War on terror has lost all sense of proportion.

[Rikk]

Would you take a bath if you knew the fact that bathtubs kill as many people as terrorist's do?

Would you drive your car if you knew that cars kill as many people as a war zone does?

Media hype is the driving force for the "war on terror" or should I say media BULLSHIT is the driving force for this current war.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg ... 27n3-5.pdf

How does the risk of terrorism measure up
against everyday dangers?
A False Sense
of Insecurity?
BY JOHN MUELLER
Ohio State University

Determining how to respond to
the terrorist challenge has become a
major public policy issue in the United
States over the last three years. It has
been discussed endlessly, many lives
have been changed, a couple of wars
have been waged, and huge sums of
money have been spent — often after little contemplation —
to deal with the problem.
Throughout all this, there is a perspective on terrorism that
has been very substantially ignored. It can be summarized,
somewhat crudely, as follows:
_ Assessed in broad but reasonable context, terrorism
generally does not do much damage.
_ The costs of terrorism very often are the result of
hasty, ill-considered, and overwrought reactions.
A sensible policy approach to the problem might be to stress
that any damage terrorists are able to accomplish likely can be
absorbed, however grimly. While judicious protective and
policing measures are sensible, extensive fear and anxiety over
what may at base prove to be a rather limited problem are misplaced,
unjustified, and counterproductive.
TERRORISM'S DAMAGE
For all the attention it evokes, terrorism actually causes
rather little damage and the likelihood that any individual
will become a victim in most places is microscopic. Those
adept at hyperbole like to proclaim that we live in "the age
of terror." However, while obviously deeply tragic for those
John Mueller holds the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon
Center at Ohio State University. His most recent book, The Remnants of War, has just
been published by Cornell University Press. He may be contacted by e-mail at
mailto:bbbb@osu.edu">bbbb@osu.edu.
directly involved, the number of people worldwide who die
as a result of international terrorism is generally only a few
hundred a year, tiny compared to the numbers who die in
most civil wars or from automobile accidents. In fact, in
almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who
die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the
world is not much more than the number who drown in
bathtubs in the United States.
Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping
of years by all forms of international terrorism than were
killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths
occurred within the United States itself. Even with the September
11 attacks included in the count, the number of
Americans killed by international terrorism since the late
1960s (which is when the State Department began counting)
is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the
same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe
allergic reaction to peanuts.
Some of this is definitional. When terrorism becomes really
extensive, we generally no longer call it terrorism, but war.
But Americans seem to be concerned mainly about random
terror, not sustained warfare. Moreover, even using an expansive
definition of terrorism and including domestic terrorism
in the mix, it is likely that far fewer people were killed by terrorists
in the entire world over the last 100 years than died in
any number of unnoticed civil wars during the century.
Obviously, this condition could change if international terrorists
are able to assemble sufficient weaponry or devise new
tactics to kill masses of people, and if they come to do so routinely.
That, of course, is the central fear. As during the Cold
War, commentators are adept at spinning out elaborate doomsday
and worst-case scenarios. However, although not impossible,
it would take massive efforts and even more stupendous
luck for terrorists regularly to visit substantial destruction upon
the United States.
42 REGULATION FA L L 2004
R I S K
HISTORICAL RECORD It should be kept in mind that September
11 continues to stand out as an extreme event. Until then,
and since then, no more than 329 people have ever been killed
in a single terrorist attack (in a 1985 Air India explosion). And
extreme events often remain exactly that — aberrations, rather
than harbingers.
A bomb planted in a piece of checked luggage was responsible
for the explosion that caused a Pan Am jet to crash into
Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, killing 270 people. Since that time,
hundreds of billions of pieces of luggage have been transported
on American carriers and none have exploded to down an
aircraft. (And millions of passengers who checked bags at hotels
and retrieved them before heading to the airport have routinely
lied to airline agents when answering the obligatory question
about whether their luggage had at all times been in their possession.)
