Welcome to the Trapped in the War on Terror Blog

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.

I think that War on Terror is part if a bigger process, and it has natural economic roots. These roots are in the fact that our economy, like a drug addict, became dependent on artificial stimulators, and like drug addict, can't live without them. Probably the most explicit pre-9/11 demonstration of this was Y2K hysteria, which generated new business while being total hoax for anyone competent in computer programming. Once it was over, it was clear that there must be some replacement, and security was natural choice.

This trend is even more clearly seen in the media industry, where one "center topic" is replaced by another, and all interest is centered around the next cult. I think there's no need to even mention the specific examples, so obvious it is. But if you look around, you will see that the same articifial process is taking place in other areas of society as well.

If this theory is true, then when War on Terror eventually wear out, at that time the economy and society will need their next doze, another "national idea", so at that time some new hoax will be invented.

Getting out of drug addiction is pretty hard. Once you get used to award grants, contracts and other funds based on the popular hysteria rather than the real situation and needs, it's pretty hard to convert the thinking back to normal.

As a psychologist, I think we’re especially likely to find ourselves “trapped”—individually and collectively—over issues that engage one or more of the five core concerns that govern much of our lives: vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness. The “war on terror” is certainly such an issue, and this country’s right-wing leaders have been especially aggressive and persistent in invoking these five concerns to promote their WOT agenda. Here I’ll offer one illustrative example of each.

Vulnerability: Vice President Cheney was especially brazen in appealing to fear at a town hall meeting in Des Moine, Iowa, two months before the 2004 election: "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States."

Injustice: President Bush has repeatedly invoked a WOT refrain that wrongdoing must be redressed. Typical was his statement in Washington just a few weeks before invading Iraq (2/26/03): “The best way to secure the homeland is to find killers before they kill us and bring them to justice. And that's what we're going to do.”

Distrust: Appeals to distrust, to our need to be suspicious of those around us, have also been commonplace in the WOT context. A classic example was provided this past August by then incumbent (now defeated) Senator Conrad Burns of Montana. During a campaign event he explained to the assembled: “They’re faceless. They operate in the shadows. They drive taxi cabs in the daytime and kill at night….That’s the enemy we face, and we must win this war on terror.”

Superiority: Appeals to superiority take a variety of forms, but in the WOT they often engage simplistic good-versus-evil frames with explicitly religious overtones. For example, in a televised CNN debate in 2004, televangelist Jerry Falwell offered his view of the WOT as an exalted pursuit: “You've got to kill the terrorists before the killing stops. And I'm for the president to chase them all over the world. If it takes 10 years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord."

Helplessness: In the WOT, a key appeal in this final domain typically calls upon us to resist resignation and defeatism. In June of this year, for instance, then House Speaker Dennis Hastert invoked the memory of 9/11 in the following way: “We in this Congress must show the same steely resolve as those men and women on United Flight 93; the same sense of duty as the first responders who headed up the stairs of the twin towers. We must stand firm in our commitment to fight terrorism and the evil it inflicts throughout the world.”

Many other specific examples could be offered, but I think my point is clear. We do indeed desperately need to get “untrapped” in the war on terror. But psychologically it will not be easy. Because our national leaders are telling us over and over again that an American who turns away from the WOT is someone who (1) doesn’t care enough to protect loved ones from danger, (2) doesn’t want to bring wrongdoers to justice, (3) doesn’t recognize his/her own foolish gullibility, (4) doesn’t embrace the greatness of our country’s cause, and (5) doesn’t persist in the face of adversity. Now who would want to be a person like that?

This Coast Guard story is a terrific example of how the War on Terror works. Indeed it would be useful, and fascinating, for readers of this blog to post descriptions here of their own discoveries of the imaginative ways that government agencies, interest groups, and lobbyists seek to identify their favorite projects and long-cherished agenda items with the War on Terror.

In Trapped in the War on Terror I supply dozens of examples, including veternarians clamoring for more funds to prepare for a hoof and mouth disease attack on our cattle herds, and pharmacists asking for support to created "pharmaceutical SWAT teams" as first responders in case of terrorist attacks. 

Here's another example of the War on Terror at work. At a recent counter-terrorism conference at RAND that I attended in Santa Monica,  a speaker from the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) said that his office was responsible for putting together the "National Integrated Plan" (NIP) for fighitng the War on Terror domestically. He reported that the process entailed pasting the individual plans of large numbers of agencies at different levels of government with regard to what they would each be able to "throw" into the War on Terror. He said that in light of the enormous amount of money involved it was not surprising that virtually every department and bureau submitted a plan, except maybe, he thought, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. With a twinkle in his eye he added, "But give me some time, and I'm sure I can think of something they could throw at the terrorism problem too." My comment was that if he thought he would be able to think of something any agency might propose to do, imagine how easy it would be for desperate bureaucrats in those agencies to think of "crucial" roles they could play in the War on Terror.

The New York Times story (12/9/06) on the Coast Guard's updating problems has an example that could be straight out of "Trapped in the War on Terror":

"The contractors ran advertisements aimed at lawmakers in Washington publications, delivering ominous messages about the need to stop terrorists before they reach American shores."

The contractors had a lot to lose, of course, and waving the terrorism flag cost them nothing. In fact, they were only following the lead of the White House