Antiterrorism

[dr_tectonic]

Preaching to the choir, I'm sure, but it's so well-articulated that I want to encourage people to pass it on:

The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

Comments

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

One does hesitate to mention that the effect of blowing up 10 airplanes over the Atlantic would be substantially more chaos than we have experienced in the past few weeks, and would also be about as many people dead as in the 9/11 attacks. And the effect on commerce truly would be devastating.

I agree that there is substantial overreaction here, and that this does play into terrorist hands, but mass murder plots are not exactly a minor thing; Schneier could make his point in far less unhelpful ways.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

A Spanish friend of mine who lives here and i have been discussing this since 13 Sep 2001. I lived in Spain for a year as a child, she spent her first 23 years there. Spain had, and has, a chronic terrorism problem.

Sep 11 was huge, the scale appalling. But a one-off. The reaction here has been well beyond, in so many many ways, what is actually needed. Sigh.

[madbodger.livejournal.com]

Damn straight.

[jofish22.livejournal.com]

d00d, is it that like *your* kung-fu monkey @ blogspot that he links to in that piece, or another one?

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

It's another one.

Barnstorming

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I predicted prior to 9/11 that the future of air travel was smaller planes, smaller destinations. The hub system will largely disappear. People will take direct flights between smaller towns. The fact that most modestly size towns still have airfields means the infrastructure is already in place. Smaller airlines, shorter lines, and the onus for financial success and security will be on private companies.

(Flights into different countries would still be large.)

I'm still waiting for my revolution in fuel and technology.

In the meantime, I try not to think about terrorism. When I do, I always remember the episode in Black Adder III where someone tries to blow up the prince with a bowling ball bomb at the theatre, and the prince thinks it's part of the play.

[drdeleto.livejournal.com]

The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

I think this might be a common semi-misconception.

The first fact to note is that a group like Al Qaeda wants to hurt us as much as possible. By "us" I mean the United States.

So the formulation is accurate in one respect: Because terrorists can't contend on a military scale, they maximize their damage by hitting the broadest range of elements of our lives--economic, psychological, symbolic, etc. We should try to insulate our society from these effects, because doing so minimizes the damage done. This is basically true, but I don't know that it's as powerful of an insight as the article presumes.

The real point of doing all this damage is not to get us to ground occasional planes or flip out about vaseline. That is, the psychological or sociological adaptations we make, whether out of fear or political posturing or whatever, are not specifically what the terrorists are aiming at.

Noah Millman opened my eyes when he talked about the point of terrorism in a review of a book about the Battle of Algiers, in which terrorism was particularly effective:

[T]errorism works, but not for the obvious reason. Terrorism is militarily pointless. It also doesn't actually terrorize; the French who lived in Algeria did not flee the country, and the total death toll never rivaled other sources of random death like auto accidents. And it isn't actually that expensive in terms of the damage done, or wasn't then (obviously spectacular 9-11 style terrorism is different in that regard). Terrorism isn't really guerilla warfare; the F.L.N. never really controlled territory, fielded a real army, did the other sorts of things that we think of guerillas as doing. No, terrorism works because it turns individuals into collectives, and one collective cannot govern another collective, politically speaking. Civilized peoples understand terrorism to mean: I have no moral boundaries. But this is not what the F.L.N. meant. They did not mean, when they killed innocent bystanders, including children, that they would happily kill all French people, or that French people were not human, lesser beings who could be killed with impunity. Rather, they meant: the French are a single entity, and we will hurt that entity where we can. They were treating the French collectively, and the French responded in kind, with a collective punitive response that included herding villagers into concentration camps, torturing large numbers of people for information, etc. This was both necessary and intended: the purpose of terrorism was to force the communities apart, to make a political solution impossible.

Emphasis mine. Now, the explanation Noah gives applies specifically to insurgent terrorism like in Algeria or, notably, in Iraq. It doesn't map straight over to Al Qaeda-style attacks, so let me generalize what he's saying a little:

Terrorism radicalizes the tensions between two groups.

Presumably the tensions exist prior to the terrorism, or there is no reason for it in the first place. What terrorism does, then, is to cut through the muddled geopolitical or social facts of the tension (which muddledness may allow for some uneasy peace) and say, "You are my enemy; I am your enemy." Al Qaeda claims to speak for a whole segment of the Islamic world, and to the extent that Arabs were dancing in the streets on 9/11 or Iranian officials welcomed the attacks or the Taliban protected Bin Laden--to that extent they do. Their attacks, in that they target American civilians, are meant to indicate that they do not care if, for one thing, there are Americans who might sympathize with their grievances: Americans are all the enemy; America is the enemy.

[drdeleto.livejournal.com]

CONT'D


Al Qaeda and others want this kind of radicalization because they want a widespread war. That is the first step in fixing the world, as they see it. Terrorism confronts its target with a dilemma--and the more unsolvable, the better, in the terrorists' eyes: In defending itself, the target community becomes an accomplice in the radicalization. But it must, of course, defend itself. A sovereign entity that does not defend its citizens and deter any enemies is not worthy of the name.

So, by definition, we walk a fine line in defending ourselves from terrorists. There is no easy agreement on the best methods of doing so, and it is hard to agree how to interpret events: Is the invasion of Iraq an example of taking a fatal step toward Al Qaeda's global war? Or is it an attempt to draw parts of the Middle East to our side of the conflict through democratization?

Conclusion: As Noah says, terrorism doesn't "terrorize." So the part of that article that claims that we shouldn't freak out in our response to terrorism--and that freaking out is what the terrorists want--is mostly missing the point. However, the very broad point that how we react to terrorism determines its success is true.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

I agree that one effect of terrorism is to radicalize differences.

But the effect of terrorism can be substantially more than just that: in hyper-mediated Western culture, terrorism also does have enormous economic consequences due to, well, terror, and due to the costs of the reaction. To give the smallest of examples, the rise in US fear of terrorism is going to have enormous economic consequences here in Canada, given that starting next year, you'll need a passport or equivalent to come here from the US. (Well, technically, you'll need it to go to the US.) The expected consequence of this is a few billion dollars in annual trade and several tens of thousands of jobs lost.

Now, again, one can argue that this is just the consequence of a war, and indeed, a war in which dozens of Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan and thousands of US soldiers have died in a variety of countries. But it is also an example of terrorism having a lot more effects than just radicalization.

The example of the French in the '50s is perhaps thus not apropos: the pied noir knew that they were colonizers, and presumably were made of pretty hearty stock; neither is the example of my colleagues in Haifa. (Basic summary of recent email: "We're fine; we spent most of the last month trying to keep our morale up and do work." I was practically assuming I'd start hearing about some delicious new theorems.)

Americans haven't yet really coped with the experience of being targets of terrorism, and as such, they're getting angry, yes, but they're also getting scared. And, since folks in the US aren't hearing much about small-scale atrocities being proposed against them, there's not even the "normalcy" of occasional café bombings, as in Israel a few years ago.