This does not mean that one should cease worrying
about luggage on airlines, but it does suggest that extreme events
do not necessarily assure repetition any more than Timothy
McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 has.
Since its alarming release of poison gas in the Tokyo subway
in 1995, the apocalyptic group Aum Shinrikyo appears
to have abandoned the terrorism business and its example has
not been followed. Some sort of terrorist inoculated Tylenol
capsules with cyanide in 1982, killing seven people. However,
that frightening and much-publicized event (it generated
125,000 stories in the print media alone and cost the manufacturer
more than $1 billion) failed to inspire much in the
way of imitation.
I do not want to suggest that all extreme events prove to
be the last in their line, of course. At its time, the "Great War"
of 1914–18 was the worst war of its type, yet an even more
destructive one followed. Moreover, while Aum Shinrikyo
may be under control, Al Qaeda and like-minded terrorist
groups are unlikely to die out any time soon; September 11
marked, after all, their second attempt to destroy the World
Trade Center.
Much of the current alarm is generated from the knowledge
that many of today's terrorists simply want to kill, and kill more
or less randomly, for revenge or as an act of what they take to be
war. At one time, it was probably safe to conclude that terrorism
was committed principally for specific political demands or as
a form of political expression. In the oft-repeated observation of
terrorism expert Brian Jenkins, "Terrorists want a lot of people
watching, not a lot of people dead." Moreover, the suicidal nature
of many attacks, while not new, can be very unsettling because
the would-be perpetrator cannot be deterred by the threat of subsequent
punishment. And terrorism likely will never go away
completely; it has always existed and presumably always will.
A central issue, however, is whether such spectacularly
destructive terrorist acts will become commonplace. Although
there have been many deadly terrorist incidents in the world since
2001, all (thus far, at least) have relied on conventional methods
and have not remotely challenged September 11 quantitatively.
If, as some purported experts repeatedly claim, chemical and biological
attacks are so easy and attractive to terrorists, it is impressive
that none have so far been used in Israel (where four times
as many people die from automobile accidents as from terrorism).
Actually, it is somewhat strange that so much emphasis has been
put on the dangers of high-tech weapons in the first place. Some
of that anxiety may come from the post-September 11 anthrax
scare, even though that event killed only a few people. The bombings
of September 11, by contrast, were remarkably low-tech and
could have happened long ago; both skyscrapers and airplanes
have been around for a century now.
RESPONDING TO TERRORISM
Frantz Fanon, the 20th century revolutionary, contended that
"the aim of terrorism is to terrify." If that is so, terrorists can be
defeated simply by not becoming terrified — that is, anything
that enhances fear effectively gives in to them.
The shock and tragedy of September 11 does demand a
focused and dedicated program to confront international terrorism
and to attempt to prevent a repeat. But it seems sensible
to suggest that part of this reaction should include an effort
by politicians, officials, and the media to inform the public reasonably
and realistically about the terrorist context instead of
playing into the hands of terrorists by frightening the public.
What is needed, as one statistician suggests, is some sort of convincing,
coherent, informed, and nuanced answer to a central
question: "How worried should I be?" Instead, the message the
nation has received so far is, as a Homeland Security official put
(or caricatured) it, "Be scared; be very, very scared — but go on
with your lives." Such messages have led many people to develop
what Leif Wenar of the University of Sheffield has aptly
labeled "a false sense of insecurity."
HYPERBOLIC OVERREACTION For example, there is at present
a great and understandable concern about what would
happen if terrorists were to shoot down an American airliner
or two, perhaps with shoulder-fired missiles. Obviously, that
would be a major tragedy. But the ensuing public reaction to
it, many fear, could come close to destroying the industry.
REGULATION FA L L 20 0 4 43
Terrorists can be defeated simply by not
becoming terrified — that is, anything that enhances
fear effectively gives in to them.
