The Fear of "Tare-ists"

[Johnny Pneumatic]

The fear of terrorism puzzles me. Yes, I like you, fear death; but let's think about this rationally. How many people do terrorists kill in an average year, a few hundred at most? Lightning kills about a thousand people per year on Earth. Don't fear terrorists, fear electrons. "A suicide bomber killed four people in the city of generic Middle Eastern word at 12:21 GMT today.... "-The news every effing day. Big deal, 1,000,000+ people will die this year from malaria that mosquitoes gave them. Don't fear terrorists; fear mosquitoes. How many people starve to death each day, 50,000+? Fear the lack of food.

 

[Dan Beaird]

There were 208 acts of international terrorism in 2003, a slight increase from the most recently published figure of 198* attacks in 2002, and a 42 percent drop from the level in 2001 of 355 attacks.

A total of 625 persons were killed in the attacks of 2003, fewer than the 725 killed during 2002. A total of 3646 persons were wounded in the attacks that occurred in 2003, a sharp increase from 2013 persons wounded the year before. This increase reflects the numerous indiscriminate attacks during 2003 on “soft targets,” such as places of worship, hotels, and commercial districts, intended to produce mass casualties.

Thirty-five U.S. citizens died in international terrorist attacks in 2003:

Patterns of Global Terrorism

That said, I don't think the population is generally afraid of terrorists. Sure there are some, but I tend to put them in the same category as folks who were afraid of Y2K. For the most part people ignore terrorism unless there is a significant reason not to, such as 9/11 or a videotape of a beheading. The thing is that terrorists need publicity or they cannot achieve their goal of causing terror. It's the publicity which causes terror and so we have sort of a death-spiral of cause and effect. If the media doesn't show what the terrorists are doing the people won't be afraid, and the only way to get the media to show what the terrorists do is for them to out-do the last attack.

Soon we'll be having terrorist versions of fall and spring sweeps.

Starvation and malaria kill regardless of media coverage, in fact media coverage may even reduce the deaths because improved awareness may lead to improved aid. Improved awareness of terrorism generally just leads to more terrorism.

I think the typical response to terrorism is in fact outrage and anger rather than fear. People who are attacked tend to fight back as long as they believe they are capable of doing so. Throw in the additional outrage component caused by the typical nature of a terrorist attack and I really think that people are more than willing to fight them, although the presence of terrorist activity in an area may result in social changes that some might interpret as fear.

 

[Johnny Pneumatic]

Goods points.

The greater point of this thread is the big deal we've blown 9/11 into. Yes, it's sad that several thousand people died there. Is the attack worth the many many billions we're wasting to bomb the crap out of caves in the desert or a country that had nothing to do with the attacks? When the death toll on the US side eventually gets higher in Iraq than was loss in the twin towers is that sane? Already far more civilians have died in Iraq than Saddam had gassed(the second ad hoc rationalisation for the war after WMDs) Is any of this War on Terrror sane? I don't think it is. Terrorists are like petulant children, except instead of jumping up and down screaming "Look at me!" they blow themselves up with trinitrotoluene(a larger noise maker) while saying "Praise be to Allah!". The only way to win is to ignore them, or show them how their religion is being used to screw them over. The latter is very unlikely, very very unlikely. When you have people so brainwashed that they'll die for virgins and a God they've never seen, all hope of appealing to reason and logic is lost.

 

[Ziggurat]

Goods points.

The greater point of this thread is the big deal we've blown 9/11 into. Yes, it's sad that several thousand people died there. Is the attack worth the many many billions we're wasting to bomb the crap out of caves in the desert or a country that had nothing to do with the attacks?

From an economic standpoint, 9/11 was devastating. It did an estimated $500 billion in damages to the economy. That the reaction to it is also expensive in dollars is not blowing anything out of proportion.

When the death toll on the US side eventually gets higher in Iraq than was loss in the twin towers is that sane?

Is that really the thread you want to start? Because the issues with Iraq involve a lot more than 9/11.

Already far more civilians have died in Iraq than Saddam had gassed(the second ad hoc rationalisation for the war after WMDs)

Again, is this REALLY the debate you want to have? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war, and this includes military deaths and terrorists we've killed. Saddam killed several hundred thousand Iraqis. If you want to talk numbers, you need to have a better grasp of what numbers you're talking about - talking only chemical weapons deaths isn't useful when Saddam was such a prolific murderer by more conventional munitions.

And frankly, I don't care when the argument was made. It was a good argument in favor of the invasion before the war regardless of who did or didn't make it.

The only way to win is to ignore them, or show them how their religion is being used to screw them over.

