The Pathology of "Terrorism"

In the last three days we have seen headlines for two horrific incidents of violence:

7 killed in London Bridge attack

Disgruntled ex-employee kills 5 in Orlando

Both are appalling reminders of the violence which individuals are capable of. Both have made national and/or international news. Both involved the deaths of innocent citizens going about their daily lives.

One attack was a "terrrorist" attack. The other was not. And our differential responses say a great deal about us and our tolerance for violence.

The London attack immediately became part of a larger narrative when the self-styled Islamic State claimed responsibility. In the minds of many, particularly politicians with self-serving agendas, this immediately made it part of a larger global "war on terrorism". Tweets were sent, heated words flew almost immediately as we rehashed yet again the now-tired argument (at least in the US) between tribal Republicans who decry "political correctness" and tribal Democrats who defend the value (or the reality) of a multicultural society.

The Orlando case, on the other hand, falls into a much more isolated narrative, the "disgruntled ex-employee". President Trump has not tweeted about the attack in Orlando, preferring apparently to argue with the Mayor of London. There will be no calls from national politicians to do anything in particular. The headline quote from the local sheriff after the incident was this:

“We have no indication that this subject is a participant in any type of terror organization,” Demings said during the news conference.

That's our main response: well, at least it wasn't terrorism.

If it were my spouse, my child, my parent killed in that business in Florida, I doubt that would come as any comfort at all. The very idea seems absurd. And yet, our public conversation treats the deaths of innocents completely differently based solely on who killed them. We can live with the deaths of innocents, so long as they're shot by disgruntled ex-employees rather than stabbed or run over by terrorists.

We have become pathologically obsessed with terrorism. In any given year, far more innocent Americans are killed by disgruntled ex-employees than by terrorists. That's not just statistics - it's lives ruined, communities wounded, productivity lost. Every one of those lost lives leaves an impact, a hole where a person used to be. They all hurt. They are all children of God.

And yet, we act as if only those lucky enough to have been killed by terrorists matter. Those deaths get the attention, the large public ceremonies with politicians and media attention and stern promises of "This bloodshed will end"!

No one will go to Orlando and console the survivors of that attack with promises of action and praise for how strong they are to go on living in the wake of tragedy. There will be no mass gatherings of funds for those families. I imagine the local community will gather around the wounded and the fallen, and that's as it should be. But for the rest of the nation - and in particular, for our public "leaders" - the lives of seven people in London are far more important than the lives of five people in Florida.

There was an attack in Orlando that garnered a great deal of attention - because the attacker could be described as a "terrorist". We all came together united in the wake of the nightclub shooting. Yet just a few years before, we tore each other apart over an incident in which 20 six and seven year olds were gunned down in their school. No unity there, just spite and hate (even people who want to deny that it ever happened.) Our own children don't even matter unless they're killed by terrorists.

I understand why all of this is. I get the politics, the use of narrative, the incentives that drive politicians to use events for their own ends, the tribalism that divides us from our common humanity, even our common national identity. I understand all of that far too well, having studied it for too many years.

What I can't shake is a fundamental conviction: that this is Wrong.

Many American politicians piously call themselves Christians (Vice President Pence has famously said that he is a "Christian first"). Under what reading of the Bible does one set of innocent deaths matter more than another? If you think your job as a public servant is to protect innocent lives, why do you lavish hundreds of billions of dollars to protect some and nothing to protect others?

In the years immediately following 9/11/2001, we had a national conversation - not a great one, but the best we could do - about what constitutes "winning" for terrorists. We told ourselves that if we allowed the terrorists to drive us into fear, to change us, to make us something we're not, then they would in fact have won. We argued about where exactly those boundaries were, but for a while we shared a general sense: as long as we go on being Americans, they have not prevailed.

We are now so enthralled, so bewitched, so addicted to the idea of "terrorism" that I begin to think that perhaps they have won. Not too many years back, it seemed that tragedy brought out the best in us. We came together after 9/11, but also when the Mississippi flooded its banks and inundated the midwest; when New Orleans disappeared under water; when Hurricane Andrew struck Florida. In between disasters we argued and bickered, but when the chips were really down we seemed to have each other's backs. That's probably a simplified version of the past - but if so, it's an aspirational one.

Now, each new tragedy divides. Terrorist attacks are simply grist for more division and arguing and spite, while other incidents - like this morning's attack in Orlando - are ignored.

As usual, I don't have any solutions - only a conviction that we have all of this badly wrong. And I am reminded of Mahatma Gandhi's famous saying:

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Gaslighting on Terrorism and Immigration

This weekend has seen a mass of confusion, protest, anger, and dismay at a hastily-constructed executive order that brought an immediate halt to certain kinds of immigration and travel, and an indefinite halt to others (specifically, refugees from Syria). People marched, court orders were issued (and apparently ignored), statements were made, contradicted, and clarified. Things are still far from certain as of the start of the week.

Lost in the shuffle of all of these important issues is an underlying reality: we as a nation have been effectively "gaslighted" on terrorism and immigration. The Trump forces have told the lie that we are unsafe and vulnerable to attack by terrorists traveling from overseas so often that we all now take it for granted - even Democratic Senators otherwise opposed to the executive order.

