State of the Union Address Part I: That Terrorist Threat
In his state of the union address, President George W. Bush said about terrorists that 'all of us must take their declared intentions seriously'. Why 'declared intentions'? 'Declared intentions' refer to subjective perceptions, not objective threats. So long as we concern ourselves only with the words that bin Laden and Zawahiri speak, we avoid asking ourselves the harder but more serious questions about whether, assessed rationally, these threats should be taken seriously.
So let us take their intentions seriously, though not in the way Bush means that phrase. Here are three reasons why, when looked at objectively, a war on terror is unnecessary.
1. According to one official list, there are 80,000 vulnerable sites in the United States, including urban centers, ports, bridges, tunnels, subways, airports, chemical and power plants, train systems and national monuments. Couple that with the easy availability of bomb materials, and the range of potential delivery systems (rental cars, small airplanes, backpacks, suicidal individuals), and we appear even more vulnerable. Yet there has been no terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11. That alone sugests there are very few terrorists, with extremely limited capacity to sustain attacks.
2. You have heard it before, but it's worth remembering that, even in 2001, you were far likelier to die in a car accident than from terrorist attack. Heck, you were more likely to die from a lightning strike than from terrorism (Daily Kos had a good post on this a while back). Nobody thinks we should declare a war on lightning, or even traffic accidents. Those are the kinds of risks we accept everyday as part of living.
3. A number of past articles (here and here and including one written by one of our editors as well as a GAO report) have noted that the many so-called 'terrorist-related convictions' are nothing of the sort. Yet the convictions are used by the government to claim that there are lots of terrorists out there, and that the authorities are catching them. Sadly, this spate of articles on the hyped up numbers of convicitons has not been followed up on. That's partly because there haven't even been any high profile anti-terrorism cases for the government to cite!
Boston Globe columnist James Carroll recently suggested that the 'embarrassing question' is: 'Is America actually at war?', to which he answered no, or at least not really. We would add that, to the extent that we are, we should not be. The three reasons we've given stand as solid evidence that taking Bin Laden and the President seriously means taking them less seriously. They are both, in Carroll's pithy phrase 'self-mythologized figures of no historic standing'.
So let us take their intentions seriously, though not in the way Bush means that phrase. Here are three reasons why, when looked at objectively, a war on terror is unnecessary.
1. According to one official list, there are 80,000 vulnerable sites in the United States, including urban centers, ports, bridges, tunnels, subways, airports, chemical and power plants, train systems and national monuments. Couple that with the easy availability of bomb materials, and the range of potential delivery systems (rental cars, small airplanes, backpacks, suicidal individuals), and we appear even more vulnerable. Yet there has been no terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11. That alone sugests there are very few terrorists, with extremely limited capacity to sustain attacks.
2. You have heard it before, but it's worth remembering that, even in 2001, you were far likelier to die in a car accident than from terrorist attack. Heck, you were more likely to die from a lightning strike than from terrorism (Daily Kos had a good post on this a while back). Nobody thinks we should declare a war on lightning, or even traffic accidents. Those are the kinds of risks we accept everyday as part of living.
3. A number of past articles (here and here and including one written by one of our editors as well as a GAO report) have noted that the many so-called 'terrorist-related convictions' are nothing of the sort. Yet the convictions are used by the government to claim that there are lots of terrorists out there, and that the authorities are catching them. Sadly, this spate of articles on the hyped up numbers of convicitons has not been followed up on. That's partly because there haven't even been any high profile anti-terrorism cases for the government to cite!
Boston Globe columnist James Carroll recently suggested that the 'embarrassing question' is: 'Is America actually at war?', to which he answered no, or at least not really. We would add that, to the extent that we are, we should not be. The three reasons we've given stand as solid evidence that taking Bin Laden and the President seriously means taking them less seriously. They are both, in Carroll's pithy phrase 'self-mythologized figures of no historic standing'.
5 Comments:
You have heard it before, but it's worth remembering that, even in 2001, you were far likelier to die in a car accident than from terrorist attack. Heck, you were more likely to die from a lightning strike than from terrorism (Daily Kos had a good post on this a while back). Nobody thinks we should declare a war on lightning, or even traffic accidents. Those are the kinds of risks we accept everyday as part of living.
On the Winds of Change blog, the first commentor to this post offers the following observation, which, although not aimed at Kos's remark, goes a long way toward refuting it, but at the same time suggesting that the Bush administration has its priorities mixed up:
A society can survive lighting [sic] strikes, car accidents and war. A society can survive, and even thrive as a result of war or resistance action. But the destructive impulses of totalitarianism, genocide and terrorism will ultimately destroy a society. That's why these random destructive impulses have always been, like cannibalism and incest, taboo.
In other words, lightning strikes are purely random events. Terrorist attacks, on the other hand, are specifically intended to damage the fabric of society. It seems to me that Kos has unwittingly bought into the Bush administration's mistake of characterizing the war on terror almost exclusively as protecting the American people from harm while paying much less attention to the implications (of both terrorism and the campaign against it) for American society as a whole.
The federal government could protect us, the American people to the hilt, but it wouldn't be much of a victory if either (a) we were to lose essential liberty, and our way of life as we know it, as a consequence of these protective measures, or (b) in spite of these measures, our way of life as we know it is brought low by means other than terrorism (a not-insignificant possibility I brought up in my first comment to this blog).
Lumping terrorism in with totalitarianism and genocide is rhetoric, not argument. A few shadowy terrorists are nothing like the Stalinist state. It may be that terrorists fancy themselves as some decisive political movement, but they're 'leader' is holed up in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan, not running a state.
However, it is indeed interesting the shift from protecting basic institutions to protecting the lives of specific individuals. National security used to mean protecting those essential social institutions that ensured liberty from subversion. The national security concept during the Cold War focused on 'subversion', ie, political movements that might change the social status quo, not kill people. Now, there is a greater concern with saving lives, even when there is essentially no chance that suicidal maniacs could actually change society. Bush's response has gone far further, and well beyond what's necessary, than the terrorists could ever hope.
That there is "no war on terror" is, also, rhetoric, a word I wish understood, unpejoratively. Perhaps, we should look at this "security" question as a psychological issue rather than a semantic one.
For myself, I do not care, one way or the other, if I am killed -- subject to at least two conditions: that my death should come so quickly that 1) I do not feel significant pain and 2) I am not given time to contemplate my coming demise.
I would note that to the contrary, the 9/11 "movie" with its images of falling bodies and bodies on fire and victims trapped and awaiting their deaths is an extreme example of the particular circumstances surrounding my imagined death which I fear the most. 9/11 is, psychologically, a "horror" and worse, I was there, empathetically, fascinatedly, and repeatedly.
Are the words "War on Terror" being deployed to provide a psychological defense, to block the mind from contemplating the abyss of the 9/11 horror? If so, what counter-language could be effective, on an emotional level, to convince people that the "comforting" words are totemic and should not be reified?
The 9/11 'movie' was, as you say, a great example of just how obsessed we are with death and dying. There was something positively morbid with the endless play and replay of these gruesome images. While it's hard to agree with your indifference towards dying, it is indeed important to develop a rhetoric that can expand our concerns past dealing with 9/11.
. . . it's hard to agree with your indifference towards dying . . . .
Ah, yes. I suppose you imagine yourselves floating up there near the ceiling looking down sadly upon your dead bodies and commiserating among yourselves that you did not become all you could be. Get a grip!
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