Ian Lustick's blog

    Nearly seven years after Sept. 11, 2001, what accounts for the vast discrepancy between the terrorist threat facing America and the scale of our response?

Why, absent any evidence of a serious domestic terror threat, is the War on Terror so enormous, so all-encompassing, and still expanding?

The fundamental answer is that al-Qaeda's most important accomplishment was not to hijack our planes, but to hijack our political system.

For a multitude of politicians, interest groups, professional associations, corporations, media organizations, universities, local and state governments and federal agency officials, the War on Terror is now a major profit center, a funding bonanza, and a set of slogans and sound bites to be inserted into budget, project, grant and contract proposals. For the country as a whole, however, it has become a maelstrom of waste and worry that distracts us from more serious problems.

Consider the congressional response. In mid-2003, the Department of Homeland Security compiled a list of 160 potential terrorist targets, triggering intense efforts by representatives, senators and their constituents to find potential targets in their districts that might require protection and therefore be eligible for federal funding. The result? Widened definitions and blurrier categories of potential targets and mushrooming increases in the infrastructure and assets deemed worthy of protection. By late 2003, the list had increased more than tenfold to 1,849; by 2004 it had grown to 28,364; by 2005 it mushroomed to 77,069; and by 2006 it was approximately 300,000.

Across the country, hundreds of interest groups recast their traditional objectives and funding proposals to reflect the new imperatives of the new war. The National Rifle Association declared that the War on Terror means more Americans should own firearms to defend against terrorists. The gun control lobby argued that fighting the War on Terror means passing stricter gun control laws to keep assault weapons out of the hands of terrorists. Schools of veterinary medicine called for quadrupling funding to train veterinarians to defend the country against terrorists using foot-and-mouth disease to decimate cattle herds. Pharmacists advocated the creation of pharmaceutical SWAT teams to respond quickly with appropriate drugs to the victims of terrorist attacks. According to a 2005 report by the Small Business Administration (SBA) inspector general, 85 percent of the businesses granted low-interest SBA counterterrorism loans failed to establish their eligibility. The SBA authorized 7,000 loans worth more than $3 billion, including $22 million in loans to Dunkin' Donuts franchises in nine states. With a half-billion dollars in homeland security funds available for bulking up the counterterrorist and intelligence capabilities of state and local police and sheriff's departments, jurisdictions throughout the country scrambled to expand lists of potential threats. By 2006, thanks to this flood of federal funding, more than 100 police departments had established some type of intelligence unit. Other cities found more imaginative ways to combat terrorism. In May 2007, Augusta, Ga., officials authorized spending $3 million to protect fire hydrants against terrorist tampering. This spending decision was recommended by the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police, which cited a 2004 government report labeling hydrants "a top vulnerability."

Not surprisingly, the American Waterworks Association warmly endorsed the idea of spending nearly $60 billion to protect fire hydrants nationwide.

Universities also have benefited from the ready availability of new grant and contract funds, creating graduate programs in homeland security, institutes on terrorism and counterterrorism, and proposals for academic conferences. It is difficult to blame scientists and researchers for responding to government appeals to devote their talents to the War on Terror.

In 2004, I attended a lecture given by the official in charge of encouraging scientists to shift their research activities in this direction. We were told that no matter what topics we worked on, and whether we were natural scientists or behavioral scientists, our work likely could help in the fight against terrorism. The official strongly encouraged us to submit grant proposals for projects based on "outside the box" thinking because, he said, there was plenty of money available.

Officially, the terrorist threat level is always and everywhere no less than elevated. The threat is constantly dangled before us: ports, border crossings, the milk supply, cattle herds, liquid natural gas tankers, nuclear power plants, drinking water, tunnels, bridges, subways. The result: continued support for ever-increasing funding.

Within little more than half a decade America adjusted psychologically, politically and militarily to the Soviet enemy and its capacity to incinerate our cities on a moment's notice. We came to know the Soviet enemy very well and were able to adopt prudent, realistic and successful policies in the face of genuine threats of national destruction posed by Moscow's nuclear arsenal. Rather than let our fears and anxieties of Muslim fanatics drive policy, we need the same sober approach to the real but lesser threat posed by terrorists.

     There is something truly pathetic about President George W. Bush's speech to the Coast Guard cadets yesterday. Desperate to convince Americans they are in enough danger to warrant bloody slaughter in Iraq, he weaves new sound-bites out of old non-events to conjure an al-Qaeda threat only stoppable in Iraq.