R I S K
Accordingly, it would seem to be reasonable for those in
charge of our safety to inform the public about how many
airliners would have to crash before flying becomes as dangerous
as driving the same distance in an automobile. It turns
out that someone has made that calculation: University of
Michigan transportation researchers Michael Sivak and
Michael Flannagan, in an article last year in American Scientist,
wrote that they determined there would have to be one
set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance
out. More generally, they calculate that an American's chance
of being killed in one nonstop airline flight is about one in
13 million (even taking the September 11 crashes into
account). To reach that same level of risk when driving on
America's safest roads — rural interstate highways — one
would have to travel a mere 11.2 miles.
Or there ought to be at least some discussion of the almost
completely unaddressed but patently obvious observation
that, in the words of risk analyst David Banks, "It seems
impossible that the United States will ever again experience
takeovers of commercial flights that are then turned into
weapons — no pilot will relinquish control, and passengers
will fight." The scheme worked in 2001 because the hijackers
had the element of surprise working for them; previous
airline hijackings had mostly been fairly harmless as hijackers
generally landed the planes someplace and released the
passengers. The passengers and crew on the fourth plane on
September 11 had fragmentary knowledge about what had
occurred earlier that day and they prevented the plane from
reaching its target. Similar responses are likely for future
attempted hijackings. Nonetheless, notes Banks, "enormous
resources are being invested to prevent this remote contingency."
There is a distinction, he argues, "between realistic
reactions to plausible threats and hyperbolic overreaction to
improbable contingencies."
Moreover, any problems caused by radiological, chemical,
or perhaps biological weapons are likely to stem far more from
the fear and panic they may cause than from the weapons
themselves. While a "dirty bomb" might raise radiation 25 percent
over background levels in an area and therefore into a
range the Environmental Protection Agency considers undesirable,
there ought to be some discussion about whether that
really constitutes "contamination" or much of a danger at all,
given the somewhat arbitrary and exceedingly cautious levels
declared to be acceptable by the epa. The potential use of such
bombs apparently formed the main concern during the
Orange Alert at the end of 2003. Because the bombs simply
raise radiation levels somewhat above normal background levels
in a small area, a common recommendation from nuclear
scientists and engineers is that those exposed should calmly
walk away. But this bit of advice has not been advanced prominently
by those in charge. Effectively, therefore, they encourage
panic. As one nuclear engineer points out, "If you keep
telling them you expect them to panic, they will oblige you.
And that's what we're doing."
POOR RESULTS For their part, biological and chemical weapons
have not proven to be great killers. Although the basic science
about them has been well known for a century at least, both
kinds of weapons are notoriously difficult to create, control,
and focus (and even more so for nuclear weapons).
To this point in history, biological weapons have killed
almost no one. And the notion that large numbers of people
would perish if a small number of chemical weapons were to
be set off is highly questionable. Although they can be hugely
lethal when released in gas chambers, their effectiveness as
weapons has been unimpressive. In World War I, for example,
chemical weapons caused less than one percent of the total
combat deaths; on average, it took a ton of gas to produce one
fatality. In the conclusion to the official British history of the
war, chemical weapons are relegated to a footnote that asserts
that gas "made war uncomfortable...to no purpose." A 1993
analysis by the Office of Technology Assessment finds that a
terrorist would have to deliver a full ton of Sarin nerve gas perfectly
and under absolutely ideal conditions over a heavily
populated area to cause between 3,000 and 8,000 deaths —
something that would require the near-simultaneous detonation
of dozens, even hundreds, of weapons. Under slightly
less ideal circumstances — if there were a moderate wind or
if the sun were out, for example — the death rate would be
only one-tenth as great. The 1995 chemical attack launched
in Tokyo by the well-funded Aum Shinrikyo (attempted only
after several efforts to use biological weaponry had failed completely)
managed to kill only 12 people.
Thus far at least, terrorism is a rather rare and — in appropriate,
comparative context — not a very destructive phenomenon.
