A Run on Terror
The rising cost of fear itself

Posted on Thursday, March 4, 2004. Originally from Harper's Magazine,
March 2004. By Luke Mitchell.

Terror, like ecstasy, tends to magnify perceptions. Just as affection
becomes adoration in the physical act of love, so too does vigilance
sometimes become morbid obsession in the face of spectacular violence.
To be effective, this normal function of survival must also be
temporary. It is now more than two years since our own national
incident of spectacular violence, however, and although the United
States remains obsessed, it is not unfair, or even insensitive, to
begin considering the events of September 11 from a more detached
perspective.

In 2001, terrorists killed 2,978 people in the United States,
including the five killed by anthrax. In that same year, according to
the Centers for Disease Control, heart disease killed 700,142
Americans and cancer 553,768; various accidents claimed 101,537 lives,
suicide 30,622, and homicide, not including the attacks, another
17,330. As President Bush pointed out in January, no one has been
killed by terrorists on American soil since then. Neither, according
to the FBI, was anyone killed here by terrorists in 2000. In 1999, the
number was one. In 1998, it was three. In 1997, zero. Even using 2001
as a baseline, the actuarial tables would suggest that our concern
about terror mortality ought to be on the order of our concern about
fatal workplace injuries (5,431 deaths) or drowning (3,247). To
recognize this is not to dishonor the loss to the families of those
people killed by terrorists, but neither should their anguish eclipse
that of the families of children who died in their infancy that year
(27,801). Every death has its horrors.

Anti-terrorism nevertheless has become the animating principle of
nearly every aspect of American public policy. We have launched two
major military engagements in its name. It informs how we fund
scientific research, whose steel or textiles we buy, who may enter or
leave the country, and how we sort our mail. It has shaped the
structure of the Justice Department and the fates of 180,000
government employees now in the service of the Department of Homeland
Security. Nearly every presidential speech touches on terrorism, and,
according to the White House, we can look forward to spending at least
$50 billion per year on “homeland defense” until the end of time.

* * *

Is all this necessary? One of the remarkable things about September 11
is that there was no follow-up—no shopping malls were firebombed, no
bridges destroyed, no power plants assaulted. This is, no doubt,
partly the result of our post-2001 obsession with preventing just such
disasters. We must at least consider the possibility, however, that
this also represents a lack of wherewithal on the part of would-be
terrorists. Although there may be no shortage of those angry enough to
commit an act of violence against the United States, few among them
possess the training, the financing, or the sheer ambition necessary
to execute an operation as elaborate as that of September 11. The
nineteen who have already done so are dead, and in the two and a half
years that they have enjoyed their martyrdom and their virgins, few
have stepped forward to join them. In the United States, none have.

This may be because it is very hard to kill thousands of people at
once. It turns out, for example, that the radioactive “dirty bombs” of
Jose Padilla’s fantasies are in fact “not very effective as a means of
causing fatalities,” according to Richard Meserve, who is the chairman
of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Smallpox was eradicated
from nature in 1978, is impossible to manufacture, and—if terrorists
did somehow get hold of what little of the virus remains in Russian
and U.S. hands—is exceedingly difficult to spread. It is safe to
assume that many aspiring terrorists have killed only themselves, with
prematurely dispersed sarin or perhaps an all-too-successful anthrax
experiment. And contrary to their designation as “weapons of mass
destruction,” anthrax and sarin, as well as mustard gas, VX, tabun,
and a host of other high-tech horrors, are more accurately called
simply “weapons.” Aum Shinrikyo—which had 65,000 members worldwide,
$1.4 billion in assets, and a secret weapons lab run by scientists
recruited from Japan’s best universities, and spent years underground
during which no investigative body knew of them, much less was seeking
them—managed to kill sixteen people in a Tokyo subway station. A boy
with a machine gun could have done worse.

Real nuclear weapons, of course, are a different matter, but they also
are incredibly hard to make. Libya recently gave up on the project.
North Korea has been at it since the late sixties and may now have as
many as two. As for the much-feared loose Russian nukes, Aum
Shinrikyo, with all its money, tried just after the Berlin Wall fell
to buy one and failed. This is why Al Qaeda, despite all its
well-financed malice, used planes. It was the best they could do.

