How afraid should we be? If you listen to
the Bush Administration, a minority of Supreme Court Justices, and the extreme
right wing, the answer is simple. RUN,
RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! President Bush and Vice
President Cheney have said repeatedly that terrorism is an “unprecedented
threat”. Because it is unprecedented we must, therefore, be prepared to do
anything. Ron Suskind writes in his latest oeuvre, The One Percent Doctrine, that Vice President Dick
Cheney said:
if there’s a 1 percent chance that al-Qaida could
get its hands on weapons of mass destruction, “we need to treat it as a
certainty. It’s not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence.
It’s about our response.”
The fear of
terrorism is understandable, but completely irrational. Let me return for a
moment to a much criticized op-ed in the New York Times that I wrote in the summer of
2001. I said:
Judging from news reports and the
portrayal of villains in our popular entertainment, Americans are bedeviled by
fantasies about terrorism. They seem to believe that terrorism is the greatest
threat to the
United States and that it is becoming more widespread and
lethal. They are likely to think that the United States is the most popular target of terrorists. And
they almost certainly have the impression that extremist Islamic groups cause
most terrorism…. None of these beliefs are based in fact…. While terrorism
is not vanquished, in a world where thousands of nuclear warheads are still
aimed across the continents, terrorism is not the biggest security challenge
confronting the United States, and it should not be
portrayed that way.
I stand by that
assessment. At that time most of the terrorist attacks counted by the
intelligence community where carried out by non-Islamist groups. Unfortunately,
some who read this piece were unaware of my previous work, an op-ed penned with
Milt Bearden in November of 2000 and my interviews with Frontline in August of
1998, in which I identified Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as our main terrorist
threats.
Since 2001 there has been
a sea change in the terrorist threat—in 2004 radical Islamic groups accounted
for the vast majority of attacks and were largely responsible for all people
killed and wounded in terrorist attacks. In 2002, for example, there were a
total of 208 terrorist attacks. By 2004, there were almost 700 terrorist attacks
in which people were killed or injured. This was the highest number of attacks
ever recorded since the intelligence community started keeping statistics in
1968.
While terrorism from radical Islamic
extremism is a threat we must take seriously, we are kidding ourselves to place
it on par with the military and nuclear threat we faced during the Cold War with
the Soviet
Union.
Let’s start with Al Qaeda. In the summer of 2001,
Jane’s Defense said
that Al Qaeda’s network, under the leadership of Osama bin Laden was:
resilient, with a membership of
3,000-5,000 men worldwide. A global conglomerate of groups operating as a
network, Al-Qaeda (“The Base”) has a worldwide reach, with a presence in
Algeria, Egypt,
Morocco, Turkey,
Jordan,
Tajikistan, Syria,
and 31 other countries. (August 2001)
Since then, according to the Bush
Administration, at least 50% of al Qaeda has been destroyed. Besides al Qaeda,
there are other loose groups and gangs of aspiring jihadists. How many? We
really don’t know. One way to judge is to look at the number of terrorist
attacks, both international and domestic. Last year, according to the National
Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), there were almost 11,000 attacks that caused
14,500 deaths.
Iraq accounted for almost 30% of those
attacks and 55 percent of the fatalities (see page ix, NCTC Report on
Incidents of Terrorism 2005).
By merging domestic and international
attacks NCTC has made it more difficult to track the number of attacks in which
people are being killed and injured. For the sake of discussion, let’s be
generous and assume that most of last year’s attacks were caused by radical
jihadists. Less than 50 of these attacks killed 50 people or more. That is an
objective fact. If there are hundreds of thousands of jihadist terrorists around
the world, these statistics beg a critical question—why are they so inactive
relative to their numbers?
If there were, say, 50,000 committed
jihadist terrorists we should expect to see more than 2000 attacks annually with
significantly higher casualties. So far, that is not the case. Should we fear
jihadists more than we feared the Soviet threat? I say no.
In 1989 the Soviet armed
forces was the world’s
largest military establishment, with nearly 6 million troops in
uniform. The Soviets had:
five armed services rather than the standard army,
navy, and air force organizations found in most of the world’s armed forces. In
their official order of importance, the Soviet armed services were the Strategic
Rocket Forces, Ground Forces, Air
Forces, Air Defense Forces, and Naval Forces. The Soviet armed
forces also included two paramilitary forces, the Internal Troops and the Border
Troops.
