September, 2006

The Case for Doing Nothing

Ervin is right. I haven’t addressed his fundamental point yet. So I guess I should do it now. I agree with him and have no doubt that “Al Qaeda and its acolytes remains determined to attack us again.” Nevertheless, I suspect that their ability to pull off “another devastating attack” is largely overblown. John and […]

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It Is How You Deal with the Threat that Matters

This blog has certainly gotten to be fun. Clark says that I misconstrued his God analogy in my first response. Actually what I did was not engage it because I thought it beside the point. But since Clark repeated it, I will engage it now. Essentially Clark’s argument is that it is better to be […]

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Threats Overblown

I would like strongly to associate myself with Timothy Naftali’s comment, “Misunderstanding the Threat.”
My book, Overblown, due out in November, focuses particularly on perceptions of the terrorist threat, arguing that, while the threat exists and is “real,” it has been systematically and very substantially exaggerated. However, the book also takes a look back at other […]

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Al Qaeda and the Cold War

It is noteworthy that neither John, nor Veronique, nor Tim has yet engaged my fundamental point, while it seems to me that I have engaged theirs. Of course, we can’t protect ourselves against every conceivable threat. We don’t have the resources or imagination to do that. Yes, a balance must be struck between security and […]

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Knee-Jerk Security

While I am packing to come back to the US with my two toddlers after 10 days in France, I just found out that “passengers will be able to carry lotions and gels onto airliners again after a six-week ban, but only in tiny containers of 3 ounces or less and only if they’re in […]

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Misunderstanding the Threat

At the core of this debate is a disagreement over the operational consequences of misunderstanding the threat. Clark Ervin employs the analogy of the Cold War and of personal faith to argue that these consequences are not significant enough, comparatively speaking, to weigh against accepting an expansive view of the terrorist challenge.
I take a […]

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Terror Theology

I very much like the way Clark Kent Ervin characterizes as “believers” those who, like him, hold that terrorism presents an existential threat to the United States, that terrorists only have to succeed once, that the Big One is going to happen any day now, and that we are vulnerable, vulnerable, vulnerable. As the application […]

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The Terrorist Threat Today

Timothy Naftali, author of Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism, argues that “the threat is getting wider without being deeper,” with new terror recruits failing to form “the kind of militaristic groups that would be needed to mount a serious military threat to the U.S. mainland.” Naftali argues that though the Bush administration deserves credit for weakening Al Qaeda, it has otherwise been “largely incompetent” in denying terrorists sanctuaries, and discouraging recruits to violent extremism. The main danger, Naftali contends, is that a terror group acquires a loose nuke, and the U.S. needs to attend more to this specific problem.

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Spending too Much the Wrong Way on the Wrong Things

Veronique de Rugy, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argues that the $271.5 billion devoted by the federal government to homeland security since 9/11 has not been well spent. “Not only are we over-investing in homeland security,” de Rugy argues, “but most times we spend too much money in the wrong way and on the wrong things.” The consequence is that we are no safer. “Bad security is often worse than no security at all,” de Rugy writes. “By trying, and failing, to make ourselves more secure, we make ourselves less secure.”

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I’d Rather Err on the Side of the Believers

Clark Kent Ervin, Director of the Homeland Security Initiative at the Aspen Institute, and author of Open Target: Where America is Vulnerable to Attack counts himself among those who “strongly disagrees with both [John Mueller’s] premises and his conclusions.” Ervin stresses Al Qaeda’s repeated intention to again attack the U.S., and the alleged proliferation of terror cells in the U.S. and abroad. Ervin takes issue with what he calls Mueller’s “argumentum ad statisticum”—comparing terrorist murder to accidental death—and maintains that in a context of uncertainty about future attacks, “I’d rather err on the side of the believers. The downside of being wrong is so much smaller!”

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Some Reflections on What, if Anything, “Are We Safer?” Might Mean

Five years after 9/11, are we any safer? In the lead essay of this month’s Cato Unbound, Ohio State University political scientist John Mueller offers a set of provocative reflections on what that question might mean. Along the way, Mueller argues that the terrorist threat to American lives is overblown, and that the attempt to protect ourselves against any possible attack is impossible, and a waste of taxpayer money. “It would seem to make more sense,” Mueller writes, “to substantially abandon the quixotic policy of seeking to make everything (or even a lot of stuff) safe, and then use the money saved to repair any terrorist damage and to compensate any victims.”

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Coming Monday: 9/11 Five Years After: Reassessing the Terrorist Threat and Homeland Security

Monday is the fifth anniversary of the deadly terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon which precipitated the Global War on Terror internationally and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security domestically. While the Global War on Terror has received a vast amount of commentary, less has been said about the […]

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Will the Problem Fix Itself?

Given how hard it seems to forge a political consensus over what to do about Mexican immigration, I find some comfort in the indications that immigration flows from Mexico to the United States could decrease substantially in the not too distant future. Over the past half century, fertility rates in Mexico have declined sharply […]

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