[Infowarrior] - Fear as a "Terror Tax"

[Richard Forno]

Here's How America Looks to the World

By Josef Joffe
Sunday, May 4, 2008; B03

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/30/AR2008043003008_pf.html

HAMBURG Some years ago, I received a terror threat. If I did not  
apologize publicly and profusely for a column that blasted the Iranian  
regime, I would be killed by Friday, Sept. 13 -- what an auspicious  
date! So I sent for the security experts, and this is what they told  
me: Your front and back doors are worthless; get armored ones. Order  
bulletproof windows. Build a safe room. Install panic buttons. Get rid  
of that silly chicken-wire fence and put in a steel and concrete one.  
Don't use the driveway; try to vary your access routes (which, I  
think, meant sneaking home through the neighbors' gardens). Pretty  
soon, we were talking six-figure costs and contemplating emigration to  
Iceland.

The appointed day of my demise came and went. (Real terrorists don't  
write letters; they just kill you.) But the moral of this story will  
remain etched in my mind: When security is at stake, there is no limit  
to fear or fortification.

Fear, in other words, is a tax, and al-Qaeda and its ilk have done  
better at extracting it from Americans than the Internal Revenue  
Service. Think about the extra half-hour millions of airline  
passengers waste standing in security lines; the annual cost in lost  
work hours runs into the billions. Add to that the freight delays at  
borders, ports and airports, the cost of checking money transfers as  
well as goods in transit, the wages for beefed-up security forces  
around the world. And that doesn't even attempt to put a price tag on  
the compression of civil liberties or the loss of human dignity from  
being groped in full public view by Transportation Security  
Administration personnel at the airport or from having to walk  
barefoot through the metal detector, holding up your beltless pants.  
This global transaction tax represents the most significant victory of  
Terror International to date.

The new fear tax falls most heavily on the United States. Last  
November, the Commerce Department reported a 17 percent decline in  
overseas travel to the United States between Sept. 11, 2001, and 2006.  
(There are no firm figures for 2007 yet, but there seems to have been  
an uptick.) That slump has cost the country $94 billion in lost  
tourist spending, nearly 200,000 jobs and $16 billion in forgone tax  
revenue -- and all while the dollar has kept dropping.

Why? The journal Tourism Economics gives the predictable answer: "The  
perception that U.S. visa and entry policies do not welcome  
international visitors is the largest factor in the decline of  
overseas travelers." Two-thirds of survey respondents worried about  
being detained for hours because of a misstatement to immigration  
officials. And here is the ultimate irony: "More respondents were  
worried about U.S. immigration officials (70 percent) than about crime  
or terrorism (54 percent) when considering a trip to the country."

The falloff has not been as uniform when it comes to international  
scholars. Chinese, Koreans and Indians keep coming, reports the  
International Institute of Education (IIE); for the 2006-07 academic  
year, growth rates were between 3 and 6 percent. But the number of  
Western scholars coming to the United States is falling. Japan,  
Germany, Canada, Great Britain, Israel, Australia and Holland show  
declines of between 1 and 13 percent -- presumably because the richer  
a country, the less willing its scientists are to brave the  
indignities they face before entering the United States. Those hailing  
from poorer countries, with more limited opportunities -- such as the  
Chinese and the Indians -- remain undaunted.

The pattern for international students resembles that of the scholars.  
For 2006-07, the IIE reports the "first significant increase in total  
international student enrollment since 2001/2002." Again, the rise is  
led by the Indians, the Chinese and the Koreans. The number of  
students from Japan is down; ditto for Germany. Hence the IIE's veiled  
warning: "America needs to continue its proactive steps to insure that  
our academic doors remain wide open, and that students around the  
world understand that they will be warmly welcomed." To which all  
Americans should say amen, as these foreign students contribute about  
$14.5 billion annually to the U.S. economy, according to the IIE.  
Higher education, after all, is the fifth-largest service-sector  
export of the United States. And foreign talent that's willing to  
stick around is one of the country's critical natural resources.

Some U.S. officials know all this, of course. But while the State  
Department protests, the Department of Homeland Security makes the  
rules -- and will invent new verbotens by the day. Nor is there any  
end in sight. The demand for security, as my death threat taught me,  
is like an obsession, spreading relentlessly, for which there is no  
rational counterargument. DHS always asks, "What if?" -- which always  
trumps "Why more?" A more fruitful dialogue with the homeland security  
apparat would be trying to answer: "What is the national interest?"

After all, which face does the United States want to show to the  
world? One distorted by fear and suspicion, or the face that it used  
to present: that of a boisterous, easy-going and welcoming society?  
America's face used to be George Bailey's genial grin in "It's a  
Wonderful Life," filled with the optimism and trust that can banish  
greed and evil; now, it's the grim visage of Jack Bauer in "24."

This is not woolly-headed idealism but sober realism. Just imagine how  
the U.S. Army would have fared in liberating my home continent,  
Europe, if the blinkered commissars of DHS had been calling the shots  
in 1944. The way the last superpower chooses to bestride the world  
brings with it hard consequences. Does the United States open its arms  
or ball up its fists? Growling rarely elicits smiles, and distrust  
never reaps its opposite. To present a friendly face to the world is  
not a matter of saccharine niceness but of well-considered interests,  
especially for a fearsome giant like the United States. For trust  
breeds authority, and authority breeds influence.

What is happening to the American character? True, the country has  
gone through crises of confidence before, some of them cresting in  
sheer hysteria -- from the Alien and Sedition Acts to Sen. Joseph  
McCarthy's search for a commie under every State Department desk. But  
the worst acts from 1798 were repealed or allowed to lapse within  
three years, and the senator from Wisconsin was censured a few years  
into his red-baiting career. Alas, the USA Patriot Act and DHS have  
already endured longer than either earlier excess, and neither is  
fading.

Will the 9/11 terrorist attacks change the American character in ways  
that John Adams's laws and McCarthy's mendacity could not? The answer  
is still "no" if you go to the heartland, where trusting librarians  
let this perfect stranger shove his memory stick into a public  
computer; they seemed to think that a virus scan referred to the  
common cold. The heartland is still Jefferson country. But when you  
travel through John F. Kennedy International Airport or Dulles  
International Airport, you notice nervousness bordering on angst,  
which is hardly a classic American trait. No, your neighbor will not  
let you leave your bag on the seat while you amble over to Starbucks.

Have the "free and brave" lost it? If so, you are not alone. Look at  
France, where the controls at Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport are  
just as invasive as those at Reagan National Airport. Like the United  
States, the European Union now wants to fingerprint all foreigners who  
enter or leave its boundaries. So there is a larger moral to this  
tale: Security is an obsession that defies natural limits. And we  
submit because we like it.

Al-Qaeda likes it, too. Never before have so few terrorized so many  
with so little.

Josef Joffe is publisher-editor of Die Zeit, a German weekly  
newspaper, and co-founder of the American Interest.