[lbo-talk] Mitchell: The risk of terror as merely an everday thing

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat May 29 16:52:57 PDT 2004


[Gets better as it goes on]

URL: http://www.harpers.org/ARunOnTerror.html

Harper's Magazine

A Run on Terror

The rising cost of fear itself

Originally from Harper's Magazine, March 2004.

By Luke Mitchell.

Terror, like ecstasy, tends to magnify perceptions. Just as affection

becomes adoration in the physical act of love, so too does vigilance

sometimes become morbid obsession in the face of spectacular violence.

To be effective, this normal function of survival must also be

temporary. It is now more than two years since our own national

incident of spectacular violence, however, and although the United

States remains obsessed, it is not unfair, or even insensitive, to

begin considering the events of September 11 from a more detached

perspective.

In 2001, terrorists killed 2,978 people in the United States,

including the five killed by anthrax. In that same year, according to

the Centers for Disease Control, heart disease killed 700,142

Americans and cancer 553,768; various accidents claimed 101,537 lives,

suicide 30,622, and homicide, not including the attacks, another

17,330. As President Bush pointed out in January, no one has been

killed by terrorists on American soil since then. Neither, according

to the FBI, was anyone killed here by terrorists in 2000. In 1999, the

number was one. In 1998, it was three. In 1997, zero. Even using 2001

as a baseline, the actuarial tables would suggest that our concern

about terror mortality ought to be on the order of our concern about

fatal workplace injuries (5,431 deaths) or drowning (3,247). To

recognize this is not to dishonor the loss to the families of those

people killed by terrorists, but neither should their anguish eclipse

that of the families of children who died in their infancy that year

(27,801). Every death has its horrors.

Anti-terrorism nevertheless has become the animating principle of

nearly every aspect of American public policy. We have launched two

major military engagements in its name. It informs how we fund

scientific research, whose steel or textiles we buy, who may enter or

leave the country, and how we sort our mail. It has shaped the

structure of the Justice Department and the fates of 180,000

government employees now in the service of the Department of Homeland

Security. Nearly every presidential speech touches on terrorism, and,

according to the White House, we can look forward to spending at least

$50 billion per year on "homeland defense" until the end of time.

* * *

Is all this necessary? One of the remarkable things about September 11

is that there was no follow-up--no shopping malls were firebombed, no

bridges destroyed, no power plants assaulted. This is, no doubt,

partly the result of our post-2001 obsession with preventing just such

disasters. We must at least consider the possibility, however, that

this also represents a lack of wherewithal on the part of would-be

terrorists. Although there may be no shortage of those angry enough to

commit an act of violence against the United States, few among them

possess the training, the financing, or the sheer ambition necessary

to execute an operation as elaborate as that of September 11. The

nineteen who have already done so are dead, and in the two and a half

years that they have enjoyed their martyrdom and their virgins, few

have stepped forward to join them. In the United States, none have.

This may be because it is very hard to kill thousands of people at

once. It turns out, for example, that the radioactive "dirty bombs" of

Jose Padilla's fantasies are in fact "not very effective as a means of

causing fatalities," according to Richard Meserve, who is the chairman

of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Smallpox was eradicated

from nature in 1978, is impossible to manufacture, and--if terrorists

did somehow get hold of what little of the virus remains in Russian

and U.S. hands--is exceedingly difficult to spread. It is safe to

assume that many aspiring terrorists have killed only themselves, with

prematurely dispersed sarin or perhaps an all-too-successful anthrax

experiment. And contrary to their designation as "weapons of mass

destruction," anthrax and sarin, as well as mustard gas, VX, tabun,

and a host of other high-tech horrors, are more accurately called

simply "weapons." Aum Shinrikyo--which had 65,000 members worldwide,

$1.4 billion in assets, and a secret weapons lab run by scientists

recruited from Japan's best universities, and spent years underground

during which no investigative body knew of them, much less was seeking

them--managed to kill sixteen people in a Tokyo subway station. A boy

with a machine gun could have done worse.

Real nuclear weapons, of course, are a different matter, but they also

are incredibly hard to make. Libya recently gave up on the project.

North Korea has been at it since the late sixties and may now have as

many as two. As for the much-feared loose Russian nukes, Aum

Shinrikyo, with all its money, tried just after the Berlin Wall fell

to buy one and failed. This is why Al Qaeda, despite all its

well-financed malice, used planes. It was the best they could do.

