[Infowarrior] - Good WSJ Op-Ed on Terrorism

[Richard Forno]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704130904574644651587677752.html

JANUARY 9, 2010

Undressing the Terror Threat Running the numbers on the conflict with  
terrorists suggests that the rules of the game should change

By PAUL CAMPOS
—Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado.

I'm not much of a basketball player. Middle-age, with a shaky set shot  
and a bad knee, I can't hold my own in a YMCA pickup game, let alone  
against more organized competition. But I could definitely beat LeBron  
James in a game of one-on-one. The game just needs to feature two  
special rules: It lasts until I score, and when I score, I win.

We might have to play for a few days, and Mr. James's point total  
could well be creeping toward five figures before the contest ended,  
but eventually the gritty gutty competitor with a lunch-bucket work  
ethic (me) would subject the world's greatest basketball player to a  
humiliating defeat.

The world's greatest nation seems bent on subjecting itself to a  
similarly humiliating defeat, by playing a game that could be called  
Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts as long as there are terrorists who want to harm  
Americans; and

(2) If terrorists should manage to kill or injure or seriously  
frighten any of us, they win.

These rules help explain the otherwise inexplicable wave of hysteria  
that has swept over our government in the wake of the failed attempt  
by a rather pathetic aspiring terrorist to blow up a plane on  
Christmas Day. For two weeks now, this mildly troubling but  
essentially minor incident has dominated headlines and airwaves, and  
sent politicians from the president on down scurrying to outdo each  
other with statements that such incidents are "unacceptable," and that  
all sorts of new and better procedures will be implemented to make  
sure nothing like this ever happens again.

Meanwhile, millions of travelers are being subjected to increasingly  
pointless and invasive searches and the resultant delays, such as the  
one that practically shut down Newark Liberty International Airport  
last week, after a man accidentally walked through the wrong gate, or  
Tuesday's incident at a California airport, which closed for hours  
after a "potentially explosive substance" was found in a traveler's  
luggage. (It turned out to be honey.)

As to the question of what the government should do rather than keep  
playing Terrorball, the answer is simple: stop treating Americans like  
idiots and cowards.

It might be unrealistic to expect the average citizen to have a  
nuanced grasp of statistically based risk analysis, but there is  
nothing nuanced about two basic facts:

(1) America is a country of 310 million people, in which thousands of  
horrible things happen every single day; and

(2) The chances that one of those horrible things will be that you're  
subjected to a terrorist attack can, for all practical purposes, be  
calculated as zero.

Consider that on this very day about 6,700 Americans will die. When  
confronted with this statistic almost everyone reverts to the mindset  
of the title character's acquaintances in Tolstoy's great novella "The  
Death of Ivan Ilyich," and indulges in the complacent thought that "it  
is he who is dead and not I."

Consider then that around 1,900 of the Americans who die today will be  
less than 65, and that indeed about 140 will be children.  
Approximately 50 Americans will be murdered today, including several  
women killed by their husbands or boyfriends, and several children who  
will die from abuse and neglect. Around 85 of us will commit suicide,  
and another 120 will die in traffic accidents.

No amount of statistical evidence, however, will make any difference  
to those who give themselves over to almost completely irrational  
fears. Such people, and there are apparently a lot of them in America  
right now, are in fact real victims of terrorism. They also make  
possible the current ascendancy of the politics of cowardice—the  
cynical exploitation of fear for political gain.

Unfortunately, the politics of cowardice can also make it rational to  
spend otherwise irrational amounts of resources on further minimizing  
already minimal risks. Given the current climate of fear, any  
terrorist incident involving Islamic radicals generates huge social  
costs, so it may make more economic sense, in the short term, to spend  
X dollars to avoid 10 deaths caused by terrorism than it does to spend  
X dollars to avoid 1,000 ordinary homicides. Any long-term acceptance  
of such trade-offs hands terrorists the only real victory they can  
ever achieve.

It's a remarkable fact that a nation founded, fought for, built by,  
and transformed through the extraordinary courage of figures such as  
George Washington, Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr. now  
often seems reduced to a pitiful whimpering giant by a handful of  
mostly incompetent criminals, whose main weapons consist of scary- 
sounding Web sites and shoe- and underwear-concealed bombs that fail  
to detonate.

Terrorball, in short, is made possible by a loss of the sense that  
cowardice is among the most disgusting and shameful of vices. I  
shudder to think what Washington, who as commander in chief of the  
Continental Army intentionally exposed himself to enemy fire to rally  
his poorly armed and badly outnumbered troops, would think of the  
spectacle of millions of Americans not merely tolerating but actually  
demanding that their government subject them to various indignities,  
in the false hope that the rituals of what has been called "security  
theater" will reduce the already infinitesimal risks we face from  
terrorism.

Indeed, if one does not utter the magic word "terrorism," the notion  
that it is actually in the best interests of the country for the  
government to do everything possible to keep its citizens safe becomes  
self-evident nonsense. Consider again some of the things that will  
kill 6,700 Americans today. The country's homicide rate is  
approximately six times higher than that of most other developed  
nations; we have 15,000 more murders per year than we would if the  
rate were comparable to that of otherwise similar countries. Americans  
own around 200 million firearms, which is to say there are nearly as  
many privately owned guns as there are adults in the country. In  
addition, there are about 200,000 convicted murderers walking free in  
America today (there have been more than 600,000 murders in America  
over the past 30 years, and the average time served for the crime is  
about 12 years).

Given these statistics, there is little doubt that banning private gun  
ownership and making life without parole mandatory for anyone  
convicted of murder would reduce the homicide rate in America  
significantly. It would almost surely make a major dent in the suicide  
rate as well: Half of the nation's 31,000 suicides involve a handgun.  
How many people would support taking both these steps, which together  
would save exponentially more lives than even a—obviously hypothetical— 
perfect terrorist-prevention system? Fortunately, very few. (Although  
I admit a depressingly large number might support automatic life  
without parole.)

Or consider traffic accidents. All sorts of measures could be taken to  
reduce the current rate of automotive carnage from 120 fatalities a day 
—from lowering speed limits, to requiring mechanisms that make it  
impossible to start a car while drunk, to even more restrictive  
measures. Some of these measures may well be worth taking. But the  
point is that at present we seem to consider 43,000 traffic deaths per  
year an acceptable cost to pay for driving big fast cars.

For obvious reasons, politicians and other policy makers generally  
avoid discussing what ought to be considered an "acceptable" number of  
traffic deaths, or murders, or suicides, let alone what constitutes an  
acceptable level of terrorism. Even alluding to such concepts would  
require treating voters as adults—something which at present seems to  
be considered little short of political suicide.

Yet not treating Americans as adults has costs. For instance, it  
became the official policy of our federal government to try to make  
America "a drug-free nation" 25 years ago.

After spending hundreds of billions of dollars and imprisoning  
millions of people, it's slowly beginning to become possible for some  
politicians to admit that fighting a necessarily endless drug war in  
pursuit of an impossible goal might be a bad idea. How long will it  
take to admit that an endless war on terror, dedicated to making  
America a terror-free nation, is equally nonsensical?

What then is to be done? A little intelligence and a few drops of  
courage remind us that life is full of risk, and that of all the risks  
we confront in America every day, terrorism is a very minor one.  
Taking prudent steps to reasonably minimize the tiny threat we face  
from a few fanatic criminals need not grant them the attention they  
crave. Continuing to play Terrorball, on the other hand, guarantees  
that the terrorists will always win, since it places the bar for what  
counts as success for them practically on the ground.

—Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado.