Don't panic. Fear is al-Qaeda's real goal.
In responding to the attempted bombing of an airliner on Christmas Day, Sen. Dianne Feinstein voiced the feelings of many when she said that to prevent such situations, "I'd rather overreact than underreact." This appears to be the consensus view in Washington, but it is quite wrong. The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction. Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn't work. Alas, this one worked very well.
The attempted bombing says more about al-Qaeda's weakened state than its strength....
Zakaria's rather sensible recommendation is that we approach any attempted or successful terrorist attack in much the same manner the FAA approaches airplane accidents, ie try to figure out what failed and introduce policies and procedures to prevent a recurrence. (Physicians take just this approach when examining unusual cases or unexpectedly poor outcomes. Morbidity and Mortality {M & M} conferences are among the best learning tools for Physicians.)
Stephen Flynn leads off his article with a similar injunction:
5 myths about keeping America safe from terrorism
1. Terrorism is the gravest threat facing the American people.
Americans are at far greater risk of being killed in accidents or by viruses than by acts of terrorism. In 2008, more than 37,300 Americans perished on the nation's highways, according to government data. Even before H1N1, a similar number of people died each year from the seasonal flu. Terrorism is a real and potentially consequential danger. But the greatest threat isn't posed by the direct harm terrorists could inflict; it comes from what we do to ourselves when we are spooked. It is how we react -- or more precisely, how we overreact -- to the threat of terrorism that makes it an appealing tool for our adversaries. By grounding commercial aviation and effectively closing our borders after the 2001 attacks, Washington accomplished something no foreign state could have hoped to achieve: a blockade on the economy of the world's sole superpower. While we cannot expect to be completely successful at intercepting terrorist attacks, we must get a better handle on how we respond when they happen.
In the abstract I agree with both Zakaria and Flynn, yet the reason M & M conference results are rarely if ever entered into the public record, let alone part of a patients file, is the same reason we will continue to overreact to terror attacks, failed and successful.
For the last 30-40 years the Left, by design and through inadvertence, has consistently and repeatedly reinforced a view of the American people as dependent and helpless. A corollary to this view is the insistence, promulgated most assiduously by the Trial Lawyers, that there is no such thing as an accident. Whenever there is an untoward outcome, someone must be found to be liable and cash settlements are a necessary accompaniment of all accidents and injuries. This approach had its apotheosis among those families who were victimized by 9/11 and refused to accept government payments in exchange for their agreement to drop future litigation.
[As far as I know, suits alleging malfeasance by the airlines involved and by the builders, architects, and owners of the Twin Towers, remain in the system (though I have no direct knowledge of this and would welcome any information clarifying this detail.) Whether or not these suits have been settled or persist, they represented an idea familiar to Medical Doctors: there can be no accidents, no bad outcomes; someone (preferably with deep pockets) can always be found to be guilty.]
The 9/11 Commission had two primary goals.
1) As with any bureaucracy (and the 9/11 commission was composed of agents of our Federal Bureaucracy) the prime directive was to protect itself and its members. Thus we had such Theater of the Absurd as Jamie Gorelick, the doyen of the wall of separation between FBI and CIA, sitting on a Commission designed to ferret out the responsibility for our failure to "connect the dots" enabled in large part by the wall she constructed.
2) A secondary response was to a thinly veiled attempt to assign responsibility (blame) to the Bush Administration for not protecting us. This was partly meant to deflect the spotlight off of the bureaucracy (see #1) but also understood as a political weapon for use against the opposing party.
Following the 9/11 Commission, the desire, and need to assign blame, flourished and in its paranoid, psychotic iteration became the basis for the contention that 9/11 was an "inside job" known about in advance or perpetrated by the Bush administration. many leading Democrats not only refused to condemn the 9/11 Truthers but offered them indirect support with such locutions as "their concerns deserve to be addressed." NO prominent Democrat, to my recollection, ever addressed these attacks on the Bush administration, and since his inauguration Barack Obama, as often as possible, has attempted to continue the tradition of blaming Bush for all the evils in the world.
This leaves the Obama administration in a bind. They have insisted that the Bush administration has failed us in a multitude of ways. Obama would protect us better from man caused disasters (terrorism) and natural disasters (Katrina) far better than the belligerent Bush had done. The paternalistic approach taken by the Bush administration and Congress post 9/11 (setting up yet more bureaucratic responses to terror, such as the DNI and TSA) left and leave little room for personal responsibility or initiative.
The analogy of terror attacks to other kinds of accidents are often made. Americans tolerate hundreds, thousands, of deaths from car accidents, so why should we overreact to a few hundred or less deaths from terrorism? To ask the question is to begin to answer it. We each have some autonomy and control in our cars and are willing to accept the risk that our own behavior places us under. At the same time we are intolerant of risk when the control is in the hands of others. In addition, we have been well trained to expect someone to pay whenever we have a loss.
For Obama supporters to now attempt to lecture their fellow Americans that the danger of terrorism isn't really so bad is innocuous and disingenuous since they were among the strongest supporters of the idea that a paternalistic (or more aptly, a maternalistic) government, with more and more power, would offer cradle to grave comfort and safety.
It is hard to enlist Americans in the war on terror, even in its most benign iterations such as watching what goes on in your neighborhood and contacting authorities if you see anything suspicious, when you both demonize those who might want to take a more active role in such efforts as quasi-racist vigilantes usurping government's rightful functions, and insist that "Father (or Mother) knows best" and will protect us from all of life's vicissitudes. Maureen Dowd, in her terrible disappointment at the Presidency of the One, expresses the zeitgeist perfectly:
He’s so sure of himself and his actions that he fails to see that he misses the moment to be president — to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders, who reassures and instructs the public at traumatic moments.
He’s more like the aloof father who’s turned the Situation Room into a Seminar Room.
As long as our Father lives in Washington too many people raised under his paternalistic ministrations will be unable to think, fell, or act for themselves. They have been raised to believe their Father will protect them and make everything all right. As any parent of an adolescent can tell you, when reality intrudes and your human limitations become all too obvious to your child, his wrath can be intense.