In the unlikely event that a terrorist organization did manage to

steal or, more likely, build a nuclear weapon, smuggle it into the

United States, and detonate it near a major population center, the

predicted casualty rate starts at 10,000 and climbs, in some

estimates, to as high as 250,000. This would be a singular crime. But

it would be a horror not unlike many that this nation has faced before

and many that this nation will face again, terrorists or no

terrorists. The country would go on, just as it did after the

influenza epidemic of 1918 (600,000 deaths) or during the current AIDS

epidemic (500,000 deaths and counting). Attorney General John Ashcroft

has called terrorists "those who would destroy America," but a

successful nuclear attack would not destroy America. It would not even

come close.

* * *

In this coming election, as in every other, genuine differences of

opinion will inform much of the political debate. A tax cut in a time

of recession might make sense to you, or it might not. Perhaps we

should build a moon colony instead of funding public schools.

Reasonable people may differ. Terror, though, will not be argued on

logic or ideology or even self-interest. It will be argued on the

basis of emotion. It is an emotion.

Moreover, it is a seductive emotion. Our current obsession with

terrorism is premised on the fiction of an unlimited downside, which

speaks darkly to the American psyche just as did the unlimited upside

imagined during the Internet bubble. Indeed, this hysteria can be seen

as a mirror image of the bubble, a run on terror. Whereas before we

believed without basis that we could all be illimitably wealthy with

no work, we now believe without basis that we will die in incalculable

numbers with no warning or determinable motivation. Both views are

childish, but the Internet bubble at least did not require calling out

the National Guard.

Contrary to the administration's claims, the War on Terror is not "a

challenge as formidable as any ever faced by our nation." It is not

the Cold War, in which our enemy did in fact have the ability to

destroy the Earth. Nor is it the Second World War (405,399 dead

Americans), nor the First (116,516). It certainly is not the Civil

War, still the deadliest conflict in American history (364,511 dead on

the Union side, and an estimated 258,000 dead in the South) and one

that specifically threatened to end the American experiment. It is not

even a war in the "moral equivalent of war" sense of Lyndon Johnson's

War on Poverty. Fighting it does not make us a better people. It is

much closer to the War on Drugs--a comic-book name for a fantasy

crusade. We can no more rid the world of terror than we can rid it of

alienation. This may sound like a splitting of linguistic hairs, but

we made a similar category error in Vietnam by calling a U.S. invasion

a Vietnamese "civil war." That misidentification cost 58,200 American

lives.

As opposed to terror, murder, at the hands of Al Qaeda or anyone else,

is a very real threat. But it is not a supreme threat, and by calling

it what it is we can recognize that it does not require the wholesale

reorganization of the American way of life. The prevention of murder

does not require the suspension of habeas corpus, nor does it call for

the distribution of national identity cards, nor does it require the

fingerprinting of Brazilian tourists. Preventing murder certainly does

not require war, which of course is quite murderous in and of itself.

What preventing murder requires is patient police work.

In New York City we have a program called Comstat, in which police

carefully track various crime statistics, detect anomalies, and

marshal their forces appropriately. It works. There were 596 murders

here in 2003, down from 2,245 in 1990. This sort of effort lacks

election-year grandeur, however, which may partially explain why the

Department of Homeland Security does not bother to track the number of

Americans killed by terrorists. (The FBI tracks terror fatalities

within the United States and the State Department tracks the same

abroad, but each uses a different definition of terrorism and neither

has domestic numbers beyond 2001.) Similarly, there is no

comprehensive watch list of likely terror operatives. What we have

instead is a sophisticated public-relations system, the color-coded

"Homeland Security Advisory System," that works to terrify Americans

without the grisly work of actual terrorism.

Many desired activities, from shopping to watching television, have

been cited as examples of what we must do, or else "the terrorists

will have won." This is debatable. What is not debatable is that if

the American people are terrified the terrorists have won. And, in

this regard, they will have been working with the full cooperation of

the current administration.

About the Author

Luke Mitchell is a senior editor of Harper's Magazine.

This is A Run on Terror, originally from March 2004, published

Thursday, March 4, 2004. It is part of Features, which is part of

Harpers.org.



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