Doing the Terrorists' Work for Them

Weighing in on the supposed plot to blow up JFK Airport, Mayor Mike Bloomberg said the following:

There are lots of threats to you in the world. There's the threat of a heart attack for genetic reasons. You can't sit there and worry about everything. Get a life. You have a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being struck by a terrorist.

That's the most refreshing thing I've heard from a major politician in many years, and it reminded me of a time--back before the Bush administration and 9/11--when the government saw its job as calming and reassuring the public rather than needlessly stoking people's fears.

Compare Bloomberg's words to those of his predecessor Rudy Giuliani:

"They hate you!" says Rudy Giuliani in his new role as fearmonger in chief, relentlessly reminding audiences of all the nasty people out there. "They don't want you to be in this college!" he recently warned an audience at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. "Or you, or you, or you," he said, reportedly jabbing his finger at students. In the first Republican debate he warned, "We are facing an enemy that is planning all over this world, and it turns out planning inside our country, to come here and kill us." On the campaign trail, Giuliani plays a man exasperated by the inability of Americans to see the danger staring them in the face. "This is reality, ma'am," he told a startled woman at Oglethorpe. "You've got to clear your head."

And consider this:

When U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf described the alleged terror plot to blow up Kennedy Airport as "one of the most chilling plots imaginable," which might have caused "unthinkable" devastation, one law enforcement official said he cringed.

The plot, he knew, was never operational. The public had never been at risk. And the notion of blowing up the airport, let alone the borough of Queens, by exploding a fuel tank was in all likelihood a technical impossibility.

And now, with a portrait emerging of alleged mastermind Russell Defreitas as hapless and episodically homeless, and of co-conspirator Abdel Nur as a drug addict, Mauskopf's initial characterizations seem more questionable -- some go so far as to say hyped.

We now live in an era where our own government goes out of its way to hype threats well beyond what the facts will bear and create unwarranted fear among the citizenry. I know, I know, this isn't exactly a new phenomenon. In the 50s the scary bogeymen were communists, not terrorists. But there's something more invidious about it now.

As a tactic, terrorism works by creating terror, by giving rise to fears that are disproportionate to any actual threat. That's why it's the preferred tactic of groups engaged in asymmetric struggles. It's a way of magnifying their influence.

And that's why it's so troubling to see our own government using all of its power and influence to do exactly what the terrorists want, i.e., spread fear among the public. That's why this kind of fear-mongering is so much more destructive than the hysteria over communism a generation ago. While the Red Scare may have been similarly used as a cynical domestic political tool, at least it didn't actively further our enemies' goals.

But now, whenever Osama bin Laden's dispatches some scary statement from his cave in the Pakastani hinterland, it immediately finds its way into a speech by the President of the United States, where its influence is magnified by many orders of magnitude beyond anything Bin Laden ever could have achieved on his own. And whenever some group of halfwits sitting in a basement in Brooklyn or Miami hatches some goofball "plot" that has zero chance of success, the government relentlessly hypes the threat, creating the kind of public terror that these wannabe terrorists would never have been able to accomplish on their own.

We're doing their work for them. It's insanity, and it has to stop.

The government should of course take all threats seriously and do whatever it can to prevent terrorist attacks, but it should do so while simultaneously reassuring the public and helping people put the overall threat in perspective. That's what a responsible government does. I sure wish we had a responsible government.