Our wildly inflated fear of terrorism is a self-fulfilling
prophecy.
One in 3.5 million: That’s your annual risk of dying from a terrorist attack in the United States, at least according to Cato analyst John Mueller. Rounded generously, that comes out to roughly 3 one-hundred thousandths of a percentage point, or 0.00003 percent.
And this, according to a recent Gallup
poll cited by The New York
Times, is the percentage of Americans “worried that they or
someone in their family would be a victim of terrorism”: 51.
So that’s 51 percent of Americans who
think a terrorist attack against themselves is sufficiently likely to warrant
their personal concern, versus a 0.00003 percent chance it might actually
happen. If you’ll forgive my amateur number crunching, that means Americans are
overestimating their personal exposure to terrorism by a factor of
approximately 1.7 million.
It’s no wonder people play the lottery.
A public mood that overestimates the risk of terrorism by upwards of 2 million times, you might imagine, is a pretty significant headwind for a presidential administration that — with a few notable exceptions, like the surge in Afghanistan and the free-ranging drone war — has generally sought to wind down the full-blown militarized response its predecessor took to terrorism.
But more militarization, particularly in
the Middle East, is exactly what this insanely distorted threat perception
would seem to demand.
With Americans more fearful of terrorism than
at any time since 9/11, it’s no wonder Republican presidential candidates like
Ted Cruz can call for bona fide war crimes like
“carpet-bombing” Syria — and then revel in applause rather opprobrium.
In a more rational world, it would be
easy to explain away the problem by arguing that the risk of terrorism in the
U.S. is actually quite small, while the human costs of yet another
ill-considered military intervention in the Middle East could be enormous.
But
the politics of terrorism are anything but. “As a society we’re irrational
about it,” said a former administration security official quoted by the Times.
“But government has to accept that irrationality rather than fight it.”
Gawker‘s Hamilton
Nolan drew a less charitable
conclusion from
those comments: “The public is too dumb to hear the truth about terrorism.”
Threading
the Needle
All this helps explain why Obama said
what he did about America’s ongoing ISIS war in his final State of
the Union address. “Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks
and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to
civilians and must be stopped,” he allowed. “But they do not threaten our
national existence. That’s the story [the Islamic State] wants to tell; that’s
the kind of propaganda they use to recruit.”
In all this, Obama was essentially
correct. Yet he tempered this disclaimer with the reassurance that “We spend
more on our military than the next eight nations combined” — a fact more
commonly cited by critics of
America’s post-9/11 militarization than its supporters.
And then came an appeal to the
carpet-bombing constituency.
Calling the Islamic State “killers and
fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed,” Obama boasted:
“With nearly 10,000 air strikes, we are taking out their leadership, their oil,
their training camps, and their weapons. We are training, arming, and supporting
forces who are steadily reclaiming territory in Iraq and Syria.”
Feel better?
Obama wanted to temper the hysteria of
those who would look at ISIS and claim, as he put it, “this is World War III.”
But given the apparently prevalent view to the contrary, he had to reassure his
listeners that we’re still dropping an awful lot of bombs. It’s a college try
at breaking the political taboo, identified by the Times,
against lecturing people about the real — and low — risk of terrorism.
Unfortunately, that only illustrates a
much deeper American taboo about foreign terrorism against the United States:
namely, admitting that it’s almost always a response to U.S. foreign policies.
You know, policies like launching 10,000
air strikes.
Why
Us?
Obama said something else that was
pretty instructive: “In today’s world, we’re threatened less by evil empires
and more by failing states.” That’s true, basically: There’s no conventional
power on earth that poses an imminent military threat to the U.S.
But why, then, should “failing states”?
The usual answer is that weak or failing
states offer fertile ground for militant groups to organize, train, recruit,
and arm themselves.
That’s how the Arab-dominated group that became al-Qaeda
used Afghanistan in the years between the Soviet invasion and the 9/11 attacks
(though they also plotted in decidedly stable environs like Hamburg).
And it’s
how the Islamic State is using Syria now after bursting out of its origins in
Iraq, where it formed the core of a Sunni insurgency against the U.S.-backed
Shiite government.
