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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

I hear that a lot, but the truth is that the next Perl Harbour has already happened. It was a surprise aerial attack on a strategic port city back in 2001. Almost 3,000 people were killed.

I don't believe any cyber attack is likely to be that dramatic or destructive for the same reasons that computer systems are hard to protect. Complexity. It's hard to protect a computer system because there are so many potential vulnerabilities. It's easier to take one down, but that won't necessarily result in much damage. To do that you need to take over a complex system and exercise sophisticated and dynamic control of it, to orchestrate very specific behaviour, which is not easy. For example shutting down the computers at a nuclear power plant may be feasible. However taking control of it and manipulating it with enough sophistication to engineer a meltdown, while overcoming all the computerised and physical safeguards would be a lot more complex to pull off.

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"I hear that a lot, but the truth is that the next Perl Harbour has already happened. It was a surprise aerial attack on a strategic port city back in 2001. Almost 3,000 people were killed."

The Pearl Harbour attack was an attempt by a government to cripple an enemy's capability to project power in the Pacific ocean, with the attacker's intent to then establish dominance in that region. What you describe was nothing of the sort and to call it another Pearl Harbour is simply wrong.

Fair point, I stand corrected.

I think the rest of my point in the second paragraph stands though.

this is why i love HN where reasonable people are willing to consider different perspectives and make their choices of conviction. thanks for the conversation.

If you define Pearl Harbour as a military attack, then yes. But if you look at the cultural and political impact of 9/11 and Pearl Harbour, then they are quite similar. Both did change US policy and politics, have both generated treatment in movies and books and perhaps most strikingly are used in a phrase like "The next ..."

The Pearl Harbour attack forced a nation that was reticent into an actual, real war against a serious foe that presented a genuine threat; a war that would dictate cultural and economic supremacy over the Pacific region for the next half-century. It also pushed the US into the genuine battle for national existence raging over the other half of the planet in which millions of people were already under the yoke of an invader. The ensuing economic activity towards the war effort created the situation post-war in which the U.S. dominated the world whilst at the same time providing massive, massive increases in living standards for the U.S. population and also in large parts of Europe via the Marshall Plan. The echoes continue to ring today.

Comparing this to 9/11 is like comparing a tank to a soap box racer. I might as well say that the price of pork belly futures is the next Pearl Harbour as that also affects US policy.

Well, hold on there. Think about the comparison: The 9/11 attacks DID force a nation into an actual, real war (two, actually, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and three if you want to count the generic "War on Terror" that was stepped up dramatically after the attack). The war in Afghanistan has become the longest in United States history, and those wars together HAVE clearly helped set in motion a series of events that will dictate the balance of power in the Middle East for a generation to come, from the deposition and removal of dictators by force to the Arab Spring to the ongoing civil war in Syria. Though there was no contiguous threat in the Middle East to rival Nazi Germany, the Middle East was and is still characterized by a number of oppressive dictatorships.

Did post-9/11 have the same economic effects for the US as the post-WWII era? No, but that's not really the effect of any particular difference between the events that precipitated WWII and the wars of the last decade. And, if anything, the post-9/11 landscape HAS seen a dramatic shift in the global balance of power, specifically in challenges to US supremacy and an internal reconsideration of how we project the power we do have.

The point to be made here, which I think backs up the whole "digital attack as next Pearl Harbor" argument, is that unconventional warfare is the new conventional warfare. We're less likely to see a direct military challenge along the lines of Pearl Harbor, and much more likely to see indirect challenges to US supremacy through digital or terrorist attacks. There are a lot of parallels to be drawn here, and you made many of them yourself.

"The 9/11 attacks DID force a nation into an actual, real war (two, actually, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and three if you want to count the generic "War on Terror" that was stepped up dramatically after the attack). "

The US was not forced into those wars. Iraq posed no threat to the US. Afghanistan posed no threat to the US. Pearl Harbour was an act of war by a nation; Japan had serious intent to dominate the Pacific and become the regional economic and military power, and was prepared to do serious damage to the US in order to achieve those aims. 9/11 was an act of terrorism by non-national actors. Iraq and Afghanistan were no threat; the US was not pushed into those wars. The US chose them.

Fine, if you want to be nit-picky about the necessity of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, you're more than welcome. But either way, it's abundantly clear that the 9/11 attacks precipitated both of those wars. There is simply no way the neoconservatives could have convinced Congress of the need to invade Afghanistan or Iraq without the 9/11 attacks. Pearl Harbor may have forced our hand more clearly, so to speak, but both attacks were deep provocations. You can separate out the intent of the attacks if you want to be precise--Japan's to establish military domination in the Pacific, and Al Qaeda's simply to wreak havoc, or what have you--but in broader terms each represented a physical challenge to the United States' influence over particular spheres. And besides, the point that's trying to be made here is exactly that: There may not be any more "Pearl Harbors," if you want to define Pearl Harbor as a military attack by a sovereign nation. But if you want to define "Pearl Harbors" as serious, potentially dangerous attacks against the US, they are more likely these days to be of a terroristic or digital nature. You're missing the forest through the trees, my friend.

Nit-picky about the necessity? Two countries were invaded without posing any threat to the US!

"Pearl Harbor may have forced our hand more clearly, so to speak, but both attacks were deep provocations."

What exactly was 9/11 a provocation to do? Most of the people involved were already dead, and they weren't state actors - they were private citizens. What exactly was that a provocation for the US to do?

"each represented a physical challenge to the United States' influence over particular spheres."

One represented a challenge to physically and economically dominate the Pacific for the foreseeable future. One represented a challenge to the structural integrity of some buildings in New York. The scale, effect and consequences are so fantastically different that I genuinely struggle to understand how they can be seen in principle as the same thing.

"But if you want to define "Pearl Harbors" as serious, potentially dangerous attacks against the US"

By this definition, 9/11, which was not a serious, potentially dangerous attack against the US, was not a Pearl Harbour. It was a criminal act that killed a lot of people and caused a lot of damage. It was not a serious threat to the US.

9/11 pushed the US into a war with Iraq and Afghanistan, created the climate in which things like the Patriot Act flourished and turned the US from a clear supporter of human rights into a nation whose use or non use of torture is a question of semantics. [1]

In addition my perception from outside of the US is, that since 9/11 US popular culture uses terrorists as villains in a similar manner as Nazis or Russian spies before that. (Atop of that, I have a hard time remembering a movie in which the torture of an SS member is depicted as a necessary evil.)

So I am not arguing that the twelve years 9/11 did change the world in a similar magnitude as WWII did, I am arguing that the cultural significance of 9/11 is similar to the cultural significance of Pearl Harbour. Especially considering that the US would have been drawn into WWII anyhow, while at least the Afghanistan war is a direct consequence of 9/11.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding#Classification_i....

"9/11 pushed the US into a war with Iraq and Afghanistan,"

I disagree. The US was not pushed into those wars; the US chose both those wars. Neither of those nations presented a threat to the US, and Iraq had no links to 9/11 (and Afghanistan's links were laughably circumstantial - some of the planners lived there; let's have a war!) - it was simply a convenient excuse for the US to launch into a badly thought-out war.

"Pushed" is indeed a poor choice of wording. But Bush would have had a hard time to get enough political support to invade without 9/11.

The 10-year prelude to each was similar also. The U.S. blockaded trade with Japan from about 1930 so Japan had almost run out of oil by 1941. The U.S. and allies ran a no-fly-zone over Iraq from 1991 onwards.

With somewhat different results, though. Japan blockade - Japan starts a war to secure the natural resources it needs. Iraq blockade - Iraq poses no threat and gets invaded anyway.

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