As a security studies scholar, let me put this in clear terms: there is not a shred of evidence that the United States is any more vulnerable to terrorist attacks from abroad than it ever has been, and plenty to suggest that we are safer than at any point in our history. There is also no way of defending the assertion that Islamic terrorism represents an existential threat to the United States, or that it even ought to be on the list of top US national security priorities. We are afraid of terrorism only because we've been told we should be.

The easiest way to see the truth, of course, is to look at the statistics. Violence of any kind - never mind terrorist violence - doesn't even make the top 15 list of causes of death in the US, and has been in long-term secular decline (as have death rates in general). Any given American's odds of being killed or injured by a terrorist are almost infinitesimally small, and the odds of a terrorist attack of any kind happening on US soil on any given day - or even in any given month - are likewise extremely small. The list of things you are more likely to encounter than a terrorist is vast.

The few high-profile cases we've had in recent years (San Bernadino and, if you really want to stretch, Orlando) were committed by US citizens. The only recent case that might conceivably have been stopped by the rules recently put in place was a knife-wielding Somali at Ohio State, which while regrettable and tragic didn't lead to any loss of life (other than the attacker's) and which represented only the tiniest of dangers even to the people of Columbus, OH. Dylann Roof did more damage in South Carolina that this student did in Columbus.

The fact is that, of things that threaten Americans' lives and way of life, terrorism just doesn't make the list. It is, in reality, just not that important. Are we 100% free of terrorist risk? Of course not - and we never will be. There is no set of rules, no border restrictions, no "extreme vetting" procedures that will ever eliminate that risk. And at this point, the risk is so low that any efforts to improve procedures - however well-considered and well-implemented - will only lower the risk level by an almost immeasurably small amount. When you're that close to zero, it's hard to get closer.

Why, then, are so many Americans concerned about terrorism? Why are even Senate Democrats unwilling to question the underlying logic of Trump's executive order, which amounts to "desperate times call for desperate measures"? Because we have all been gaslit on this. The lie has been repeated so many times that it has become the truth.

This is not a problem that goes away with one administration, however disliked or incompetent. This is now baked into the system, the result of 15 years of steady drumbeats that long predate Trump and his people. No politician, Democrat or Republican, will challenge the conventional wisdom, and a great many of them will find it useful as cover to do what they want to do, whether it be restricting economic activity or discriminating against certain groups or simply getting reelected on the basis of blind fear. The "War on Terror" is, indeed, the never-ending war, because we have enshrined it on a pedestal in our heads.

I wish I could be less bleak about this, but I don't see a way forward. We have largely lost the capacity for hope in our politics, especially as concerns "national security" issues. 25 years ago we dreamed of a world in which we felt secure. Since then we have allowed our "leaders" to make sure that we will never feel secure again, whatever the real world is doing. As usual, Walt Kelly said it best: we have met the enemy, and He is Us.

I Was a Stranger and You Did Not Welcome Me

I have written a great deal in the past about fear and the terrible things it drives us to do. I've also written a lot about tribalism and the evils of walling ourselves off in aggressively exclusive communities. (You can look for those terms in the search box in the upper left to find past blog posts).

This past week we have been treated to a case that encompasses both - an Emirati man in traditional dress taken down by local police in Avon, Ohio for the crime of talking on a cell phone outside a hotel.

The fact that the mayor later said that police were "following protocol" and yet claimed that the incident "does not reflect our community" is absurd. Local rules and protocols reflect exactly what kind of community they want. That's what representative democracy is supposed to do. If this is not the kind of community that the citizens of Avon want, their elected officials need to do a better job of translating those wishes into rules and actions.

It is tempting to blame this incident on Donald Trump. Initially, my thought was to write a blog post about this story titled something like "Living in Trump's America". But the reality is that Trump did not cause the paranoia, the fear, or the xenophobia. He's just using it for his own selfish ends.

In the days immediately following the Oklahoma City bombing, before Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were identified and apprehended, Sikhs and Muslims across the country were attacked at random. In other communities and in days gone by it has been Hispanics. Or blacks. Or gays. Or Irish. Or Italians. This is nothing new, though it is no less shameful for that. We have not made nearly as much "progress" as we like to think.

It's easy to single out the frightened 911 caller here, and I'm glad that there may be consequences for someone calling 911 and claiming without evidence that someone is "pledging allegiance to ISIS or whatever". More problematic is the law enforcement response. Cranks call 911 all the time. That doesn't mean we have to provide muscle for their desire to lash out at others.

But beyond the obvious paranoia, tribalism, and xenophobia on display here, I want to point something out to a particular audience. For those of us who are followers of the Christian faith (as I am), and for those in particular who claim a desire for the United States to be a "Christian Nation" (I do not) - in the face of this story I am struck by these words of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew:

I was a stranger and you did not welcome me (Mt 25:43)

This is the very antithesis of welcoming the stranger. The man was obviously from a foreign land. Rather than greet him with welcome, he was greeted with fear, xenophobia, and force. He was accosted and humiliated, made worse because it was done under the color of law by people who supposedly represent us all.

If you really want your nation, or your community, or the world immediately around you, to reflect the Kingdom of God, then you need to take this kind of thing seriously. It is not in sermons and Sunday services that faith lives; it is in our everyday actions, as simple as making a phone call or greeting a stranger.

