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Apocalypse Not
The enemy is not al-Qaeda but our exaggerated fears and overblown reactions to terrorism, say a growing number of observers
Ian Macleod
The Ottawa Citizen
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Our overblown reaction to the threat of terrorism is a bigger threat to our safety than terrorism itself, argues John Mueller, author of a new book about the war on terror.
Which is the greater threat: another major Islamist terrorist attack on North American soil or our reaction against it? In the absence of a single strike on the continent since Sept. 11, 2001, what was considered a harbinger of an existential threat has, statistically speaking, turned out to be an aberration, a dreadful anomaly.
If it is so easy to pull off, if al-Qaeda and like-minded terrorists are so omnicompetent, why hasn't there been another attack? Why don't they open fire in shopping centres, poison food and water, cut electrical lines, blow up trains and oil pipelines and inflict more misery?
Where is the apocalyptic peril that has obsessed us and drained government treasuries for more than five years now?
A U.S. book, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them, asks us to consider this: Maybe there are no Islamic terrorists, or at least competent ones, lurking in our midst.
Given the flow of illegal immigrants, narcotics and contraband into the United States, foreign terrorists can't be trying very hard to filter past border security. Or, perhaps, they are just far less dedicated, diabolical and competent than we have been led to believe, argues Overblown author John Mueller.
Even if that's wrong, even if there is another significant foreign terrorist assault, chances are infinitesimally tiny of an average North American becoming a victim.
Yet we're spending billions of tax dollars -- trillions counting the U.S. war in Iraq -- to prevent a threat that, even counting the 3,000 victims of 9/11, claims far fewer North American lives than car accidents, smoking, lightning, allergic reactions and bathtub drownings.
Canadian, U.S. and European soldiers and countless civilians, meanwhile, are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq. Law-abiding Muslims are viewed with suspicion. Domestic U.S. wiretapping runs rampant and Mahar Arar and others are imprisoned without a shred of due legal process.
No, the enemy is not al-Qaeda, says Mr. Mueller and a small but growing band of other commentators.
It is our inability to control our exaggerated fears about homeland terrorism and our overblown reactions, manifest in the quixotic and costly pursuit of governments to target-harden our way of life by outlawing carry-on tubes of toothpaste and demanding 80-year-old grandmothers have their orthopedic shoes X-rayed before boarding airplanes.
"Ultimately, the enemy, in fact, is us," says Mr. Mueller, who holds the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at Ohio State University.
If we really want to deflate terrorism's impact, we need to get a grip -- on ourselves. Terrorism is more a state of mind and we can defeat it, "simply by not becoming terrified and by resisting the temptation to overreact."
He concedes some efforts to deal with terrorism are justified, especially nuclear terrorism.
"But alarm, hysteria and panic are not. Nor is massive extrapolation, obsession with worst-case scenarios, or policy overreaction. It certainly doesn't say that, therefore, because we're scared about terrorism you have to go out and start a catastrophic war in Iraq and lose far more Americans than in 9/11 and spend $1 trillion to $2 trillion on it."
The real scourge is a "terrorism industry" -- opportunistic politicians, butt-covering bureaucrats, over-eager law enforcement, risk entrepreneurs and a yammering mass media -- that stokes public fear by engaging in expensive "terrorist-encouraging overreaction" rather than facing up to the statistical reality.
Mr. Mueller says the attitude among some bureaucrats to protect themselves from criticism in the event of another attack has proven to be little more than fear-mongering. That, he says, was never more clear than in 2003 when former Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller testified before a congressional intelligence committee.
"The greatest threat is from al-Qaeda cells in the U.S. that we have not yet identified," he told the panel.
Two years later, with still no attacks on the U.S., he told the same committee: "I remain very concerned about what we are not seeing."
Canada, too, the author said in an interview this week, has fallen into the "doom boom" trap, especially since al-Qaeda placed Canada on its hit list.
But Bahrain has been placed on the list, so, too, have Japan, Italy and Britain.
"And people say, 'Ah, see they said Britain and now Britain has been hit,'" with the London transit bombings. "But what about all the countries that didn't get hit? It just seems there's an awful lot of huffing and puffing going on out there."
(Terror attacks in Europe, notably the London bombings and the 2004 Madrid train bombings, were "pretty limited," he says.)
The propensity for overextrapolation and overreaction has been a feature of U.S. foreign policy for decades, says Mr. Mueller.
From the U.S. response to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the "Red Scare" of domestic communism in the 1950s, the Cold War, the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik, Castro's Cuba to Vietnam, it all has led to "unwise, costly, unnecessary and sometimes massively counter-productive," policies.
And now, we're at it yet again. "Perhaps now more than ever."
The book, not surprisingly, is under attack from terrorism experts and policy analysts for its "false logic" and comforting message to those already skeptical about politics, government and counter-terrorism strategy.