Al Qaeda, today, is estimated to be around
2000-3000 strong. Their leadership is hiding out in remote areas of
Pakistan, they lack strategic training
bases, and have limited ability to communicate.
In 1989 the Soviets
Strategic Rocket Forces had:
over
1,400 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), 300 launch control
centers, and twenty-eight missile bases. The
Soviet
Union had six types of operational
ICBMs; about 50 percent were heavy SS-18 and SS-19 ICBMs, which carried 80
percent of the country’s land-based ICBM warheads. In 1989 the
Soviet Union
was also producing new mobile, and hence survivable, ICBMS. A reported
100 road-mobile SS25 missiles were operational, and the rail-mobile SS-24 was
being deployed. The Strategic Rocket Forces also operated SS-20 intermediate
range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) and SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles
(MRBMs).
Al Qaeda and its jihadist
allies do not have access or control of any intercontinental or medium range
ballistic missiles. I do not doubt their willingness to use such weapons if they
could get their hands on them, but desire is not the same as
capability.
In 1989 the Soviets had a massive Air
Force capable of delivering nuclear weapons inside the
United States:
More
than seventy [Soviet] bombers [had] been modified to carry air-launched
cruise missiles (ALCMs). A new intercontinental-range bomber, the Tu-160, which
also bore the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) designation Blackjack,
became operational in 1989. In the late 1980s, long-range bombers carried a
small, but increasing, percentage of all Soviet strategic nuclear weapons.
Al Qaeda does not have an air force or any
vehicle capable of delivering an air borne nuclear device.
In 1989 the Soviets had an extensive
submarine capability for delivering nuclear devices:
Since
1973 the Soviet Union has deployed ten different attack submarine classes,
including five new types since 1980. In 1989 the Soviet Union also had sixty-six guided
missile submarines for striking the enemy’s land targets, surface combatant
groups, and supply convoys.
In retrospect, Bush and
his allies are right about one thing—the threat of terrorism from Islamic
extremists is unprecedented. However, it is unprecedented in the sense that we
have allowed our fear of the unknown to justify torture, illegal detention, a
clamp down on civil liberties, and ignoring international accords, like the
Geneva Convention.
Should we ignore terrorism? No. We do face
a serious threat from radical Islamists. They are a fervent and uncompromising
lot. Fortunately, they are not ubiquitous nor do they represent a majority
opinion among Muslims around the world. While jihadist radicals have flocked to
Iraq (and been killed and captured with
regularity) they have had limited success gaining traction and sustaining
operations around the world.
There are trouble
spots—Somalia,
southern Thailand,
parts of Indonesia—where radicals are trying to get a
foothold. But, these radicals have not been able to project force consistently
outside of the local communities that protect them. When they do attack they
provoke a counterstrike by government officials that usually results in the
death or capture of terrorist operatives. This weakens their ability to sustain
operations.
We make a mistake, a potentially fatal mistake, if
we delude ourselves into accepting that the threat of terrorism is so unique and
so severe that we must suspend civil liberties, break international accords, and
ignore allies in order to fight this enemy. If we continue to choose this road
we risk alienating the moderate Islamic nations and the Islamic authoritarian
regimes (e.g.,
Pakistan,
Egypt,
and Saudi
Arabia) who we need as allies in order to battle this threat.
Justice Stevens, the only member of the Supreme
Court to have served in a combat unit during war, wrote in the Hamdan decision
that a nation at war must still be governed by law. His colleague, David
Souter, wrote:
“For reasons of inescapable human nature, the
branch of government asked to counter a serious threat is not the branch on
which to rest the Nation’s reliance in striking the balance between the will to
win and the cost in liberty on the way to victory.”
If we go to war and in the process lose
our humanity and savage those principles that made America a City on a Hill, a
light of freedom to the world, then the victory on the battlefield is hollow and
of no value. Bush and his political allies may be ignorant of history and
incapable of understanding the threats we have faced and survived in the past,
but as we commemorate the Fourth of July we must remember. We must not forget
that we have confronted and survived more devastating threats and fearsome
terrors. We have faced enemies far more lethal and far more capable and
triumphed. We must not surrender to
fear.
Larry C. Johnson is CEO and co-founder