police and state surveillance, that is), the only organization capable of credibly challenging the existence of a state is another state. If I'm alone and say I plan on destroying Canada, or even if I'm hanging out with a few hundred friends, in person and via social networking, who will say the same thing alongside me, even if we all pledge our energies towards destroying this country, who likely are we to succeed? Really. Police measures are more suited than military interventions, and panic is not your friend regardless else you say silly things like the above and act accordingly. *
* Unless we're talking about military interventions against states which are involved, seriously at least, in supporting terrorist attacks. That's a different story.