The security-minded response - the voice that wrote those law enforcement protocols - claims that "we have to do this", that "this is necessary to keep us safe". And after all, what is the minor inconvenience of one man (he was released shortly thereafter, once it became clear to everyone that he was not a threat) next to the safety of the community?

You are welcome to that point of view, of course. I would make only two observations. First, it is a vantage ruled entirely by fear. If you are going to allow fear to own your decisions, admit to it. I prefer a different path.

Second, you cannot hold this position and simultaneously claim to wish for a "Christian Nation" or a Christian community of any sort. To take the "safety first/security above all" road is to give up on God and Christ entirely. Jesus did not say, "Invite in the stranger after he's been through a thorough background check and has been screened for weapons". 2000 years ago the world was every bit as dangerous, indeed far more so, than it is today. Yet his words are what they are.

We must all choose, every day, between fear and courage, between isolation and connection, between security and vulnerability. These are never easy choices, and there is room for compromise and balance between competing concerns. But we should make these choices mindful that every choice we make remakes the world a little bit, for good or ill. Next time, let's try welcoming the stranger rather than handcuffing him.

Hate is Hate: Responses to the Orlando Shooting

Much has already been written about the terrible shooting in Orlando this past afternoon, and much more will be written and said in the coming days and weeks. A lot of what we hear will be predictable, because we've had this "conversation" a lot of times before. I've written a lot about gun control already; if you want to my thoughts on that subject, type "gun control" in the search box on this blog and have at it. The short form: guns are a terrible means of self-defense, and the answer to gun violence isn't arming everyone else in society.

What I want to offer here is a broader perspective, one that looks at the shooting in Orlando not as simply as a terrorist attack or an attack on the LGBTQ community or a mass shooting, but as another event in the long and frequent chain of human violence.

Viewed from this very broad lens, the specific questions about the precise motives of the shooter or the detailed connections between him and various other organizations become much less important. They matter for this case in particular, but if our intention is to have a dialogue about how to have fewer such incidents in the future then we need to move beyond the specifics and talk about violence.

We tend to be guilty of "fighting the last war" in our response to mass shootings. After Sandy Hook and Aurora, the answer was "better mental health"; after Columbine, "better parenting". After Orlando, some want to use the "terrorist" label to claim that we have a particular enemy (ISIS? Radical Islamism?), and that all we have to do to prevent such attacks in the future is to eradicate that enemy.

All of this, of course, misses the point. We had plenty of shootings (including mass shootings) in the United States long before the current flavors of radicalized Islam came along, and we will likely have more long after they are gone. Many recent attacks (including Sandy Hook, Charleston, and Aurora) weren't conducted by Muslims at all, nor did they have any particular political motive. Yet the action, and the result, was much the same: innocent civilians, going about their daily lives, gunned down by an individual bent on their destruction.

Politicians who offer simple solutions are deluding us, and possibly themselves. There are no easy answers, no "if only I was in charge everything would be better" actions. Crimes of mass violence are at the same time unique and the offspring of a particular set of (very broad) factors:

Opportunity: This is the one factor that we never talk about, because there's simply nothing that can be done. If someone is bent on killing civilians and can manage to hide their plans from law enforcement ahead of time, there will always be opportunities. A sporting event. A dance club. A concert. A shopping mall. A movie theater. An airport. A train station. A school. The fact that we live in community makes us vulnerable. We can tinker with these vulnerabilities at the margins, but only for specific targets and for limited periods of time. To live in society means to live in vulnerability to one another. The key here is to live with that vulnerability, but without fear.

Means: This tends to attract a lot of heat, and not much light. There are many ways for people bent on mass destruction to cause it. Some are more effective than others, and some are easier to contain or implement than others. Homemade bombs are possible, but tricky, and efforts can be made to monitor certain kinds of chemicals in certain quantities to try to prevent another Oklahoma City. Knives and other hand implements can be deadly, but usually in small numbers; it is difficult to imagine an assailant killing 49 people in a night club with a knife.
     Guns come in various types, from small pistols with few rounds to large rifles with many rounds and high rates of fire. Guns get most of the attention because, in the United States, they are the perfect means for anyone bent on causing widespread destruction: easy to acquire, easy to use, widely available, and highly destructive. We already have a few restrictions on firearms - fully automatic weapons are widely restricted from civilian ownership, for example. Further restrictions would reduce the means available for mass killings. It would not eliminate these events, but it would make them both less frequent and less deadly when they do occur.

Motive: This is the arena in which people love to engage in rampant speculation, most of it useless. More often than not (Orlando, Sandy Hook, San Bernadino, etc.), the killers die in the incident, leaving us to speculate afterwards about their motives. What particular ideology or mental illness fueled this particular rampage? We think that, if only we can get the right answer (or say the right words), we can solve the problem.
     This is where we are most at sea. For law enforcement purposes, it matters whether the Orlando shooter was working with others or not. But for the purposes of trying to reduce the quantity and severity of violence in our society in the future, it's irrelevant. We shouldn't care whether this individual was a follower of ISIS, or al-Qaeda, or the KKK, or the Westboro Baptist Church. There will always be ideologies and theologies that justify, even demand, violence against innocents. There is only one thing they all have in common: Hate.