In the unlikely event that a terrorist organization did manage to
steal or, more likely, build a nuclear weapon, smuggle it into the
United States, and detonate it near a major population center, the
predicted casualty rate starts at 10,000 and climbs, in some
estimates, to as high as 250,000. This would be a singular crime. But
it would be a horror not unlike many that this nation has faced before
and many that this nation will face again, terrorists or no
terrorists. The country would go on, just as it did after the
influenza epidemic of 1918 (600,000 deaths) or during the current AIDS
epidemic (500,000 deaths and counting). Attorney General John Ashcroft
has called terrorists “those who would destroy America,” but a
successful nuclear attack would not destroy America. It would not even
come close.

* * *

In this coming election, as in every other, genuine differences of
opinion will inform much of the political debate. A tax cut in a time
of recession might make sense to you, or it might not. Perhaps we
should build a moon colony instead of funding public schools.
Reasonable people may differ. Terror, though, will not be argued on
logic or ideology or even self-interest. It will be argued on the
basis of emotion. It is an emotion.

Moreover, it is a seductive emotion. Our current obsession with
terrorism is premised on the fiction of an unlimited downside, which
speaks darkly to the American psyche just as did the unlimited upside
imagined during the Internet bubble. Indeed, this hysteria can be seen
as a mirror image of the bubble, a run on terror. Whereas before we
believed without basis that we could all be illimitably wealthy with
no work, we now believe without basis that we will die in incalculable
numbers with no warning or determinable motivation. Both views are
childish, but the Internet bubble at least did not require calling out
the National Guard.

Contrary to the administration’s claims, the War on Terror is not “a
challenge as formidable as any ever faced by our nation.” It is not
the Cold War, in which our enemy did in fact have the ability to
destroy the Earth. Nor is it the Second World War (405,399 dead
Americans), nor the First (116,516). It certainly is not the Civil
War, still the deadliest conflict in American history (364,511 dead on
the Union side, and an estimated 258,000 dead in the South) and one
that specifically threatened to end the American experiment. It is not
even a war in the “moral equivalent of war” sense of Lyndon Johnson’s
War on Poverty. Fighting it does not make us a better people. It is
much closer to the War on Drugs—a comic-book name for a fantasy
crusade. We can no more rid the world of terror than we can rid it of
alienation. This may sound like a splitting of linguistic hairs, but
we made a similar category error in Vietnam by calling a U.S. invasion
a Vietnamese “civil war.” That misidentification cost 58,200 American
lives.

As opposed to terror, murder, at the hands of Al Qaeda or anyone else,
is a very real threat. But it is not a supreme threat, and by calling
it what it is we can recognize that it does not require the wholesale
reorganization of the American way of life. The prevention of murder
does not require the suspension of habeas corpus, nor does it call for
the distribution of national identity cards, nor does it require the
fingerprinting of Brazilian tourists. Preventing murder certainly does
not require war, which of course is quite murderous in and of itself.
What preventing murder requires is patient police work.

In New York City we have a program called Comstat, in which police
carefully track various crime statistics, detect anomalies, and
marshal their forces appropriately. It works. There were 596 murders
here in 2003, down from 2,245 in 1990. This sort of effort lacks
election-year grandeur, however, which may partially explain why the
Department of Homeland Security does not bother to track the number of
Americans killed by terrorists. (The FBI tracks terror fatalities
within the United States and the State Department tracks the same
abroad, but each uses a different definition of terrorism and neither
has domestic numbers beyond 2001.) Similarly, there is no
comprehensive watch list of likely terror operatives. What we have
instead is a sophisticated public-relations system, the color-coded
“Homeland Security Advisory System,” that works to terrify Americans
without the grisly work of actual terrorism.

Many desired activities, from shopping to watching television, have
been cited as examples of what we must do, or else “the terrorists
will have won.” This is debatable. What is not debatable is that if
the American people are terrified the terrorists have won. And, in
this regard, they will have been working with the full cooperation of
the current administration. About the Author

Luke Mitchell is a senior editor of Harper’s Magazine. This is A Run
on Terror, originally from March 2004, published Thursday, March 4,
2004. It is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org.

Has Theme Terrorism

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