Armed with a portfolio of PowerPoint slides, academic John
Mueller appeared before an audience at the libertarian Cato
Institute on Wednesday to make the case that when it comes to
terrorism, Americans have nothing to fear but fear itself.
“Terrorism is a threat, it is a problem and there are bad guys
out there, but the scope of the threat has been substantially
exaggerated and is basically something we can live with and deal
with,” Mueller said. Our overzealous response to terrorism, he
believes, has cost us more in money and lives than relatively
low-frequency, low-impact, terrorist attacks cause in the first
place. By spreading fear, we’re actually doing the terrorists’ job
for them, so we need to have a more measured approach to the
problem.
The Ohio State University professor has made a name for himself
in the past several years by pushing this argument, culminating in
his new book: Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism
Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe
Them.
Former Virginia Governor James Gilmore, speaking after Mueller,
declared that “This book adds a great deal to the analysis and
thinking about terrorism in the world today and specifically in the
United States.”
Even many supporters of an aggressive response to terrorism
would probably agree with Mueller that some of the money spent by
the Department of Homeland Security is nothing but government
waste, that many of the airport security measures imposed in recent
years (such as shoe removal) border on the absurd, and that not all
of the 80,000 potential terrorist targets identified by DHS (such
as Florida water park Weeki Wachee Springs) are likely to be in al Qaeda’s
crosshairs.
But Mueller doesn’t just take issue with some of the “duck
and cover” aspects of the War on Terror. He even takes issue
with sensible security precautions, such as having air marshals on
airplanes to prevent hijackings, “something that’s probably
impossible given what happened on the fourth plane on 9/11 —
passengers and crew won’t allow it to happen.”
However, while the courageous effort of the passengers of United
Airlines Flight 93 may have saved either the Capitol or White
House, the passengers themselves would have likely survived had
there been an armed air marshal aboard the flight. Also, Mueller’s
assertion that “passengers and crew won’t allow it to happen”
undercuts his own thesis, because having an alert citizenry that
acts on its suspicions is a direct result of all the warnings about
terrorism, and all the measures the government has taken to put the
nation on a war footing — measures that Mueller mocks and
dismisses as “security theater.” When Richard Reid tried to set off a bomb in his shoe
a few months after Sept. 11, he was subdued by passengers and crew
members who acted quickly. If people aboard the flight shared
Mueller’s attitude about the low statistical probabilities of a
terrorist attack, perhaps they would have hesitated long enough for
Reid to be successful.
Another problem with Mueller is that his reliance on cold
statistical analysis doesn’t take into account some of the aspects
of terrorism that make it such a unique threat.
In his presentation, Mueller asserted that the odds a human
being will die in a terrorist attack are 1 in 80,000 — roughly the
same odds as getting killed by an asteroid. Given the tremendous
cost in blood and treasure of fighting terrorism, Mueller suggests
that we should “absorb” casualties from terrorist attacks, just as
we “absorb” over 40,000 auto accident-related deaths each year.
Even if the nation were to accept Mueller’s ghoulish casualty
calculus, no mathematician can attach a number to the intangible
damage caused by attacks on such prominent symbols of American
economic and military might as the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
Clearly, the damage caused to the nation was greater than the
tragic loss of life by itself.
Were it not for the brave actions of the passengers onboard
United Airlines Flight 93 on Sept. 11, we may have also been
watching video of smoke rising from the rubble that once was the
dome of the Capitol. How would America be viewed by its allies and
enemies were we simply to shrug off such an attack and treat it as
a simple police matter?
Mueller acts as if his approach to terrorism is novel, but in
fact it is very representative of the approach to terrorism we had
prior to Sept. 11, and it failed us gravely. An informal chronology available on the State Department website
lists “significant terrorist incidents” since 1961, when the first
U.S. aircraft was hijacked. In the 1960s, there were four
incidents, but the number quadrupled to 16 during the 1970s, more
than doubled to 36 in the 1980s and more than doubled again to 75
during the 1990s. That’s a 19-fold increase in total. Not only did
the frequency of significant attacks increase, but the
sophistication improved dramatically. In 1961 a lone gunman
hijacked an airplane; on Sept. 11, 19 hijackers almost
simultaneously hijacked four airplanes and used them as missiles to
kill 3,000 people. Mueller said that about the same number of
people die in terrorist attacks in a typical year as drown in their
bathtubs, but the number of people who die in their bathtubs is
relatively static, whereas the threat of terrorism has mushroomed
over time, largely because from its early days we treated it as a
manageable threat that could be dealt with through international
policing — which is precisely what Mueller suggests we do now.
Mueller argued that Ronald Reagan didn’t suffer politically when
he pulled U.S. troops out of Lebanon in the wake of the 1983 Marine
barracks bombing that killed 242 Americans. The attack was “sort of
accepted in stride,” Mueller said. Reagan may not have suffered
politically, but history should judge the decision as the biggest
mistake of his presidency, because it sent the message to
terrorists that they could attack us and we wouldn’t have the
appetite to respond.
In a 1996 fatwa, Osama bin Laden wrote:
Where was this false courage of yours when the
explosion in Beirut took place on 1983 AD (1403 A.H). You were
turned into scattered pits and pieces at that time; 241 mainly
marines solders were killed. And where was this courage of yours
when two explosions made you to leave Aden in less than twenty four
hours!
One of the problems President Bush faces in fighting terrorism is
that he’ll never get credit for thwarting attacks that never
materialize, but he’ll get all the blame for the visible costs of
responding to terrorism. With more than five years having passed
without an attack and with the human and financial cost of fighting
terrorism growing each day, it’s easy to see how Mueller’s
arguments would appeal to war-weary Americans. But whether or not
someone supports the Iraq War or all of Bush’s anti-terror
strategy, it’s important that Americans agree to disagree with
Mueller. Should we go back to viewing terrorism as a mere
“nuisance,” as John Kerry once put it, the threat will only
continue to grow exponentially.
