SARS,or Severe Acute Resperatory Syndrome, was a front and center issue in 2002 and 2003. It killed over 8,000 people worldwide, and received a lot of news coverage. Interestingly, the thing that sets SARS apart from most other diseases, the fact that it killed a disproportionate number of healthy adults, was not something that received a lot of followup. Most diseases affect the young and the elderly in larger numbers than the mid-adult population, SARS bucked that trend.
Without getting into a lot of technical mumbojumbo about pulmonary edema and antibody response, the reason SARS kills more of the healthy population is pretty simple: the virus that causes the illness (SARS-CoV) is ineffective and clumsy. People with suppressed immune systems have survived where healthy people have not. The reason for this is that it is the body's immune response (killing the virus and trying to get rid its waste) that causes the victim's lungs to fill with fluid. The stronger the immune system, the stronger the response, and the more rapidly the victim's lungs fill with fluid. In essence, the more healthy the victim, the faster their life is put in danger. It's the body's own reaction that puts the victim at risk by perverting disease-fighting resources to a self-destructive end.
In conventional war the goal is control. Control requires resources: people, productivity, etc. When fighting a war, one group of resources (governments, industries, populations) allied with one controlling entity try to destroy similar resources which support a rival. For the human race, this is pretty old-hat. Wars are documented in all societies from the stone age forward. Happily, societies with comparable productivity are usually mutually tolerant. Wholly incompatible societies are usually separated widely enough on the resource-and-capability scale that most wars are relatively short. Yes, there are exceptions, but many wars are so brief that they're decided fact before they make the news. It averages out.
Terrorism is quite different. It has two pathologies: intimidation and perversion. Intimidation is the most overt of the two which is why on the surface terrorism seems to fail so blatantly. From the Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes to the 9/11 hijackings of Al Qaeda, the targetted population wasn't swayed in the direction of the attackers. It was completely and strongly against. Seemingly, terrorism had failed.
That, unfortunately, is only half of the story. Like SARS, terrorism's main damage is dealt by perverting normally healthy responses to destructive ends. Terrorist attacks can redirect a huge amount of resource toward ends which benefit the country virtually nothing, stunting its normal growth. On the order of a trillion dollars have already been spent by the United States trying to prevent additional plane-related attacks. In all likelihood, virtually every dollar was wasted. The other reaction: waging war upon Afghanistan, exerted sufficient control in the area that any similar hijacking plans which may have been in the offing were completely distrupted. Beyond that, the TSA, the DHS, etc., were merely public-facing efforts to put people at ease, and today represent billions in misspent resources.
Imagine for a moment the alternative history where reaction to the hijackings is delayed for a year: Al Qaeda kills 3,000 people on 9/11. The next day, everyone goes straight back to work and continues on. There are 3,000 less workers today, and there is some societal capability lost, but the other 339,997,000 Americans go back to work. On 9/12, Al Qaeda sacrifices another 20 of its zealots and kills another 3,000 americans. Rinse and repeat for one year. This assumes that Al Qaeda could field and fund over 7,000 suicidal zealots and find 365 locales densely populated enough to kill 3,000 people every day. In the course of this "year at war",the United States would have lost less than one third of one percent of its population. Finally the United States launches a war in Afghanistan, removes the support Al Qaeda was receiving, and then goes back to normal operations. In the past 10 years, that United States would have had a trillion government dollars to spend on health care, spaceflight, and fighting off the mortage crisis; in short on everything else the United States does.
Nineteen hijackers in exchange for three thousand dead Americans and "a woken, angry giant" is a lousy trade. Nineteen hijackers in exchange for removing $100 billion per year from the US economy could be considered quite a coup. Perhaps, as the 10th anniversary of these attacks approaches, we should consider rethinking our priorities.