It makes sense that failing states might
present opportunities for militant groups. And it’s reasonable to expect that
failed states in the Muslim world would appeal to Islamist groups in
particular. But all this explains nothing about why their militancy should
uniquely threaten the United States.
After all, if they’re simply religious
zealots, hell-bent on killing or converting the infidels, why shouldn’t these
failing states be a concern to non-Muslim powers like Brazil? Or Japan? Or
South Africa?
Why aren’t they reduced
to bean-counting air strikes on countries halfway around the world?
The simple answer is that no other
non-Muslim country on earth has intervened in the region as extensively as the
United States has.
Our
Demons
Robert Pape — a political scientist
who’s studied every suicide attack on record — argues that while religious
appeals can help recruit suicide bombers, virtually all suicide terrorism can
be reduced to political motives that are essentially secular.
“What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common, since 1980, is not
religion,” he concludes. Instead, they have “a specific strategic motivation to
respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation,
of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly.”
Let’s look at some of our favorite
demons.
In the years before al-Qaeda pulled off
the 9/11 attacks (and since, for that matter), the U.S. propped up
dictatorships in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which ruthlessly repressed
Islamist challengers.
It armed and protected Israel, even as the country bombed
its Muslim (and Christian) neighbors in Palestine and Lebanon, and violated UN
resolutions against illegal settlement building in occupied Palestinian lands.
And in between its two full-scale invasions of the country, the U.S. imposed a
devastating sanctions regime on Iraq, which restricted the flow of food and
medicine and is estimated to have caused some half a million Iraqi children to
die.
Some Washington policy makers have
professed benign motivations for these policies — in making strategic
partnerships against terrorists, for example, protecting a besieged ally, or
attempting to undermine the Iraqi dictatorship. But one could forgive the victims
of those policies for seeing them differently.
In his letter explaining
the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden mentioned all of these things and
more to argue that U.S. intervention in the Muslim world had to be stopped.
Aside from its anti-Semitic ramblings, social conservatism, and appeals to the
Quran, in fact, parts of the letter could have been written by any reputable
international human rights organization.
Similarly, the Islamic State — an
avowedly murderous organization, to be sure — emerged out of a Sunni insurgency
against an increasingly sectarian U.S.-backed government in Baghdad after the
second Iraq War, expanding into Syria in an audacious bid for strategic depth
and territory.
To the extent that it’s engaged in international terrorism —
against France, Turkey, Lebanon, and Russia, among others — the attacks have
been levied principally against foreign powers that have thrown themselves
into the Syrian civil war on the side of its enemies.
If ISIS attempts to attack the U.S., it
will certainly serve a propaganda purpose like the one Obama described. But it
will also serve as a counterattack for those 10,000 air strikes he boasted
about.
A
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
None of this excuses terrorism by
al-Qaeda, ISIS, or anyone else. But if Obama or anyone else wants to take a
realistic look at the threat, we can’t just look at the likelihood of
it. We have to look at the reasons for it.
All things considered, given the scope
of U.S. actions in the Middle East since 9/11 — by my count we’ve toppled three
governments, launched a drone war stretching from Somalia to the Philippines,
and sent hundreds of thousands of troops to Iraq and Afghanistan — a 0.0003
percent per capita risk of terrorism is quite modest, even if it feels much
higher to some critics of the president.
But with Obama responding to those
critics by launching “nearly 10,000 air strikes” and “training, arming, and
supporting” a hodgepodge of armed forces in the region, there’s a very
significant risk that our inflated threat perception will become a
self-fulfilling prophecy.
The fact is, there’s not a bomb on this
planet powerful enough to heal the political divisions in Iraq and Syria that
have enabled the rise of ISIS. But if Obama legitimizes his hawkish critics by
papering over the problem with bombs, he’s only paving the way for the Ted
Cruzes and Donald Trumps of the world to argue that if some bombs
are good, more bombs
are better. And our fear-fueled plunge into intervention will only deepen our
exposure to terrorism.
©
2015 Foreign Policy In Focus
Peter
Certo is an editorial assistant for OtherWords and Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. www.ips-dc.org
