Britain escaped another terrorist bombing. It was pure luck; an ambulance crew noticed the working bomb in a vehicle when they were at a nightclub helping a patron. These near misses and foiled attacks–ranging from plots to blow up apartment buildings to designs on the gas lines at JFK Airport to shooting up Fort Dix to the shoe bomber–are out of the news so fast it boggles the mind.
Yet these foiled attacks are very important. And this heuristic of ignoring “near misses” impedes clear thinking and good policy. These attacks show we’re still at war. They show the enemy means business. They show us how easily an attack can happen and how much must happen right among law enforcement to thwart any attack. They show how many lives can be lost in an instant if al Qaeda is successful. And they also show the importance of good intelligence, which is often too hard to come by using ordinary law enforcement means.
Why the difference? Ordinary criminals often operate alone or in small groups. The stakes of many of their crimes are low. The violence they commit is frequently restricted to other criminals in those instances where large organizations are involved. And, when ordinary innocent Americans can get caught up in the dragnet, this means a high costs of mistakes. In contrast, terrorists operate in large groups and their associated cells. The stakes of success are very high, usually involving mass death to ordinary Americans. And a great many of these suspects are foreigners overseas (and illegal aliens at home) to whom lower duties of civil liberties protection are owed. After all, in a healthy society it should not be controversial to say that a national government is, above all, dedicated to the interests and protection of its citizens.
Sadly, the Michael Moores of the world feel free saying we’re not too endangered by terrorism and that the threat is overblown. The only way this naive blowhard can make such a claim is by willfully ignoring the various foiled attacks that al Qaeda has launched since 9/11. The illogic of only looking at successful attacks has no parallel in any other area of life where risk management is called for, whether we’re talking about investing or insurance or the law of criminal attempt liability or medicine. Perhaps there is some deep evolutionary reason for this widespread “availability heuristic,” but self-described sophisticates in the media and the government should know better.
1 Jul 2007 at 12:31 pm
These attacks are due to the folly of allowing Muslims to pour into a country while simultaneously antagonizing them with things like the assault on Iraq (someone has termed this the “invite the world, invade the world” policy). Stop the aggressions, send the Muslims home and let’s all get along.
2 Jul 2007 at 7:26 pm
Yes, here’s the quid pro quo: the West gets out of the Muslim world (including Israel) and the Muslims get out of the West.
3 Jul 2007 at 2:53 pm
As thousands of manboy nutball Muslims goose step across the world with their um…gas cans and ah ah nails and some plastic explosives it will take nothing less than an army of millions to stop them. Invade all of their countries for we need more war to make us feel safe. Who will volunteer? Oh yeah recruitment is down. Yes, you could always author a blog to defend yourself.
4 Jul 2007 at 10:21 am
Bruce this is not a conventional threat, but this is a majorly disruptive threat and if al Qaeda is able to get its hands on a functional WMD they will, unlike even the craziest nation state, definitely use it.
But if you think the don’t-worry-about-terrorism thesis is viable, don’t be surprised when someone like Bush is elected our next President. There is some wisdom in large numbers; read Burke.
Finally, haven’t we had enough of the chickenhawk thing–particularly if you knew a bit more about me. I’d gladly volunteer to extract information from Khalid Sheik Mohammad and friends, though, since it seems you liberals and libertarians are a bit squeemish about things that go on in the real world.
13 Jul 2007 at 1:21 am
Hanson commented recently that there’s a reason these things get spotted and turned in in the West, but not in Arabistan: the civil society’s network of services and consensus and mutual trust that shrinks the maneuvering room of the BGs. Though we don’t see it, our society is thickly woven with these threads, and not a ramshackle frayed and incomplete patchwork. Big difference.