On Sunday night as we were still sifting through information about the shootings, I happened to be watching the Tony Awards and was treated to Lin-Manuel Miranda's moving and emotional sonnet, which he read in lieu of an acceptance speech. The poem is anchored in an anthem of the LBGTQ community, "Love is love", and so it is. But the opposite is also true: hate is hate, whether born of Christian or Muslim ideology, whether directed at women or blacks or sexual minorities or other nations or people of different faiths or members of different political parties.

If you're looking for one root cause to these acts of inhumane violence, here it is: hatred. Hatred of particular groups, hatred of others who are different, hatred of random strangers, even hatred of self. Hatred, as Star Wars reminded us, leads to suffering - for both the hated and the hater.

The thing about hatred is that it feeds on itself. Read, if you can, this Storify compilation of live tweets from a recent rally for Donald Trump. The anger and hatred, as the correspondent reported, were "palpable". Insults, curses, angry words, threats, coming both from the candidate and the crowd - all combined to raise the collective level of hatred far beyond simply the sum total of the individuals. The more anger and fear we immerse ourselves in, the more we hate. The more hatred we encounter in others, the more we hate. And make no mistake - there is hatred inside all of us.

Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us of this many years ago:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

If you want a more modern example, I encourage you to read this speech by the Lt. Governor of Utah. It is moving, it is eloquent, and it makes all the right points.

If we want to have less violence in our society, the answer doesn't lie in defeating an ideology or a religion. It doesn't rest on electing a strong man who promises peace but delivers only anger. It doesn't rest, in fact, on who we elect at all. It doesn't even rest, ultimately, on whether we put more money into mental health, or do better work with terrorist watch lists, or restrict guns - although all of those may be good things to do. The answer lies in us, every day. Every day we face opportunities to love more, to be kind, to come together. And we face temptations to give into fear, to express our anger, to hate someone a little bit more. We together decide which it will be.

Which will you choose today?

Sarah Palin, Blasphemer

Usually, Sarah Palin is too easy a target to bother picking on. She makes poor Dan Quayle (anybody remember him?) sound like a Rhodes Scholar, and can always be counted on to feed late-night comedians. I think Comedy Central should pay her royalties.

That said, this past weekend Palin outdid herself in front of a National Rifle Association rally in Indianapolis. The NRA, never known for inviting speakers with moderate views, may have gotten more than even it bargained for this time around.

What was Palin's sin? Blasphemy. In the midst of what I'm sure was an otherwise ho-hum tribalist rant about how evil Liberals are and how the government wants to take away everything, she uttered this little chestnut about how to deal with terrorists:

"If I was in charge they would know, waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists."

I'm sure that line got quite a lot of applause. I would like to think - though I don't hold out much hope - that faithful Christians in the audience, of whom surely there were many, may have withheld their applause or at least paused in discomfort for a moment. When was the last time you heard someone refer to the Sacrament of Baptism and terrorists in the same sentence?

The religious blasphemy here is obvious to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the basic tenets of Christianity. Baptism is one of two sacramental practices that is pretty much universal to the Christian faith around the globe (the other being communion, the sharing of bread and wine). And while there are lots of squabbles over details, the fundamental understanding of baptism is the same the world over: it is a practice that signifies the salvation of the individual baptized and their joining with the broader church, the Body of Christ. It is a deliberately inclusive ritual that brings people into the fold of acceptance by the church.

How anyone, even in search of a political punch line, can equate this practice with torturing terrorists for information is beyond me. I can only assume that someone who would say such a thing is so callous to the faith she professes to believe, so wrapped up in her own ego and need for approval, and so steeped in the blindness of the political tribalism she has helped create that she doesn't understand what she said. The fact that "baptism" might have some religious significance for anyone - even for some of her own followers - is obviously not of the slightest concern to her.

I don't really care what Sarah Palin does or what she says. She strikes me as the worst kind of pandering politician who, far from being a "rogue", is all too eager for power and will do whatever is necessary to obtain it. Lacking electoral power, she is happy to whip people up into a frenzy as a sort of modern-day political revivalist, which is power of a sort.

What interests me more is the reaction of the churches. What must the Assemblies of God, the Pentacostal denomination to which Palin has belonged, think of such an obvious theological outrage? One of the four points of the church's stated Mission is "Show compassion" - which suggests that water boarding might be a little out of place. The church also describes "Baptism of the Holy Spirit" as one of its "Core Doctrines", though there are no references to torture therein.

Beyond the Assemblies, what kind of response might we see from other churches? Few that will be reported in the media, of course - Pope Francis might be able to draw some attention (and I hope he will), but most other denominations likely won't make the front (or even the back) page. They should consider issuing statements all the same, to their own members if nothing else. This is one case where I would think almost any sincere Christian would agree that there should be a line between politics and religion, and that no faith - not even the faith of the powerful class - should be used to score cheap political points.

At root there is an old lesson here. Setting aside Constitutional arguments about the Separation of Church and State from the government side, this case presents a cautionary tale to churches about the dangers of mixing in politics. Politicians can and will twist, distort, and pervert your words, doctrines, and beliefs - whatever they may be - to their own ends. When you lend your support to them in public, you give them license to do so.

