Death Toll as Measure of Success

Andrew Sullivan quotes the Economist:

What the attacks also show, however, is that well co-ordinated though the four explosions were, they were not terribly effective. Chance plays a big role in such attacks. The bombs in Madrid last year which killed 191 people might have killed many more had the station roof collapsed. The September 11th hijackings might have killed fewer than the eventual 2,752 had the twin towers of the World Trade Centre not melted down and collapsed. As The Economist went to press, the toll in the four London bombs was not clear, but the estimate of at least 33 deaths was thankfully far smaller than in Madrid. By the terrible calculus of terrorism, the attacks should thus be counted as a failure - sign of weakness, not strength.

I don't think death toll is a proper measure of the success or failure of a terrorist attack. Whether 2700 or 700 people died on 9/11, the resultant fear and, yes, terror would have been the same. The terror comes not from the death toll but from the image of skyscrapers burning and crashing to the ground. It comes from the total uncertainty of not knowing if the bus or subway train I take to work in the morning is going to blow up.

The terrorists' goal is not to kill as many as possible, though they probably do want that. Rather their goal is to spread fear and make that fear pervasive in our lives, so pervasive that we will go to great lengths to make it stop. The terrorists win when we give into that fear, as the people of Spain did after the Madrid bombings. The terrorists lose when we shrug off that fear.

The London attacks would have to be considered a failure, not because relatively few people died, but because the people of London got on with their lives. Sullivan's blog is full of accounts yesterday of people going to the pub, reading the latest soccer news, playing cricket, etc. Rather than being paralyzed with fear, the people of London lived their lives. As one emailer is quoted on his blog, "It's not callousness or indifference to carry on as normal, it's quiet defiance."