Terrorism: It's Time to Get a Grip

"Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror." --FDR, 1933

American public policy shouldn't be made by 19 reactionary right-wing fundamentalists with box-cutters or some Saudi culture warrior holed up in a cave in Pakistan, and it shouldn't be based on the public's basest emotional responses. But for the past five years, that's largely been the case.

Of course, that assumes that sound policy, based on realistic analyses of the issues, is lawmakers' primary goal. It's not. That would only be in the interests of ordinary people. Terrorism has become intensely politicized, and fear is now an organizing principle for the right.

Last week, journalist Mathew Stannard wrote about a new study by Columbia University researchers that showed empirically what many of us have long known intuitively: The Bush administration hypes the threat of terrorism, the media embrace that hype, President Bush's approval ratings rise and the cable news channels get their ratings.

University of California scholar Mark Juergensmeyer told Stannard, "This public panic benefits the terrorists, whose work is made easier by an overactive government response that magnifies their efforts. In an odd way, this puts the government and the terrorists in league with one another," he said. "The main loser, alas, is the terrified public."

Aside from the political consequences of a freaked-out populace, the constant drumbeat of fear has been used to justify the detention of U.S. and foreign citizens without trial, warrant-less surveillance of Americans and an unprovoked war of aggression against a sovereign state that has proved to be disastrous. It's also been used to justify the greatest expansion of military spending since the start of the Cold War, paid for with large deficits and deep cuts in domestic priorities.

For all of those reasons, we have to put the threat of international terrorism in perspective. That doesn't mean denying that Islamist terror is a real threat -- it certainly is -- but it does mean evaluating how great that threat is, and questioning whether the strategies that the U.S. has adopted to counter it are the appropriate ones.

With that, here are some things you should know to put international terrorism in the proper perspective.

The advent of "spectacular" terror attacks belies the fact that international terrorism is in the midst of a long decline

Terror statistics are notoriously unreliable and, under the Bush administration, highly politicized. Last year, according to government figures, there were over 11,000 incidents of international terrorism worldwide -- a record number -- and the administration would have you believe that this is evidence that we're engaged in a deadly and worsening "war." But a significant increase in the tally comes from two factors: the instability in Iraq and, more importantly, a new official definition of terror that captures all sorts of political violence -- including violence in the midst of civil wars, violence against security forces (but not soldiers) and even political vandalism that results in property damage valued at more than $10,000. The Center for Defense Information, a respected strategic think tank, notes that it's "useless for any analytical undertaking to examine the motives behind three high school students vandalizing cars with the letters "ELF" (Earth Liberation Front), just as it is useless to count every act of politically motivated violence as terrorism."

... how the government counts international terrorism incidents profoundly affects the credibility of the Bush administration's claim that the United States is engaged in a "Long War" against international terrorism. [The National Counterterrorism Center's] accounting methods, which show that international terrorism is rapidly getting worse, motivate government officials eager to promulgate their theatrical vision of the conflict in which the United States is now mired. Omitting the NCTC's more questionable incidents -- those in the conflict zones of Iraq and Kashmir -- shows terrorism reached its zenith in the mid-1980s and has been declining since.