So to faithful Christians everywhere, whatever your political leanings: behold Sarah Palin. Never forget that the lust for power and adulation can destroy anything and everything, even the things you think are most central. And think twice before backing a politician - any politician - before you give them license to speak in your name and in the name of God.

The Power of Terrorism Isn't In the Terrorists

Terrorism, and responses to it, have been back in the news lately. Revelations of NSA data-gathering, fresh memories of the Boston Marathon bombing, and the winding down of US involvement in Afghanistan have all combined to put "The War on Terror" back on the radar screen, even if we don't use that term very much anymore.

A couple of days ago, I blogged about what I regard as one of the key questions - not "how much privacy are we giving up?" but "how much security are we getting for it?" The good folks at the Dayton Business Journal were nice enough to republish it as a guest blog column, which has probably expanded the readership significantly. No angry emails or eggs on my window yet, though.

That post sparked a discussion, unsurprisingly, about the balance between how much to "spend" (in dollars or privacy or what have you) in fighting terrorism and what it's "worth". That discussion made me realize that I had stopped a level short in my previous thinking - and that one reason for disagreements about counterterrorism measures is that people can fundamentally disagree about the "value" of terrorism.

In that earlier column, I wrote this:

We don't comb through emails or phone calls for evidence that people are going to commit murder, or sell drugs, or rob banks, or any number of other illegal and harmful activities. And our political system is unable to put even the mildest controls on firearms. So why do we accept this "logic" when it comes to terrorism?

It's easy to point out that we apply different standards to things that are roughly equal in objective facts. Many (not all, but many) Americans are willing to put up with measures to prevent deaths by terrorism that they wouldn't agree to in preventing other kinds of deaths - even other violent deaths. From an economists' point of view, of course, this is crazy - but then, most of the world looks crazy to economists.

What I didn't ask in that previous column is, why? What is there about terrorist violence that makes it weigh more heavily - makes it "worth more" in our cost/benefit calculations? There is no objective answer, of course - different people can and do assign different values to such things. A friend of mine suggested a logic I hadn't considered before:

Terrorism isn't like car accidents - it's an attack on the state and the community. I don't see it as a cost-benefit calculation like bike helmet laws - it's not about the death toll, it's about sovereignty. (emphasis added)

There is, of course, no way of making an appeal to facts to support this argument - it's an argument about values. In particular, it's an argument based on the proposition that the intent or motive behind the violence alters its value, aside from how much damage it causes or to whom.

Violence has long carried symbolic meaning apart from its practical value. It is precisely that point that terrorism is designed to exploit. Terrorist groups lack the ability to cause enough damage to matter in practical military or security terms. Assuming that most terrorist groups have a political goal - change US foreign policy, or bring down the US government, or something similar - they just don't have the firepower to accomplish that by attacking the thing they want to change.

So they attack symbolically and emotionally important targets, either out of a sense of frustration and catharsis (not expecting to really "win" but feeling better because they "struck back"), or in hopes of inducing a disproportionate counter-reaction that advances their cause. In 1957 Eric Frank Russell wrote the novel Wasp in which he elucidated exactly this theory of how terrorism works:

“In given conditions, action and reaction can be ridiculously out of proportion … One can obtain results monstrously in excess of the effort … Let’s consider [an] auto smash-up…. The driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp which had flown in through a window and was buzzing around his face…. The weight of a wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being, the wasp’s size is minute, its strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid. … Nevertheless, that wasp killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap.”

Here's the thing about the power of terrorism and terrorists: it has almost nothing to do with them, and almost everything to do with us. The objectively small amounts of damage terrorists cause loom large in large part because we assign weight to them far in excess of their actual size. In short, terrorists have power because we give it to them.

Now, I readily grant that not all death is equal in meaning. Some death (say, from old age at 95 or 100) is regrettable but expected - even a marker of something to celebrate. Other deaths (say, traffic accidents) are tragic, and so we look for ways to prevent more while recognizing that the world is an inherently dangerous place. Death by intentional violence is in a different category - in cases where one human dies at the hand of another, the malice of the act matters and changes its meaning.

But from my point of view, death by violence is equally tragic whether it's at the hands of a Muslim bomber or a South Chicago gang member. The presence of political motives (or, more often, vague political rationalizations - were the Boston Bombers really trying to accomplish something?) is, for me, vastly overshadowed by the fact that some people were willing, even eager, to kill others. That, to me, is the greatest tragedy.

There isn't really a prescription at the end of this so much as an observation. Terrorists and the violence they commit have exactly as much power as we give them. If we impute greater meaning to violence done by Muslims acting in small groups than we do to violence done by racist or homophobic whites or urban gang members in similar numbers, then of course we will be willing to expend more resources on preventing the former than on the latter. That is, collectively, our choice to make. I hope we can extend our national conversation to this level, rather than relying on sound bites and loud politicians to define those choices for us.

"Terrorism", Crime & Punishment

Events continue to unfold in Boston, as we eagerly await answers to the most pressing question about the attack on last week's Boston marathon: Why? We now know (with some degree of certainty) who, although there are some lingering questions about whether there might be connections to other networks of terrorists (so far, there's no evidence that there are).

