The response of liberal academe to 9/11 has ranged from the lunatic screeds of faux professor Ward Churchill from Colorado to the on-the-surface reasonable appeals to calm by Professor John Mueller, recently interviewed by Ron Netsky of City Newspaper ("Fear Itself," January 24). Nearly all, however, share distaste, bordering on contempt, for the policies of the Bush administration.

What struck me in that interview was the overall air of insouciance displayed by Professor Mueller over the number of casualties inflicted by terrorists outside the US since 9/11: about 200 a year, fewer --- he tells us --- than the number of deaths by drowning in bathtubs in our country.

The professor does hurry to tell us there's a moral difference between accidental deaths and those inflicted by cold-blooded murderers. But our concern for the latter shouldn't assume "cosmic" proportions! I would do the professor one better: over 40,000 people (a virtual Vietnam) die in car accidents in this country every year. What's the big deal? Should we call for a ban on automobiles? Certainly not!

I suppose if one considers life as inherently lethal --- we all die, eventually --- what's the difference whether we die drowning in a bathtub, in a car accident, by a heart attack, or by being in the wrong subway car when a terrorist blows himself up? Or how about jumping off a burning skyscraper hit by airplanes? Apparently, it's all "c'est la vie" to the professor.

But to the rest of us common mortals, especially if we were related to some of the victims, it may make a difference. As for the president of the United States, he has a constitutional duty to prevent another 9/11 from happening, and the professor himself points out how, with 300 million people coming to this country every year, it really wouldn't be that hard for a dozen ill-intentioned "martyrs" to sneak in, possibly with a nuclear device. Does the professor think the president should wager that the bastards are not really trying or are incompetent fools?

Police work would do just fine, he says! That was the approach of the Clinton administration after the first World Trade Center bombing. After all, that killed only a dozen people. And relatively few were killed at the Khobar Towers, at the African embassies, and on the Cole. But was that the terrorists' intention? Does the professor really believe that the blind sheik wanted to inflict only a dozen casualties back in '93? If that tower did not come down then, I would say it was either because they didn't have the money to buy enough explosives or were too dumb to figure out how much they needed. But they tried again, the second time successfully. I wouldn't count blindly on their fecklessness.

Then there's the curious lack of historical perspective --- whether genuine or contrived, I cannot say --- regarding the "overblown" threat and response. I wonder what the professor thinks of our response to Pearl Harbor. After all, "only" slightly more than 2,400 Americans were killed there, not 3,000. Rather than two modern and functional skyscrapers, the Japanese sank a whole lot of obsolete hardware. And even then, we knew the Japanese were not out to destroy the US but simply to tell us to butt out of East Asia, which was their "sphere of co-prosperity."

In response, we reacted with a vengeance that resulted, among other things, in the atomic incineration of two of their cities. And let's not forget that, albeit as a result of a declaration of war on us by Nazi Germany (and Italy), we made them the first target for destruction, they who had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. Go figure! And let's not forget that, by the lowest estimates I have been able to dig up, 295,000 American personnel were killed in that war: a ratio of about 123 to 1 in comparison with the casualties of Pearl Harbor.

I have yet to hear a liberal historian or pundit tell me that was an excessive price to pay. And yet we are now supposed to pull our hair out because the number of Americans killed in five years between Afghanistan and Iraq has just surpassed the number of those killed on 9/11. That is, a ration of 123 to 1 is fine, but a ratio of 1 to 1 is not. The professor surely knows that, at Iwo Jima alone, twice that many Americans were killed in a battle that lasted 21 days for a God-forsaken --- albeit strategically important --- piece of volcanic ash some 8.5 square miles in size.

And then he tells us about the "huffing and puffing two-bit dictators" from North Korea and Iran. I am not willing to wait and see if an Ahmadinejad really turns out to be a Hitler, because by that time, it may be too late. And unlike Hitler and his panzerdivisionen, nuclear weapons are much more dangerous.

And need I remind the professor that all through the 1920's and well nigh up to the eve of Hitler's accession to power, the future fuehrer was considered by most outside Germany, and some even in Germany, a somewhat funny looking buffoon. Oh, he had written "Mein Kampf," all right, and some had even seen his "Second Book," but who could take that as anything but vote-getting propaganda? Just as who cannot but laugh at that scraggly-bearded demagogue in Tehran ranting about "wiping Israel off the map"?

Well, I am not laughing at Ahmadinejad, nor do I dismiss the professor as an optimist. I don't think his lack of historical perspective is quite genuine; that would make him ignorant. Like the rest of us, I think he has an agenda. Mine is to see the terrorist threat defeated and the US victorious. I wonder what his is.

Italo Savella, FernwoodPark, Rochester