Opinion/Mark Steyn: On Wednesday's letters page, Mr Cathal Rabbitte of Adliswil, Switzerland, wrote as follows: "May I extend Mark Steyn's list of events (such as heatwave deaths in France) which might never have happened had particular countries been run properly?
In 2001 almost 3,000 Americans were killed in one single day as a result of virtually non-existent airport security. At that time no self-respecting non-welfare state needed to pay airport security staff anything more than a minimum wage; what was the point in wasting valuable tax dollars in a free market on pampering passengers? They might even turn all soft and French." Hmm.
Okay, I'll bite.
I should say at the outset that I was writing about the political components of freaks of nature - earthquake, disease, weather - and a bunch of guys flying jets into skyscrapers is hardly a natural phenomenon, unless Mr Rabbitte is suggesting young middle-class Saudi men have a genetic predisposition to "martyrdom operations", a theory even the loopier Wahhabi clerics might jib at.
So more likely Mr Rabbitte spotted an opening and decided to have a bit of partisan sport.
Nothing wrong with that, I'm all in favour. But behind his jab is a rather serious point about the world post-9/11.
What happened that day was not a "tragedy", it was a systemic failure. After the Brighton bombing, the IRA famously told Mrs Thatcher, "You have to be lucky every time. We only have to be lucky once." On September 11th, 2001, Osama bin Laden got lucky four times. The scale of the slaughter was limited only by al-Qaeda's ability to find trained pilots willing to fly jets into buildings. If they'd had another 20 hijack crews on the personnel list, who can doubt that they wouldn't have hijacked another 20 planes just as easily as the first four? Let us stipulate that America's airport security was a joke, and that Boston's Logan Airport, from where two of the hijacked planes took off, was the joke of jokes. I was there a couple of weeks before 9/11, to put my niece and nephew on a flight, and security, as usual, was non-existent. Even if you could find a minimum-wage "guard" who wasn't overweight or a non-English speaker or a convicted felon, his eyes would be looking everywhere but at the scanner.
But I'm not sure turning "soft and French", as Mr Rabbitte puts it, is the answer. Three months after September 11th, Richard Reid attempted to board a flight in Paris. He had no luggage except for a knapsack, he was nervous, he'd paid around $4,000 cash for a last-minute ticket to Miami and he had a criminal record. These are all things that, post-9/11, are supposed to be red flags to security, and luckily Charles de Gaulle Airport doesn't have minimum-wage Hispanic illegal immigrants running its security but highly-paid officers of la République. So the sûreté pulled Mr Reid out of the line, questioned him for hours, put him up in a four-star hotel and then let him board the Miami flight the following day.
"We had no reason to detain him," said a spokesmonsieur for Inspector Clouseau. Er, well how about the detonator cord sticking out of his shoe? Ah, zut alors, they never spotted that.
So the only difference between Logan Airport and Charles de Gaulle security, apart from salary, pension, paid holidays, healthcare, etc, is that the minimum-wage nobodies let the 9/11 guys through immediately while the highly-trained elite guards detained the Shoebomber for 24 hours, thereby putting him to the inconvenience of blowing up an entirely different set of random passengers than the ones he'd intended to blow up.
On the other hand, plastic explosives are a prohibited substance which the detector is meant to detect, whereas, on the morning of September 11th, there was nothing unlawful about taking boxcutters and other small knives on to an airplane. It wasn't that security failed to spot a prohibited item: there was nothing to spot.
As to which country's security is the least worst, I note over the Christmas period that most of the air scares involved Air France and British Airways, which will come as a surprise to the dozens of chums who in the last two years have told me they always take foreign airlines in and out of the US because "they're less likely to be a target". The terrorist types seem to have concluded that the non-American flights are a softer touch.
Of course, what saved the day on that Miami flight was not the laughable actions of the overpaid French security but the behaviour of the passengers - both American and French - sitting around Mr Reid. As he bent down to light his sock, they figured he was pulling some stunt and jumped on him.
And that's the real lesson of September 11th. Big Government failed totally that day - I don't mean just FBI, CIA, FAA, INS and all the other big fancypants acronyms who loused up, but in a more profound sense. You couldn't ask for a more advanced model of Big Government than the American airline cabin. The control-freak regulators of Massachusetts and California can only aspire to cloud-cuckoo-land but up in that plane you're in Massachusetts-plus-Sweden-multiplied-by-Canada-to-the-nth-degree. In defiance of just about every freedom in the Bill of Rights, the average American commercial jet is like a test-programme for the EU constitution: No guns. No smoking. No nuthin'.
Certainly no free speech. If the stewardess is rude, tough. If you're rude to her, there'll be cops waiting when you land.
The trade-off is the usual one: in return for surrendering your individual freedoms, you'll enjoy collective security. And so on the morning of September 11th, when five terrorists stood up on that first flight, no-one made a move, and the cabin crew rigorously stuck to the government's 1970s hijack procedures. If a handful of losers with box-cutters tried anything in a parking-lot or a shopping mall, they'd have the crap beaten out of them. But they knew America well enough to know that an airline cabin is the one place where, thanks to government regulation, you could all but guarantee there'll be no resistance. It was the Big Government "security" procedures that amplified a small containable airborne horror into a death toll bigger than Pearl Harbor.
Three months later, the passengers on that Miami flight knew better. They acted. And that willingness to act is the difference between life and death. Mr Rabbitte is right in his sneers about the Department of Homeland Security, but so what? It's not about government at all. When the terrorist's footwear starts smoking, the government won't be up there with you, whether you're on American Airlines or Air France. So you have to be prepared to act. If not, you'll die. If Mr Rabbitte thinks more government is the answer to September 11th, then, to use his curious word, he has indeed been "pampered" - into false security.