     Acknowledging the oddity of the absence of attacks in America since 9/11, he attributes that absence to God's blessing and the capacity of the US government to be "right 100 per cent of the time" in its round the clock struggle to defend the country. Cowpies. In October 2006, 20 of 22 government attempts to evade security by bringing weapons on board airplanes at Newark Airport succeeded. In Blacksburg, Virginia we could all see how easy it is to kill Americans in the homeland. We're not being attacked primarily because our enemies have all the targets they need in Iraq and are in any event focused on changing regimes in the Muslim world, not in America.

     Comparing Bush's speech to the Cadets in 2007 to the speech he gave there in 2003, the difference is obvious. In 2003 he described al-Qaeda's remnants as being hunted down in a few dark corners of the world. In 2007 he described al-Qaeda as a raging storm, building Iraq as a gigantic base of operations. America, he said, "living in the eye of a storm. All around us, dangerous winds are swirling, and these winds could reach our shores at any moment." Beware of Hurricane Osama! What a sensational story, for the press and for the President--the storm of the century that is always about to hit, and never goes away!

      At least President Bush described al-Qaeda terrorists as "a thinking enemy." Indeed they are. They thought the US would overreact to 9/11 with a wonderfully disruptive and hopeless war in the Middle East to "bleed America" and they were absolutely right. Now they and the President are, as Bin-Laden has said, partners. They are both engaged a jihad/crusade that is al-Qaeda's best source of political support. While Bin-Laden and al-Zawahiri have the War in Iraq to make their nutty propaganda about war with the infidels seem right on the money to hundreds of millions of Muslims, the President has the War on Terror and Hurricane Osama as his only reliable techniques for distracting the country from the catastrophic consequences of his failed presidency.

The following is my letter (unpublished) to the New York Times submitted May 8, 2007.

To the Editor:

            Clark Kent Ervin's "Answering al-Qaeda" is another chicken-little warning of America's vulnerability to terrorist attack.  The hype justifies his laundry list of surveillance and border control measures along with his new sinecure, having moved from the Department of Homeland Security to become director of the "Homeland Security Initiative." 

            Despite the absence of evidence of any serious terrorist threat in the U.S. since 2001, we can assume that Americans will be killed in the future by murderers with Muslim last names. (Thank God the killer at Virginia Tech didn't have one.) But the spiral of hyping the terrorist threat, increasing spending, and reinforcing inclinations to hype the threat to protect that spending, has got to stop. There are reasonable things to do to make our country more resilient.  But the "War on Terror" weakens us. The waste, worry, and silliness it generates plays into the hands of our enemies, trapping all of us, including politicians from both parties, in an infinite and doomed commitment to treat any bad thing that could happen as a national security imperative.

 Ian S. Lustick

     As it is with children and projects of many kinds, so it is with wars. Success has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan. One sign of a war with no understood purpose or meaning is the inability of its architects to agree on a name for it. In Israel, the Ministerial Committee for Symbols and Ceremonies was still arguing, six months after the fighting ended, about what to call the conflict: Hizbullah War, War of the North, Shield of the North War, or the Second Lebanon War. The decision finally was made to call it the Second Lebanon War.

     As our government tells us here in the United States almost every day, we are, now, "a nation at war." But what war? What is most commonly called the "War on Terror" has us in its grip, but its irrationalities have made it difficult for both its apologists and victims to be comfortable with its name. Afterall, can a war really be against "terror," that is against a symptom, or a human emotion, or a tactic? Sensing the distortions associated with fighting any sort of metaphorical War, our European allies, including the British, have always been more uncomfortable than Washington with this terminology. Indeed British law enforcement explicitly avoided use of the term "War on Terror" and criticized it as an obstacle to the pursuit of terrorist criminals and murderers. Ten days ago the British government formally declared it would stop using the phrase. In the United States, some years back, architects of the War on Terror, such as Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney tried hard to abandon the phrase. They urged appellations such as "the War against Islamic Extremism," "the War against Islamofascism," "the Global War on Terror (or Terrorism)," and "the Long War."