Of pressing interest now is the eagerly anticipated questioning of the remaining suspect, who remains in serious condition in a Boston hospital. As we wait for him to be well enough to answer questions, a new controversy has arisen: whether to question him as a criminal suspect (with the usual Miranda legal protections attending) or whether to designate him an "enemy combatant", which strips away those protections (including legal counsel and protection against self-incrimination).

This is as much a political question as a legal one. The law, I suspect, will be fairly clear on this, and it may be that those raising the alternative "enemy combatant" option are doing so for political grandstanding purposes. Such demagoguery has never done the Republic any good, however, and so deserves the most careful consideration.

H/t to my colleague Will Moore for an excellent piece on this. Amidst a long(and sometimes shameful) list of past cases, Will invokes the words of John Adams from the trial of British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre (Adams was the soldiers' defense attorney):

It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. 

But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, “whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,” and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.

This is not a politically popular view, but it is an important one in an era in which politicians are likely to bay for blood at every opportunity in an effort to pander for votes. The loose use of the term "terrorism" is particularly problematic here - if we can apply a separate (non-Constitutional) set of rules to every case we slap the "terrorist" label on, we will make politics the master of the legal system.

Why, for example, do explosions get labelled as "terrorism" but gun violence does not? Should James Holmes be labeled a "terrorist" for the Aurora, CO shootings? What about Adam Lanza? Even Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were tried under standard criminal rules, despite having perpetrated what was in 1995 the largest terrorist bombing attack on US soil in history.

As conservatives are fond of warning us (and then conveniently forgetting when it suits them), we should be careful what powers we give to the government. Do we really want to give this and every future President the power to label crimes as "terrorist" and shunt them to an entirely separate legal system outside the Constitution? Who gets to decide what counts as "terrorist" and what doesn't? Right now there is no standing legal definition in the US; the term is entirely political. How long before "terrorist" becomes simply "stuff I don't like"?

These kinds of problems are, of course, why nations create Constitutions - to set the rules up ahead of time on the most fundamental issues. Crime & punishment has always been on the top of that list, which is why fully five of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights deal with it in some way. Adams and his contemporaries saw the dangers of allowing a system to be governed by the momentary passions of the mob, who would likely have lynched those British soldiers on the spot. I hope that our leaders today can recover that same wisdom and let the criminal justice system do its work.

Update 4/22/13, 3:30 pm EDT: It appears, based on this news report, that the White House has ruled out the "enemy combatant" road. The suspect has been charged and will be handled by regular criminal courts, at least according to this account.

Boston & Texas: Why Meaning Matters More Than Numbers

On Monday, two bombs went off in a crowd of spectators near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious sporting events. Three people were killed and over 180 injured, some seriously. The event was quickly labelled an act of terrorism.

On Tuesday, a large explosion leveled a fertilizer plant in near Waco, Texas. With reports still coming in, the blast injured about 160 people, killed up to 15, and leveled dozens of buildings and homes including 60-80 houses and a 50-unit apartment building. News reports as of this writing seem to indicate an accident as the likeliest cause - though we will know more in the coming days.

The responses to both events, terrorism and (apparent) accident, tell us a lot about how we view danger, violence, and threats in the modern world.

Economists (prominently including the authors of Freakonomics) love to point out that we over-estimate some dangers and threats and under-estimate others. When we hear a couple of stories about sharks attacking swimmers, we overestimate the likelihood that we ourselves might be attacked - and so stay away from the ocean. We forget about the far greater likelihood of being killed in a car accident, or by any of a number of other less visible things that kill many thousands every year.

While these are good reminders about how bad we are at probabilities and math (which is important), these analyses miss the point. They do so with a classic economics mistake - assuming that one death is very much like another, or (in economics-speak) that death is fungible. Dead is dead, after all.

But our collective responses to the Boston and West, TX events show otherwise. Death is not just event, one equivalent to another. Death has meaning, and so how we die has meaning. That meaning changes the very character of how we perceive death and how we shape our responses to it.

Assuming that no link is found to criminal or nefarious activity (and as of this time, none has been suggested), the West, TX explosion is an accidental tragedy. A fire broke out at a factory which unfortunately had large concentrations of explosive substances. Disaster ensued. But the disaster was (in this narrative) not intended, directed, or caused by any person. We may discover in the future that it was the byproduct of negligence or sloppiness or bad maintenance. But nobody meant for those people to be injured or die.

The Boston explosions are an entirely different animal - even though the damage caused was far less (in both deaths and property destruction). These were clearly a work of malevolence. It is no accident that the first fatality victim identified, and probably the best well-known, is an 8 year old boy - the very definition of an innocent. We don't just feel hurt by these explosions; we feel attacked.

And that is the fundamental distinction, the point that economists miss. Whether I die from an accidental fire or a homicide matters. Human malevolence, alone among all the possible causes of death, is the one that bothers us the most. There are many reasons why this might be - because we feel it should be the most preventable, because we feel the wrongness of it, because we are confronted with our own feelings of anger and hatred that can lead down that road. But for whatever reason, death by the deliberate targeted action of another affects us differently than any other kind.