However, the enormous sums of money being spent
to deal with the threat have in part been diverted from other,
possibly more worthy, endeavors. The annual budget for the
Department of Homeland Security, for example, now tops $30
billion, while state and local governments spend additional billions.
Some of that money doubtless would have been spent on
similar ventures under earlier budgets, and much of it likely has
wider benefits than simply securing the country against a rather
limited threat. But much of it, as well, has very likely been pulled
away from more beneficial uses.
Accordingly, three key issues, set out by risk analyst Howard
Kunreuther, require careful discussion but do not seem ever to
get it:
_ How much should we be willing to pay for a small
reduction in probabilities that are already extremely
low?
_ How much should we be willing to pay for actions
that are primarily reassuring but do little to change the
actual risk?
_ How can measures such as strengthening the public
health system, which provide much broader benefits
than those against terrorism, get the attention they
deserve?
As Banks puts it, "If terrorists force us to redirect resources
away from sensible programs and future growth in order to
pursue unachievable but politically popular levels of domes-
44 REGULATION FA L L 2004
tic security, then they have won an important victory that
mortgages our future." For instance, measures that delay airline
passengers by half an hour could cost the economy $15 billion
a year, calculates economist Roger Congleton.
HYSTERIA
Filmmaker Michael Moore happened to note on cbs' popular
60 Minutes last year that "the chances of any of us dying in
a terrorist incident is very, very, very small." His interviewer,
Bob Simon, promptly admonished, "But no one sees the
world like that." Both statements, remarkably, are true — the
first only a bit more so than the second.
It would seem to be reasonable for someone in authority to
try to rectify this absurdity. In Kunreuther's words, "More attention
needs to be devoted to giving people perspective on the
remote likelihood of the terrible consequences they imagine."
That would seem to be at least as important as boosting the sale
of duct tape, issuing repeated and costly color-coded alerts
based on vague and unspecific intelligence, and warning people
to beware of Greeks bearing almanacs.
What we need is more pronouncements like the one in a recent
book by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.): "Get on the damn elevator!
Fly on the damn plane! Calculate the odds of being harmed by a
terrorist! It's still about as likely as being swept out to sea by a tidal
wave. Suck it up, for crying out loud. You're almost certainly going
to be okay. And in the unlikely event you're not, do you really want
to spend your last days cowering behind plastic sheets and duct
tape? That's not a life worth living, is it?"
But admonitions like that are exceedingly rare, almost nonexistent.
What we mostly get is fearmongering, some of it bordering
on hysteria. Some prominent commentators, like David
Gergen, argue that the United States has become "vulnerable,"
even "fragile." Others, like Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), are given
to proclaiming that terrorists armed with weapons of mass
destruction present an "existential" threat to the United States
or even, in columnist Charles Krauthammer's view, to "civilization."
A best-selling book by an anonymous cia official
assures us that our "survival" is at stake.
The cosmic alarmism reached a kind of official pinnacle during
last winter's Orange Alert. At the time, Homeland Security
czar Tom Ridge declared that "America is a country that will
not be bent by terror. America is a country that will not be broken
by fear." Meanwhile, however, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was telling a television audience
that if terrorists were able to engineer a catastrophic event that
killed 10,000 people, they would successfully "do away with our
way of life." The sudden deaths of that many Americans —
although representing less than four-thousandths of one percent
of the population — would indeed be horrifying and tragic,
but the only way it could "do away with our way of life"
would be if we did that to ourselves in reaction.
All societies are "vulnerable" to tiny bands of suicidal fanatics
in the sense that it is impossible to prevent every terrorist
act. But the United States is hardly "vulnerable" in the sense that
it can be expunged by dramatic acts of terrorist destruction,
even extreme ones. In fact, the country can readily, if grimly,
overcome that kind of damage — as it overcomes some 40,000
deaths each year from automobile accidents. As rand's Bruce
Hoffman put it, "Unfortunately, terrorism is just another fact
of modern life. It's something we have to live with."