     All of these labels have been used, but President Bush's favorite, still, is the "War on Terror." Indeed he vetoed many of these other suggestions, either explicitly, or by his disinclination to use them in public. Some have wondered whether changing "War on Terror" to "War on Terrorism" created pronunciation difficulties too challenging for the President. But at least now we know that some substantive thinking about these matters is going on in the administration. Admiral William J. Fallon, recently appointed to head Central Command and to take primary responsibility, at least at this point, for whatever it is we are doing about terrorism world wide, announced that the phrase "The Long War" would be "retired." In a remarkable display of bipartisanship, the Democratic controlled Armed Services Committee of the House of Representatives also declared that the phrase "The Long War" would not be allowed to appear in the defense appropriations bill. The Democrats also banned "War on Terrorism" and "Global War on Terrorism" from the vocabulary of the bill.

     Though they could say which names they did not like, neither the Admiral, nor the House Committee were able to suggest what the public should call the conflict. For the time being we might most appropriately call it "The War That Shall Not Be Named."

In a long op-ed piece published in the March 25, 2007 edition of the Washington Post former President Carter's  National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, declared war on the War on Terror in terms remarkably similar to those I have used in Trapped in the War on Terror and similar to the arguments made by John Mueller in Overblown.  See his piece "Terrorized by the War on Terror."  Brzezinski understands the hugely exaggerated nature of the terrorist threat and something of the political agendas it was invented to serve.  He also points to  the self-perpetuating dynamics the War on Terror has acquired in associaiton with the culture of fear created around it and the participation of the media, politicians, government agencies, and various interests groups--all caught in a feeding frenzy of sensationalist competition for attention and in desperate efforts to make their own self-interests appear to be the snake-oil that will cure  the terrorism problem.

As this point of view stops being associated with maverick intellectuals and begins to be articulated by well-known pundits it will be interesting to see how long it will take before some politicians, apart from Representative Dennis Kucinich, to overcome their fear of acussations of having a "pre-9/11 mentality" to speak truly about the biggest enemy we face--the War on Terror itself.

Brian Ross of ABC News loves to report on what he figures as the scandalous performance of the government in leaving us vulnerable to terrorist attacks. One such report that surfaced recently, but is traceable to a story done in October of 2006, concerns an attempt to test airport security at Newark Airport. ("Not Enough People, Not Enough Training: Airport Screeners Continue To Miss Hidden Weapons") The result of twenty-two attempts to bring weapons through security was that twenty of the attempts succeeded. The real lesson to be learned from this is not how incompetent the government is, but, given the evident ease of carrying out terrorist attacks with weapons on airliners, how tiny the actual threat is. In other words, if in precisely the area we have invested so much time and attention and money for counter-terrorism measures, we are still failing most of the time, we must conclude that the absence of terrorist attacks or discovered attempts cannot be attributed to our counter-measures, but to the absence of terrorists in the U.S. trying to carry them out.

From airport security we can also learn how the War on Terror generates statistical evidence, out of whole cloth, to justify itself.  A new study shows that government agencies cannot agree on definitions of terrorism or counter-terrorism or terrorist crimes, and that produces wildly inaccurate statistics about the effects of our "anti-terrorism" measures.  See Dan Eggen's Washington Post  article published February 21, 2007. "Justice Department Statistics on Terrorism Faulted"

             Politicians, pundits, and the press have now begun warning of the Bush administration's preparation for war with Iran. The President's emphasis on destroying Iranian networks and aggressively pursuing American interests throughout the region are clear signals that another Tonkin Gulf/WMD type incident that could be used to expand the war in Iraq into Iran may well be in the offing.  It is almost certain that US efforts have been underway to destabilize the Iranian regime from without, and quite likely that undercover operations are underway inside the country for the same purpose.

            But what has not been understood or publicly commented upon is the powerful link between the War on Terror and the impetus toward war with Iran.  When I wrote the conclusion to Trapped in the War on Terror I included two paragraphs warning that the logic of the War on Terror, that would require large scale terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland to preserve itself, would push any administration committed to it to provoke enemies, such as Iran capable of delivering those attacks.  At the time I wrote those paragraphs I wondered if readers would find my reasoning and predictions too difficult to imagine or accept.  I'm glad now that I did indeed not shrink from reporting the predictions of building pressures toward war with Iran I thought the logic of my argument had produced.  Here's a brief excerpt from the final chapter of Trapped in the War on Terror (minus the footnotes).