In terms of ignoring them, tell that to the media. But of course, it's not that simple either. This isn't a problem that will simply go away if we ignore it, because it will not be ignored in the middle east. Successful terrorist attacks are used as recruiting tools, and even if we ignore the results, people in the middle east will not. No, ignoring them is not a solution (though less press coverage probably would help). We need to respond to attacks. We have to make attacks actually costly to those who would attack us, we have to disable those groups as best we can, and we have to go on the offensive against those who aid and harbor terrorists. Ignoring terrorism translates into making the cost of a successful terrorist attack approach zero. That's not a good way to prevent terrorism. That's how 9/11 happened in the first place: Al Quaeda's attacks against our embassies and even our military were met with basically no substantive response - we might as well have been ignoring them for all the good it did.

 

[Manny]

The fear of terrorism puzzles me. Yes, I like you, fear death; but let's think about this rationally. How many people do terrorists kill in an average year, a few hundred at most? Lightning kills about a thousand people per year on Earth. Don't fear terrorists, fear electrons. "A suicide bomber killed four people in the city of generic Middle Eastern word at 12:21 GMT today.... "-The news every effing day. Big deal, 1,000,000+ people will die this year from malaria that mosquitoes gave them. Don't fear terrorists; fear mosquitoes. How many people starve to death each day, 50,000+? Fear the lack of food.

In the United States, lightening killed a total of 756 people cumulatively from 1990 to 2003, an average of 58 people per year. (cite) The number of people who get malaria here (as opposed to bringing it back with them from a trip abroad) is trivially small and the largest nutrition-related danger among our poor people is obesity-related diabetes. Your examples don't apply to substantially everybody who can read your post.

More broadly, yes there are larger dangers than terrorism. Even working just a few blocks from ground zero, I'm more likely to get hit by a bus than to be killed by terrorists. In fact, some people think I'm probably more likely to die from the last terror attack than from the next one, having breathed melted plastic and asbestos and vaporized friends and neighbors for three months while the fires burned.

However, that's also not relevant to whether one should "fear" things or do something about them. I'm more likely to slip and fall in the bathtub than I am to be killed by an intruder in my home, yet I lock the doors at night. I'm more likely to be run over by a car in the street than be murdered on the sidewalk, yet I insist on a large police force. Indeed, it's precisely because I lock my doors and insist on a large police force that those dangers are less than other dangers.

I don't think the government should do very much. I think it should do less than it does. However, one of the very few duties that everyone except for extreme anarchists believe the government should perform is securing the safety of its law-abiding citizens from violence, foreign or domesic. Our local government here in New York City used to fail at that duty, so we tossed the old government out and hired Rudy Giuliani to fix the problem. The US government recently experienced a large failure in performing that duty. I absolutely insist that the federal government secure my safety from stolen 767s; if they can do that I'll handle looking both ways before crossing the street on my own.

I'll also repeat Ziggurat's admonition about the relative deaths from the Iraq war and the near-genocide of Saddam Hussein. You might start with anti-war columnist Molly Ivins' principled apology after she erroneously made the same claim.

 

[Johnny Pneumatic]

From an economic standpoint, 9/11 was devastating. It did an estimated $500 billion in damages to the economy. That the reaction to it is also expensive in dollars is not blowing anything out of proportion.



Is that really the thread you want to start? Because the issues with Iraq involve a lot more than 9/11.



Again, is this REALLY the debate you want to have? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war, and this includes military deaths and terrorists we've killed. Saddam killed several hundred thousand Iraqis. If you want to talk numbers, you need to have a better grasp of what numbers you're talking about - talking only chemical weapons deaths isn't useful when Saddam was such a prolific murderer by more conventional munitions.

And frankly, I don't care when the argument was made. It was a good argument in favor of the invasion before the war regardless of who did or didn't make it.



In terms of ignoring them, tell that to the media. But of course, it's not that simple either. This isn't a problem that will simply go away if we ignore it, because it will not be ignored in the middle east. Successful terrorist attacks are used as recruiting tools, and even if we ignore the results, people in the middle east will not. No, ignoring them is not a solution (though less press coverage probably would help). We need to respond to attacks. We have to make attacks actually costly to those who would attack us, we have to disable those groups as best we can, and we have to go on the offensive against those who aid and harbor terrorists. Ignoring terrorism translates into making the cost of a successful terrorist attack approach zero. That's not a good way to prevent terrorism. That's how 9/11 happened in the first place: Al Quaeda's attacks against our embassies and even our military were met with basically no substantive response - we might as well have been ignoring them for all the good it did.

Yeah, and the thing to do after one losses a lot of money is to spend billions more on a war. You know what a huge stupid move for those few days after 9/11 was? Banning flights. How much less would the economy have suffered if flights hadn't been grounded?