P O L I T ICI A N S A N D T H E MEDIA
A problem with getting coherent thinking on the risk of
terrorism is that reporters and politicians find extreme
and alarmist possibilities so much more appealing than
discussions of broader context, much less of statistical
reality. That is, although hysteria and alarmism rarely
make much sense, politicians and the media are often naturally
drawn to them.
There is no reason to suspect that President Bush's concern
about terrorism is anything but genuine. However, his approval
rating did receive the greatest boost for any president in history
in September 2001, and it would be politically unnatural for
him not to notice. His chief political adviser, Karl Rove, declared
last year that the "war" against terrorism will be central to
Bush's reelection campaign. The Democrats, scurrying to keep
up, have stumbled all over each other with plans to expend even
more of the federal budget on the terrorist threat, such as it is,
than President Bush.
This process is hardly new. The preoccupation of the media
and of Jimmy Carter's presidency with the hostages taken by
Iran in 1979 to the exclusion of almost everything else may look
foolish in retrospect, as Carter's secretary of state, Cyrus Vance,
conceded in his memoirs. But it doubtless appeared to be good
politics at the time — Carter's dismal approval rating soared
when the hostages were seized. Similarly, in the 1980s the Reagan
administration became fixated on a handful of American
hostages held by terrorists in Lebanon. At the time, Reagan's
normally judicious secretary of state, George Shultz, was
screaming that we needed desperately to blast somebody
somewhere "on a moment's notice" — even without adequate
evidence — in order to avoid looking like the indecisive "Hamlet
of nations." He apparently preferred the King Lear approach.
Normally, however, only lunatics and children rail at storms;
sensible people invest in umbrellas and lightning rods.
Since September 11, the American public has been treated
to endless yammering about terrorism in the media. Politicians
may believe that, given the public concern on the issue, they
will lose votes if they appear insensitively to be downplaying
the dangers of terrorism (though this fear does not seem to have
infected Sen. McCain). However, the media like to tout that they
are devoted to presenting fair and balanced coverage of important
public issues. I may have missed it, but I have never heard
anyone in the media stress that in every year except 2001, only
a few hundred people in the entire world have died as a result
of international terrorism.
As often noted, the media appear to have a congenital
incapacity for dealing with issues of risk and comparative
probabilities — except, of course, in the sports and financial
sections. But even in their amazingly rare efforts to try, the
issue — one that would seem to be absolutely central to any
rounded discussion of terrorism and terrorism policy —
never goes very far. For example, in 2001 the Washington Post
published an article by a University of Wisconsin economist
REGULATION FA L L 20 0 4 45
R I S K
that attempted quantitatively to point out how much safer
it was to travel by air than by automobile, even under the
heightened atmosphere of concern inspired by the September
11 attacks. He reports that the article generated a couple
of media inquiries, but nothing more. Gregg Easterbrook's
cover story in the October 7, 2002, New Republic forcefully
argued that biological and chemical weapons are hardly
capable of creating "mass destruction," a perspective relevant
not only to terrorism but also to the drive for war against Iraq
that was going on at the time. The New York Times asked him
to fashion the article into an op-ed piece, but that was the
only interest the article generated in the media.
In addition, it should be pointed out that the response to
September 11 has created a vast and often well-funded terrorism
industry. Its members would be nearly out of business
if terrorism were to be back-burnered, and accordingly they
have every competitive incentive (and they are nothing if not
competitive) to conclude that it is their civic duty to keep the
pot boiling.
Moreover, there is more reputational danger in underplaying
risks than in exaggerating them. People routinely
ridicule futurist H.G. Wells' prediction that the conflict
beginning in 1914 would be "the war that will end war," but
not his equally confident declaration at the end of World War
II that "the end of everything we call life is close at hand." Disproved
doomsayers can always claim that caution induced
by their warnings prevented the predicted calamity from
occurring. (Call this the Y2K effect.) Disproved Pollyannas
have no such convenient refuge.
