Fear Itself

The increasingly looney Marshall Wittmann, not surprisingly, takes the 9/11 anniversary as an opportunity to indulge in a cheap McCarthyite smear:

"Some believe that our President is a greater threat to our security than the Islamic-fascists."

Wittmann doesn't identify anyone who thinks this, of course. Maybe he just couldn't be bothered to come up with an example; maybe it's intended that way, so it applies to every liberal in general and no one in particular. That's the way McCarthyites operate.

But if he can't think of anyone who believes this, I'll help him out by giving him the name of someone who does.

I do.

And I think I have plenty of support for that belief.

In last month's Atlantic, James Fallows argued persuasively, based on extensive interviews with dozens of national security experts, that al Qaeda in itself poses little threat to America--that, in fact, the real threat comes from...well, here's an excerpt:

“Does al-Qaeda still constitute an ‘existential’ threat?” asks David Kilcullen, who has written several influential papers on the need for a new strategy against Islamic insurgents....“I think it does, but not for the obvious reasons,” Kilcullen told me. He said the most useful analogy was the menace posed by European anarchists in the nineteenth century. “If you add up everyone they personally killed, it came to maybe 2,000 people, which is not an existential threat.” But one of their number assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. The act itself took the lives of two people. The unthinking response of European governments in effect started World War I. “So because of the reaction they provoked, they were able to kill millions of people and destroy a civilization.

“It is not the people al-Qaeda might kill that is the threat,” he concluded. "Our reaction is what can cause the damage. It’s al-Qaeda plus our response that creates the existential danger.” [emphasis added]

I don't think anyone who's paying attention can honestly argue that Bush's reaction to 9/11 hasn't harmed the nation. In the article, Fallows describes some of the ways in which the response to al Qaeda has helped them and damaged us (more excerpts are below the fold; the whole article is well worth reading): the strain on the military, the recruitment value of Iraq for the jihadists, the staggering economic cost (of the war, and of excessive security measures), the near-total loss of American 'soft power', the closing of what has historically been one of the most open societies in the world.

There is other damage that he barely touches on, most noteworthy of which is the erosion of constitutional rule. At what point is America no longer America? At what point, as we jettison principle after principle, does the United States as such cease to exist?

And to the extent that Bush's reaction to al Qaeda pushes us toward that point, does he not pose an existential threat?

Maybe that's overstating the case; I don't know. Fallows' point remains not just valid but essential; it should be the beginning point for developing any kind of strategy to combat terrorism. And anyone who fails to understand it (yes, Marshall Wittmann, I'm talking to you) has nothing whatsoever to contribute to the discussion.

Hat tip: Atrios and David Sirota

More excerpts:

....In the modern brand of terrorist warfare, what an enemy can do directly is limited. The most dangerous thing it can do is to provoke you into hurting yourself.

This is what David Kilcullen meant in saying that the response to terrorism was potentially far more destructive than the deed itself. And it is why most people I spoke with said that three kinds of American reaction—the war in Iraq, the economic consequences of willy-nilly spending on security, and the erosion of America’s moral authority—were responsible for such strength as al-Qaeda now maintained.

....So far the war in Iraq has advanced the jihadist cause because it generates a steady supply of Islamic victims, or martyrs; because it seems to prove Osama bin Laden’s contention that America lusts to occupy Islam’s sacred sites, abuse Muslim people, and steal Muslim resources; and because it raises the tantalizing possibility that humble Muslim insurgents, with cheap, primitive weapons, can once more hobble and ultimately destroy a superpower, as they believe they did to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan twenty years ago. The United States also played a large role in thwarting the Soviets, but that doesn’t matter. For mythic purposes, mujahideen brought down one anti-Islamic army and can bring down another.

....Documents captured after 9/11 showed that bin Laden hoped to provoke the United States into an invasion and occupation that would entail all the complications that have arisen in Iraq. His only error was to think that the place where Americans would get stuck would be Afghanistan.

Bin Laden also hoped that such an entrapment would drain the United States financially. Many al-Qaeda documents refer to the importance of sapping American economic strength as a step toward reducing America’s ability to throw its weight around in the Middle East. Bin Laden imagined this would happen largely through attacks on America’s oil supply. This is still a goal. For instance, a 2004 fatwa from the imprisoned head of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia declared that targeting oil pipelines and refineries was a legitimate form of economic jihad—and that economic jihad “is one of the most powerful ways in which we can take revenge on the infidels during this present stage.” The fatwa went on to offer an analysis many economists would be proud of, laying out all the steps that would lead from a less-secure oil supply to a less-productive American economy and ultimately to a run on the dollar. (It also emphasized that oil wells themselves should be attacked only as a last resort, because news coverage of the smoke and fires would hurt al-Qaeda’s image.)

....The final destructive response helping al-Qaeda has been America’s estrangement from its allies and diminution of its traditionally vast “soft power.” “America’s cause is doomed unless it regains the moral high ground,” Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of Britain’s secret intelligence agency, MI-6, told me. He pointed out that by the end of the Cold War there was no dispute worldwide about which side held the moral high ground—and that this made his work as a spymaster far easier. “Potential recruits would come to us because they believed in the cause,” he said.

....America’s glory has been its openness and idealism, internally and externally. Each has been constrained from time to time, but not for as long or in as open-ended a way as now. “We are slowly changing their way of life,” Michael Scheuer’s fictional adviser to bin Laden says in his briefing. The Americans’ capital city is more bunkerlike than it was during World War II, he comments; the people live as if terrified, and watch passively as elementary-school children go through metal detectors before entering museums.

....The United States is immeasurably stronger than al-Qaeda, but against jujitsu forms of attack its strength has been its disadvantage. The predictability of the U.S. response has allowed opponents to turn our bulk and momentum against us. Al-Qaeda can do more harm to the United States than to, say, Italy because the self-damaging potential of an uncontrolled American reaction is so vast.

....A state of war encourages a state of fear. “The War on Terror does not reduce public anxieties by thwarting terrorists poised to strike,” writes Ian Lustick, of the University of Pennsylvania, in his forthcoming book, Trapped in the War on Terror. “Rather, in myriad ways, conducting the antiterror effort as a ‘war’ fuels those anxieties.” John Mueller writes in his book that because “the creation of insecurity, fear, anxiety, hysteria, and overreaction is central for terrorists,” they can be defeated simply by a refusal to overreact. This approach is harder in time of war.

[That's all, folks]