        "In the spring of . 2006 ..Iranian radicals, led by their fanatical President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Their bravado about Iranian uranium enrichment appears designed to polarize Iranian relations with the west to their faction’s internal political advantage. As if on cue, War on Terror pundits in Washington, including members of the cabal that orchestrated the American-led invasion of Iraq, have begun promoting the idea of the preventive bombing of Iran, followed up if necessary by an invasion.  According to information leaked by officials within the Pentagon opposed to such ideas, even the preemptive use of nuclear weapons against Iran is under consideration.

            Many observers have wondered what role President Bush’s plummeting approval ratings and the desperation of a Republican Party seemingly headed for defeat in the fall 2006 elections might play in authorizing such an attack. In line with the analysis presented here such calculations, along with supercharged policy arguments regarding Iranian nuclear capacities, reflect nothing so much as the frightening capacity the mechanisms of the War on Terror may have to produce the enemies the war needs to sustain itself. Indeed, as even the advocates of such a policy acknowledge, the regime in Tehran and its Hezbollah allies based in Lebanon would respond to American attacks with a worldwide campaign of terrorism against U.S. targets. These attacks would dwarf anything al-Qaeda has been or could be capable of mounting, thereby contributing a list of 9/11-type outrages long enough to help sustain the War on Terror for many years to come."

        Ultimately we will not end the Iraq War, or be safe from the Iran War, unless we also expose and bring an end to the deeper pathology that still resists explicit public scrutiny--the War on Terror.

The Washington Post on January 3, 2007 published a widely circulated article by Ylan Q. Mui, "From Monitoring Teens to Minding Terrorists."  The article reports that the "Homeland Security Institute" at George Washington University and a trade group known as the "International Council of Shopping Centers," is launching a program to train security mall guards as soldiers in the War on Terror.   I was interviewed at some length for this article and, I think, helped the journalist see the humorous side to this story.  The quote she uses from me only barely reflects how absurd, but instructive, this episode is.  Of course the most important line in the article is the sentence pointing out that George Washington University will receive $2 million for this contract, probably representing funds recyclyed from the government through the International Council of Shopping Centers. 

"Talk about a "surge." In part thanks to a misguided diversion of U.S. law enforcement funding to domestic count-terrorism, and the effects that has on programming and resource commitment by state and local agencies, violent crime in the U.S. has risen sharply in 2006. According to an article in the Washington Post, "Violent Crime Is Up For 2nd Straight Year," (December 19, 2006) 

"Reports of homicides, assaults and other violent offenses surged by nearly 4 percent in the first six months of the year compared with the same time period in 2005, according to the FBI's latest Uniform Crime Report. The numbers included an increase of nearly 10 percent for robberies, which many criminologists consider a leading indicator of coming trends.The results follow a 2.5 percent jump in violent crime for 2005, which at the time represented the largest increase in 15 years.The latest numbers suggest that those results were not an anomaly but rather part of the first significant uptick in violent crime since the early 1990s, according to criminal justice experts."

       There are cyclical effects here, but Dan Eggen of the Washington Post cites law enforcement officials across the country as blaming the administration for retreating "from fighting traditional crime in favor of combating terrorism and protecting homeland security."

 IL

      Welcome to my blog concerning Trapped in the War on Terror. As I analyze it, the War on Terror is a kind of perpetual motion machine fueled by self-interested agendas recast as patriotic duty and national security imperative.

     Invented by the cabal that brought us into Iraq, the War on Terror has taken on a life of its own that is dragging America toward a trillion dollars worth of irrationality, while warping our political life, preventing sensible debate about real security threats, and endangering our civil liberties.

     The operation and growth of the War on Terror is sustained by fundamental irrationalities and bizarre but false beliefs that prevent it from being effectively criticized. The press and the universities, themselves benefiting immensely from opportunities for sensationalist coverage and counterterrorism funding, have largely failed in their duty to ask if this particular emperor is wearing any clothes.

      But if readers of my book respond to my argument and the evidence I present by asking pointed questions about the War on Terror, about whether it is required or even useful, and if the press and politicians begin to have to answer those questions, then perhaps we can escape from its clutches.

     I therefore look forward eagerly to reading and responding to reader comments and ideas. I also encourage readers to use the blog-spot on this site to post examples they have noticed of how the War on Terror encourages counter-terrorist "bridges to nowhere"--projects and funding requests or justifications for political support based on spinning self-interest into activities advanced as "crucial in the War on Terror."

 Ian Lustick