Both of these stories are national news. Boston will go on being national news for a lot longer, as we sift through the questions - who? and why? chief among them - that accidental explosions do not pose. The memory of the victims of Boston will stay with us, as will the images of response - the pairing of New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox logos, for example, or the singing of "Sweet Caroline" at a Yankees game. All of these things move us, even those of us far away from either event, in a way that accidental tragedy does not.

This is not to say that the victims of both events are not deserving of sympathy and support - and both will be given. But these things feel different. And however much we try to be rational in our policies and responses, that feeling matters for what we do. Many stories are tragic, but not all tragedies affect us in the same way. Statistics and death tolls, in the end, are not the final arbiter - narrative and meaning are. And in a way, that is very smart of us - because we often can't control the statistics, but we can work together to build meaning.

Obligatory Iraq Redux

With the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the US war in Iraq, many of my colleagues have been looking back at the last ten years and taking stock. My friend and colleague Steve Saideman does an excellent job of reconstructing his own thoughts and then examining them, so naturally I have to try to follow suit.

In that spirit, I went about trying to figure out what I actually thought (and wrote) at the time, and how well it did or didn't hold up. Like Steve, I didn't have a blog then, so there's no ready-made archive of stuff I wrote. I did oppose the war, which can be found on the record if you look hard enough - but that's not much of a stretch, since pretty much all IR scholars not being paid by the Bush administration felt the same way.

Here's a piece typical of what I wrote at the time - an op-ed that appeared in USA Today, titled "US Won't Get What It Wants".

That piece, and the notes from various public talks I gave at the time, tended to focus on three things:

• How many US soldiers will die? At the time, we were not that far removed from "Black Hawk Down" in Somalia and it was reasonable to suspect that any administration would suffer if there were high US casualties. This turned out not to be the case - Bush won re-election in 2004 (by a narrow margin, it's true) despite a war that had by voting time turned substantially south and was producing significant numbers of US casualties. Apparently, getting American soldiers killed doesn't extract much of a political price, at least for a Republican president.

• How many Iraqi civilians will die? This was an issue, I argued, not because Americans care (they didn't and don't) but because high Arab casualties would be the best recruitment drive al-Qaeda could want. The fear here was that high Iraqi casualties would generate greater sympathy for anti-American terrorists, leading to more anti-American terrorist attacks. This also turns out not so much to be true in the long run, as factions within Iraq have been far more interested in turning violence against each other than against, say, New Yorkers. That's not to say that there wasn't an increase in anti-American sentiment - but it was already pretty high before the invasion, so the increase may have been marginal. These days, people in the region (including in Iraq) have other issues to contend with; a substantial US withdrawal makes it harder to blame their ongoing problems on us. And the number and level of terrorist attacks since 9/11 has been pretty much in keeping with pre-9/11 history: few and far between, and not amounting to much on a strategic level.

• What will the ultimate outcome in Iraq be? The Bush administration argued that Iraq would be "freed" and democratized, and that a free & democratic Iraq would do more good for US interests than anything else we could possibly do in the region. I argued (see the above piece) that a democratic and stable Iraq was an extremely unlikely scenario, and that resources put towards such an end (if that were the goal) were likely to be wasted. This one I think I got pretty well on target: 10 years on there still isn't a stable government, there are still massive problems with refugees, human trafficking, a ruined infrastructure, and no more than an uneasy detente between the Kurds, the Shiites, and the Sunnis. Separatism in the north is still a very real and viable concern, and control over the oilfields still hasn't been clearly established. In short, Iraq is a mess and is likely to stay that way (with varying levels of violence and instability) for a while.

So after 10 years, the best summary I can suggest is this: our worst fears haven't been realized (massive new waves of anti-American terrorism), but it's hard to argue that the expenditure of resources (lives and money) was worth it (no WMD, no democracy in Iraq). We've learned some things about the US public (more casualty-acceptant than many thought; discussions of a "post-Vietnam politics" may have to give way to a "post-post-Vietnam politics"). And apparently, Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn rule" (You Break It, You Bought It) doesn't really work - 10 years on, Iraq is still decidedly broken but we're going to walk away anyway.

The real test of the future effects of all of this will be ... when? In future elections, will aggressive neo-conservatism play well? (probably not) Will this engender some caution in US foreign policy? Probably - but then, Iraq was an outlier, so perhaps what we will see is simply reversion to the mean. If we've buried the most aggressive neo-con ideas politically, that would be a good thing, though it hurts to have paid so much for the lesson.

A Rare Bipartisan Moment Over Drone Attacks

Last week saw a rare bit of political theater in Washington: an actual filibuster by a US Senator. Rand Paul (KY) took the floor and held it by speaking for some 13 hours to block confirmation of President Obama's nominee for CIA director.

The filibuster had little practical effect - other than reviving references to the Jimmy Stewart classic "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," it merely delayed confirmation by a day - but it did raise awareness of an issue: the administration's apparent stance that it has the legal right to kill American citizens, on American soil, with drone strikes if national security demands it.

