First of all, I would like to thank Mr. Lustick for putting forth an opinion that is obviously not popular. I just watched a media debate on Fox in which he was alternately lambasted as a fool or a traitor and then dismissed as a crackpot.

Although I am a U.S. citizen, I have not lived in the U.S. for some time, and thus, have been somewhat isolated from the media manipulation of American public opinion. From nearly the beginning of the WOT, I have been decrying the fact that by suspending American's personal liberties, putting in place unreasonable and ineffective impediments to travel and commerce, and spending vast sums on counter-terrorism, we are helping the terrorists achieve their objectives.

Even by calling this effort a "War" instead of merely an international criminal manhunt and prosecution, I think that we have inadvertently given the terrorists the status of "nation-state". Note the debate over the status of detainees in Guantanamo and the efforts to apply the Geneva Convention, an international pact made between nations, to the combatants.

By my analysis, Al Qaeda has been spectacularly successful in achieving their goals. They have done so by playing into the American pathology of embracing each and every new scare that comes along as a "clear and present danger" that requires immediate and drastic action. This is fueled by a media that feeds on this sort of panic, by a population that seems predisposed to believe that the "sky is falling", and by an economy that is wealthy enough to have disposable income available for massive amounts of money to be spent on the prevention of the latest pending disaster.

In my lifetime, I have seen the following presented to and accepted by mainstream American thought as crisis so deadly and imminent, that they justified extreme measures (in reverse order, more or less):

- War on Terror
- Asian Bird Flu
- Global Warming (recently transformed to Sudden Climate Change)
- Y2K
- African Killer Bees
- Invasion of Illegal Immigrants
- Ebola Plague
- Destruction of the "Family"
- Hole in the Ozone Layer
- Drugs
- Failure of Education (this one repeats regularly)
- Hunger
- Poverty
- Nuclear melt down of power plants
- Pollution
- The world running out of oil
- Nuclear Winter
- Worldwide nuclear war
- Communism

I am sure I missed a few, but you get the idea. Most of these did contain some element of real threat (some more, some less, some none at all). In all of them, though, the government or special interests were able to co-opt the media into whipping up the fears of the public to the point where policies were formulated and actions taken that were out of proportion to the real threat or simply ineffective knee-jerk reactions that solved nothing but wasted time and money.

What needs more study is the pathology of collective fear and the structure of our society that causes our collective reactions to be overblown and self-destructive.

The only real explanation I have ever come up with is that is a form of entertainment for an American public so complacent and bored that they need the spectacle of a perceived threat and to see the response to that threat just for the sake of entertainment. Think of the entertainment value of a horror movie. Frankly, this is not a very satisfying explanation, and I am sure that the real explanation is more complex. Nevertheless, it is this pathology we need to address as a democracy if we are to have any hope of making better policy decisions in the future.