"There has been exaggeration, but that's not the same as saying there isn't a threat," says Martin Collacott, a senior fellow at The Fraser Institute, former Canadian ambassador to the Middle East and past director-general for security services at the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Imagine the fallout, he says, from even a small radioactive "dirty bomb" going off in Manhattan.
Combine that scenario with all the other potential human, economic and political consequences of a successful strike, even a non-catastrophic one, and "there is reason to be fairly concerned and take serious measures."
Frank Harvey, a professor of political science at Dalhousie University and fellow of the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute, agrees with Mr. Mueller that, statistically speaking, the threat has been overblown.
But that argument is not particularly relevant, he says. It is the nature of the terrorist threat, the possibility of being randomly and violently struck down by an unseen and seemingly uncontrollable malevolent force, that determines public reaction and, in turn, government response.
In other words, our imagination is also an adversary.
The U.S. 9/11 Commission blamed a "failure of imagination" for U.S. officials not preventing the attacks on New York and Washington. But the response to that criticism has spawned an "imagination of failure," says Mr. Harvey.
"When the most powerful nation on Earth is tasked with a policy directive to routinize, bureaucratize and institutionalize the exercise of 'imagination' ... no one should be surprised by how overwhelming and expensive the task has become," he concludes in a 2006 research paper, The Homeland Security Dilemma: The Imagination of Failure and the Escalating Costs of Perfecting Security. (The thesis has since been expanded and updated into an upcoming book.)
Officials, he says, have answered the call by imagining thousands of different threats, "and just as many ways to spend money to fill in the holes. And politicians have become very adept at 'imagining' the political fallout if they fail to prevent an attack they were warned about."
But as Washington spent billions securing the nation since 9/11, public confidence, trust and satisfaction levels have steadily declined, according to dozens of polls analysed by Mr. Harvey.
Canadians are less fearful of an attack here. But when 18 Toronto-area men were arrested by the RCMP last summer on suspicion of plotting a terror attack here, the public fear level skyrocketed, surpassing even the Americans'.
Counter-intuitive as it seems, counter-terrorism successes produce the same outcome.
The paradox of the "homeland security dilemma" is that the more governments spend on security, the more insecure the public feels and the more security it demands.
That zero-tolerance for failure means, "politicians are trying so hard to prevent even small attacks because those small failures will have a major impact on public perceptions."
Overblown misses another crucial point, Mr. Harvey said in an interview. The statistical absence of homeland attacks is not particularly relevant when it comes to counter-terrorism policy-making.
Like fear of flying and nuclear power, public reaction about homeland terrorism is driven by the nature of the danger, not how often it occurs. Confidence is directly related to perceptions of controllability.
"It doesn't matter how often you go on national TV and point that statistic out. It won't change the general level of the threat because terrorism is kind of unfamiliar and uncontrollable. It's the nature of the threat that determine public reaction to it."
If it was just about statistics, he says a lot people wouldn't gamble, eat fast food, smoke, drink or drive without seatbelts. "Statistically, we shouldn't be doing that, but we do."
The irony of Mr. Mueller's position, he notes, is that alarmism and the resulting billions spent on security has probably prevented additional attacks. That, in turn, has created the argument that because nothing has happened, we have nothing to worry about.
Mr. Mueller believes a key element of government anti-terrorism policy must include efforts to reduce public fear. But that is precisely the dilemma, says Mr. Harvey. How does government do that without generating even more fear or, in the case of politicians, committing political suicide by being seen as soft on terrorism?
"Security policies will inevitably prioritize the public's emotional, not statistical, reaction to terrorist threats," he explains in his paper. "Officials are politically motivated, for better or worse, to spend billions of dollars to protect citizens from exaggerated risks and threats, and are much less inclined to invest similar amounts to reduce highly probable risks to public safety that are seriously underestimated."
And if close to 75 per cent of the public believes terrorists will attack again, political leaders will be very reluctant to downplay the threat or openly question public perceptions, for two straightforward and perfectly rational reasons, he writes.
"First, it is so much easier to accept and then exploit the public's fears than it is to invest the time and resources to control those perceptions. Second, if any attack does occur -- no matter how unlikely or how small -- the political costs will be significant for those who downplayed the threat or called for a more balanced view of the facts and the risks."
Still, why hasn't there been another attack?
"We simply don't know," says Wesley Wark, professor of political science at the University of Toronto and one of Canada's leading experts on terrorism and security intelligence.
Some plots have been foiled. Heightened security may have deterred others. It may be that al-Qaeda organizations are biding their time.
The strongest argument, he says, is the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have become the fundamental core for the terror campaign against the West. "That's where the action is. Why engage in distractions at the moment?"
What is clear is, "all the evidence suggests the shocking conclusion that al-Qaeda is stronger in many respects than we ever imagined it would be at this point in time.
"The problem we face is that the future is unpredictable and we can't afford to be complacent. Our best point of reference to understanding the nature of the terrorist threat remains an event in recent history."
Ian MacLeod is editor and senior writer for national security and terrorism issues
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007
