Bell is a historian, so he takes the long view of current events.  In the grand march of history, he argues, there are plenty of incidents bloodier than 9/11.  Although Islamic terrorists despise the United States and have sworn to destroy it, they lack the means to do so.  Therefore they do not pose an existential threat to the U.S. The threat they do pose, though serious, has been overblown by right-wingers for political purposes.

Bell’s complacency is astonishing.  “[I[t is no disrespect to the victims of 9/11, or to the men and women of our armed forces, to say that, by the standards of past wars, the war against terrorism has so far inflicted a very small human cost on the United States.” He writes.  “As an instance of mass murder, the attacks were unspeakable, but they still pale in comparison with any number of military assaults on civilian targets of the recent past, from Hiroshima on down.”

The key phrase in that last passage is “so far.”  Bell, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins, is no fool.  He knows that in the current conflict any city in America could become another Hiroshima, or worse.  So he hedges his bets accordingly.

But of course, nothing like that is likely to happen, Bell assures us:

[D]espite the even more nightmarish fantasies of the post-9/11 era (e.g. the TV show "24's" nuclear attack on Los Angeles), Islamist terrorists have not come close to deploying weapons other than knives, guns and conventional explosives. A war it may be, but does it really deserve comparison to World War II and its 50 million dead? Not every adversary is an apocalyptic threat.

Here, Bell confuses means with intent.  It’s true that to date that the terrorists have been unable to launch a WMD attack on the United States and its allies.  But they dearly want to do so, and they are trying, trying.  Furthermore, the means to destroy on a vast scale are becoming easier to obtain by the day.  North Korea and Iran are cooperating closely in the development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.  This effort has scared the pants off a number of Sunni states in the Middle East, including Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, all of which recently announced a crash program to develop nuclear energy for “peaceful” means.  So there will be more enough nukes floating around the Middle East soon.  And let’s not forget the countries of the former USSR, which continue to leak nuclear materials like a sieve, feeding a thriving black market.  Who does Bell think he’s kidding?

Bell also criticizes the tendency of Americans to view every foreign threat as an apocalyptic menace, which he sees as a legacy of Enlightenment philosophy.  For many Americans, he writes, “the ‘Islamo-fascist’ enemy has inherited not just Adolf Hitler’s implacable hatreds but his capacity to destroy.”  However even a stopped clock is right twice a day.  Islamic terrorists really do pose a mortal threat to the United States, something that wasn’t true of say, the Viet Cong.  It takes a lot of education to blind yourself to a threat staring you in the face.

Actually, the jihad poses a far greater threat to the U.S. than Hitler ever did.  For all his evil, Hitler was the head of a conventional nation-state.  Once we took down Germany, the threat was over.  In addition, Hitler didn’t have the nukes.  He did have chemical weapons, but was deterred from using them by threats of Allied retaliation.  And that’s the point: as ruler of Germany, Hitler had an address.  We knew where to find him when he needed to be stopped.  The terrorists are distributed in many countries.  Also, unlike Hitler and his minions, they view themselves fighters in a religious war.  As an historian Bell should know that religious wars are far more protracted and difficult to conclude than wars between states.

To Bell’s credit, he doesn’t advocate bringing the troops home from Iraq and throwing in the towel on the GWOT:

[A]s the comparison with the Soviet experience should remind us, the war against terrorism has not yet been much of a war at all, let alone a war to end all wars. It is a messy, difficult, long-term struggle against exceptionally dangerous criminals who actually like nothing better than being put on the same level of historical importance as Hitler — can you imagine a better recruiting tool? To fight them effectively, we need coolness, resolve and stamina. But we also need to overcome long habit and remind ourselves that not every enemy is in fact a threat to our existence.

I like the part about coolness, resolve and stamina.  But Bell’s implication that we’ve absorbed the worst the terrorists can inflict is tragically wrong.  And the terrorists are most certainly not “criminals.”  Thinking like that is how we got into this mess.  If we want to win this thing we need to see the terrorists for what they are and steel ourselves for the long and bloody struggle ahead.

All of this is anathema to the Left, which is focused, as always, on gaining power by promising to increase the size of the welfare state.  Democrats mouth pro-war pieties, but fighting for the future of western Civilization is clearly not on their agenda.  As Riehl World View notes, “The Left and the Dems are going to try and do everything they can to minimize the threat from radical Islam, because when push comes to shove, they lack the courage, will and foresight to fight, even in a just cause.”  Their message to Americans, as articulated by Professor Bell, is: go back to sleep.