I involved Iraq because it's part of the War on Terror. Please tell me what other beef we had with Iraq other than the WMD terrorism angle?

Ok, I was wrong. I didn't know he killed so many. Would you care to cite when and where these deaths happened though?

Your opinion. Yes Saddam is an evil man. However, is he so much worse than the dictators that are to blame for the genocides in Africa that have killed millions? ?,000,000s>?00,000 is correct yes? When is the US going to bomb and liberate those people from their murderous dictators?

Just like children who scream louder and bite your arm until they're spanked so hard their fecal matter goes out the other way, huh?

 

[Ziggurat]

Yeah, and the thing to do after one losses a lot of money is to spend billions more on a war. You know what a huge stupid move for those few days after 9/11 was? Banning flights. How much less would the economy have suffered if flights hadn't been grounded?

That's an easy claim to make now. But at the time, when the situation wasn't clear, such a decision wouldn't have been riskless. If they had immediately resumed flights, and a repeat had happened, that would compound the damage quite a bit.

I involved Iraq because it's part of the War on Terror. Please tell me what other beef we had with Iraq other than the WMD terrorism angle?

Well, mostly that I'm not sure you really understand either angle. Iraq was indeed a state sponsor of terrorism - the Al Quaeda connections may have been unimportant, but Saddam's connections to other terrorist organizations were not. Given his proclivity for supporting, funding, and sheltering terrorists, and his general hatred for us, we were not in a forgiving mood. And the WMD question, though often framed in terms of present capabilities and stockpiles, was actually about much more than that. Maintaining sanctions was costly, both to Iraqis and to us, and the corruption it engendered was rotting away at our alliances and at the UN - not a good precondition for the cooperation needed to fight terrorism. So we either had to accept that this would continue indefinitely (if that was even possible - France, for example, actively worked to lift sanctions), or sanctions would be lifted. If they were lifted, then there would be no means to ensure that Saddam could not, in the future, rearm with WMDs. Saddam was a problem that had simply been festering for too long.

Ok, I was wrong. I didn't know he killed so many. Would you care to cite when and where these deaths happened though?

The 80's Iran-Iraq war, in which probably over 100,000 Iraqis died (some estimates as high as 300,000, and most also place Iranian death toll around twice Iraq's).

The late-80's "Anfal" ethnic cleansing campaign against the Kurds, which killed between 50,000 and 200,000 kurds and displaced hundreds of thousands more.

The '91 suppression Shia uprisings, which killed something like 60,000 people.

Continuous political assasinations and killings throughout his reign that were used to maintain despotic control. Numbers for this are hard to estimate, but likely in the tens of thousands and possibly much greater.

The increased mortality rate for children and the sick in the 90's due to malnutrition and inadequate medical care, a direct result of his deliberate abuse of the oil for food program. Numbers for this ran as high as half a million, which was almost certainly overinflated (and tended, ironically, to come from Saddam's supporters).

Your opinion. Yes Saddam is an evil man. However, is he so much worse than the dictators that are to blame for the genocides in Africa that have killed millions? ?,000,000s>?00,000 is correct yes? When is the US going to bomb and liberate those people from their murderous dictators?

He's more dangerous to our interests, and to global stability. The fact that he was sitting on lots of oil meant that he would never run out of money to buy weapons. The fact that he was centrally located in the middle east meant that, if he were to rearm, he might pose a threat to the entire global economy. And before you start thinking then that this was just about money, consider this: if the price of oil quadrupled because Saddam wiped out Saudi Arabia's oil refineries, who do you think will suffer the most? Third world countries which don't have the money to buy the oil they need. What happens when third world economies collapse and no one is there to pick up the pieces? Violence and death, on a massive scale.

The possible consequences for such a scenario include a lot of people dying all over the world. This confluence of worst-case scenarios being much worse for Saddam than African dictators, plus the fact that, yes, it was also American interests at risk and yes, the US government (as every other government) is always more likely to act when its own interests are at stake meant that Iraq was different.

I'm not morally opposed to us invading, say, Zimbabwe to get rid of Mugabe. But realistically, we simply can't do it. Even if we weren't tied down in Iraq, there's no way that the American public at large would tolerate the kind of sacrifices necessary to accomplish that if they don't feel that their own interests are also at stake. It might be preferable if we were a more selfless country, but that's the reality, and we have to act accordingly.

Just like children who scream louder and bite your arm until they're spanked so hard their fecal matter goes out the other way, huh?

These aren't children, and this isn't just misbehavior. This is life and death. Dealing with it doesn't include spanking, but it does include killing people, yes. The point of killing people isn't always to punish them, sometimes you do it because them being dead works pretty well to keep them from trying to kill you.