This raised two interesting observations (at least, they're interesting to me...):

First, there was of course a social media buzz about Paul's grandstanding. Memes like these were common on FB throughout the day:

What was fascinating to me about the social media frenzy was that this same message was coming from both the right and the left. Tribes that usually have nothing but contempt for each other's positions - and who mock each other regularly as a matter of instinct - suddenly started singing in unison. I don't know if any of them noticed - I doubt it, given how little the most committed tribalists will listen to each other - but I found it fascinating nevertheless. If nothing else, this sends an interesting political message to the President: you've managed to piss off both sides on this one. Maybe it's time to back down.

Second, it is fascinating to me the extent to which the technology (armed predator drones) provided a red herring distraction on the entire debate (a taste of "squirrel sauce", as my friend Steve Saideman would put it). "Targeted killing" is a polite term for either "assassination" or "murder", depending on your taste, and the fact that it's done with one weapon over another seems largely irrelevant.

Imagine this thought experiment: what if Sen. Paul had gotten up and asked for the President to publicly declare that the administration has no legal right to assassinate American citizens, on American soil, without trial, using CIA snipers with rifles? Or with agents slipping poison into their coffee? The universal response would have been, "of course he can't do that". The violations of habeus corpus and other portions of the Constitution, not to mention Federal law, are numerous. So why does this become a "legitimate debate" when we change "sniper rifle" to "predator drone"?

Nearly a dozen years after 9/11/01, most Americans don't worry much about terrorism anymore - with good reason. Yet the political debates in Washington continue to be shaped (some might say mis-shaped) by this one event and our failure to come to terms with it. Perhaps the response of both the left and the right to this could start to move things back to some sense. In the meantime, we'll likely see more interesting political theater - which is always entertaining!

Real Security is Hard; 100% Security is Impossible

Sometimes, the targets are too easy. We've heard stories for years of problems with the security screening network in the US; now comes this:

LA Airport TSA Screeners 'ran drug ring'

To calm a frightened public in 2001 and 2002, Americans were told that the "new" TSA and DHS would guarantee our safety. But there are no guarantees. TSA jobs are, by all accounts, frequently unpleasant and not all that well-paid. Oversight can be lax (no pun intended here). When that happens, you're bound to get things like this. And if you can bribe someone to smuggle drugs through, what else would they smuggle for money?

Too, there's the problem of "fighting the last war". In this case, we have poured billions upon billions into securing the air traffic network. Why? Because 9/11 involved airplanes, and because it looks like it might be doable. But the two largest terrorist attacks/attempts on US soil prior to 9/11 both involved rental trucks (one directed at the World Trade Center, no less) - did we go after the rental truck industry? Then there are boats, problematic border crossings, and all the rest of it.

The fact is that terrorism is all about asymmetry, which makes guaranteed security impossible. Moreover, in the grand scheme of things terrorism ranks far behind murder, traffic accidents, and any number of health issues as a threat to American lives. Yes, it's more economically disruptive - to a point. But those disruptions are incredibly rare - indeed, vanishingly so in recent years.

For the most part, terrorism isn't much on the public radar these days. The presidential candidates have other things to talk about that are more attuned to Americans' concerns. And it isn't that we don't need some kind of response to terror threats, just as we need systems for dealing with natural disasters, auto accidents, murders, and a host of other problems. Here's hoping that this year's president campaign doesn't wander into the silly territory of pandering, wherein candidates promise us complete immunity from terrorists. Because there ain't no such thing.

"Normal" Fears and the Asymmetry of Terrorism

I heard about the rash of bomb threats at the University of Pittsburgh for the first time yesterday. This is a little surprising, in that I still have family in Pittsburgh, but none are associated with Pitt. I don't often hear the Cathedral of Learning - Pitt's 42-story grand tower - referred to on the radio, so it caught my ear.

What's perhaps a little more surprising is that this has been going on since mid-February - nearly two months. To date, there have been well over 50 bomb threats resulting in building closures. This is a massive level of disruption, all the more remarkable in that it has involved no actual bombs.

There are, I think, a couple of lessons here. First, if your objective is to disrupt normal systems and engender a certain level of fear, that is remarkably easy to do. Occasionally a high school kid pulls something like this to get out of an exam; he is almost invariably caught within days, if not hours. This has been going on for weeks, and the full resources of the FBI have as yet turned up nothing.

This illustrates a key point that a lot of experts make about terrorism: its inherently asymmetric nature. Whoever is doing this is armed only with a laptop and knowledge of how to stay undetected. Granted, disrupting a large university is not the same as blowing up a major landmark. But what if you did this to the ten largest universities in the country? Or to a series of government offices, or the major businesses in a metropolitan area? The potential is clearly there for significant disruption at nearly zero cost. Which is precisely why "terrorism" (an extremely broad category) is so popular as a means for the less powerful to fight against the more powerful.

Second, I find it at least a bit remarkable that it's taken nearly two months for this to show up on the radar screen. I suppose the fact that no actual bombs have gone off has something to do with that - there is no "bleeding" to "lead" the headlines here. But does this say something about our having come to terms with a "new normal" of security precautions? It used to be that a bomb threat campaign of this magnitude would be national news. Now it just rates an article in the Chronicle? I don't know whether that's good, bad, or indifferent - though much of what we see as "news" is surely less significant than this.

I don't have any conclusions here. I do feel for the Pitt students & faculty - for them, this is a major, life-disrupting problem. Let's hope - given that hope is all we have - that this particular problem doesn't spread itself farther than it already has.