[Infowarrior] - "Terrorphobia", public opinion, and policy decisions

[Richard Forno]

http://www.the-american-interest.com/ai2/article.cfm?Id=418&MId=19

Terrorphobia
John Mueller

A few days after the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney warned that
there might never be an ³end date² in the ³struggle² against terrorism, a
point when it would be possible to say, ³There, it¹s all over with.² More
than six and a half years later, his wisdom seems to have been vindicated,
though perhaps not quite in the way he intended. At least in its domestic
homeland security aspects, the so-called War on Terror shows clear signs of
having developed into a popularly supported governmental perpetual-motion
machine that could very well spin ³till who laid the rails², as Mayor Shinn
so eloquently, if opaquely, puts it in The Music Man. Since none of the
leading Democrats or Republicans running for president this year has managed
to express any misgivings about this development, it is fair to assume that
the ³war² will amble on during whatever administration happens to follow the
present one.

In some respects, ironically enough, the closest semblance to a notable
opponent the enterprise has so far generated has been George W. Bush
himself. The President has, of course, garnered great political benefit from
the terrorism scare. He has consistently achieved his best ratings for
handling the issue, and Karl Rove has been known to boast publicly about the
political utility of fanning terrorist fears for the good of the Republican
Party.11. Note Senator Chuck Hagel¹s remark on this point in The American
Interest (March/April 2008). It is no accident that the President managed to
use the t-word at least twenty and as many as 36 times in each of his
post-9/11 State of the Union addresses (as opposed to only once in January
2001). However, for a while there he opposed slapping together all sorts of
disparate government agencies into the hopelessly unwieldy Department of
Homeland Security. He even allowed that letting a responsible Dubai company
manage the occasional American port was not necessarily the end of the
world. Eventually, he buckled on both issues, and he will probably buckle
again when determined, outraged and likely bipartisan opposition rises up
against his tentative proposal to halve the amount of Federal money ladled
out each year to localities to fight terrorism.

But at least there were some transitory glimmers. We may not even get that
much from his successor in the White House. The reason is that terrorism and
the attendant ³war² thereon have become fully embedded in the public
consciousness, with the effect that politicians and bureaucrats have become
as wary of appearing soft on terrorism as they are about appearing soft on
drugs, or as they once were about appearing soft on Communism.

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http://www.the-american-interest.com/ai2/article.cfm?Id=418&MId=19