The challenge, thus, is a difficult one. But it still seems sensible
to suggest that officials and the press at least once in a
while ought to assess probabilities and put them in some sort
of context rather than simply to stress extreme possibilities so
much and so exclusively.
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE It is easy to blame politicians and the
media for the distorted and context-free condition under which
terrorism is so often discussed. In many respects, however, that
circumstance arises not so much from their own proclivities,
but rather from those of their customers. Hysteria and
alarmism often sell.
The record with respect to fear about crime, for example,
suggests that efforts to deal responsibly with the risks of terrorism
will prove difficult. Fear of crime rose notably in the
mid-1990s, even as statistics were showing crime to be in pronounced
decline. When David Dinkins, running for re-election
as mayor of New York, pointed to such numbers, he was
accused by A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times of hiding
behind "trivializing statistics" that "are supposed to convince
us that crime is going down." New Yorkers did eventually come
to feel safer from crime, but that was probably less because
crime rates actually declined than because of atmospherics as
graffiti, panhandlers, aggressive windshield washers, and the
homeless were banished or hidden from view. So it may have
made sense in the months after the September 11 attacks to
have armed reservists parading around in airports. It is not clear
how they prevented terrorist attacks, and pulling them from
productive jobs hardly helped the economy. But if they provided
people with a sense of security, their presence may have
been worth it.
In the end, it is not clear how one can deal with the public's
often irrational — or at least erratic — fears about remote dangers.
Some people say they prefer comparatively dangerous
forms of transportation like the private passenger automobile
(the cause of over 3 million American deaths during the 20th
century) to safe ones like commercial airliners because they feel
they have more "control." But they seem to feel no fear on buses
and trains — which actually are more dangerous than airliners
— even without having that sense of control and even though
derailing a speeding train or crashing a speeding bus is likely to
be much easier for a terrorist than downing an airliner. And people
tend to be more alarmed by dramatic fatalities — which the
September 11 crashes certainly provided — than by ones that
cumulate statistically. Thus, the 3,000 deaths of September 11
inspire far more grief and fear than the 100,000 deaths from auto
accidents that have taken place since then. In some respects, fear
of terror may be something like playing the lottery except in
reverse: the chances of winning the lottery or of dying from terrorism
may be microscopic, but for monumental events that
are, or seem, random, one can irrelevantly conclude that one's
chances are just as good, or bad, as those of anyone else.
The communication of risk, then, is no easy task. Risk analyst
Paul Slovic points out that people tend greatly to overestimate
the chances of dramatic or sensational causes of death,
that realistically informing people about risks sometimes only
makes them more frightened, that strong beliefs in this area are
very difficult to modify, that a new sort of calamity tends to be
taken as harbinger of future mishaps, that a disaster tends to
increase fears not only about that kind of danger but of all
kinds, and that people, even professionals, are susceptible to the
way risks are expressed — far less likely, for example, to choose
radiation therapy if told the chances of death are 32 percent
rather than that the chances of survival are 68 percent.
But risk assessment and communication should at least be
part of the policy discussion over terrorism, something that
may well prove to be a far smaller danger than is popularly portrayed.
The constant, unnuanced stoking of fear by politicians
and the media is costly, enervating, potentially counterproductive,
and unjustified by the facts.
CONCLUSION
The policy perspective toward terrorism I suggest may not
be more valid than other ones, and no one knows, of course,
how the problem will play out in future years. However, the
policy advanced here seems to me a sound and sensible one,
and for there to be a really coherent policy discussion, it
should be part of the mix.
Deep concern about extreme events is not necessarily
unreasonable or harmful. Thus, efforts to confront terrorism
and reduce its incidence and destructiveness are justified. But
hysteria is hardly required. As always, there are uncertainties
and risks out there, and plenty of dangers and threats. But
none are existential. The sky, as it happens, is unlikely to fall
anytime soon.
46 REGULATION FA L L 2004
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