FLIGHT 93 REVISITED: Wow, I just ran across this excellent oped by Elaine Scarry in the Boston Globe. It’s a true must-read, even though much of it will be familiar to Blogosphere denizens. But it’s a major cultural milestone, I think, to see a piece like this in the Boston Globe:

When the plane that hit the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania are looked at side by side, they reveal two different conceptions of national defense: one model is authoritarian, centralized, top down; the other is distributed and egalitarian and accords with what the Framers of the Constitution expected of the citizenry.

When the US Constitution was completed it had two provisions for ensuring that decisions about war-making were distributed rather than concentrated. The first was the provision for a congressional declaration of war – following an open debate in both the House and the Senate involving what would today be 535 men and women. The second was a major clause of the Bill of Rights – the Second Amendment right to bear arms – that rejected a standing executive army (an army at the personal disposal of president or king) in favor of a well-regulated militia, a citizens’ army distributed across all ages, geography, and social class of men. Democracy, it was argued, was impossible without a distributed militia: self-governance was perceived to be logically impossible without self-defense (exactly what do you ”self-govern” if you have ceded the governing of your own body and life to someone else?).

To date, this egalitarian model of defense is the only one that has worked against aerial terrorism on American soil. It worked on Sept. 11 when passengers brought down the plane in Pennsylvania. It again worked on Dec. 22, 2001, when passengers and crew on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami prevented an apparent terrorist (now called ”the shoe bomber”) from blowing up the plane with plastic explosives. The danger itself was averted not by the fighter jets that accompanied the plane to Boston or the FBI agents who later rushed aboard but by men and women inside the plane who restrained the 6-foot-4-inch man using his own hair, leather belts, earphone wires, and sedatives injected by two physicians on board.

That’s a major change from the “leave it to the professionals” attitude that one tends to associate with the Globe. You should read the whole thing, which has some comments on speed, decentralization, and learning curves that are reminiscent of this piece and this one. I’m not sure I agree with what appears to be Scarry’s ultimate conclusion, but there are a lot of important points along the way.