In war, the goal is to keep the enemy off balance. One way to accomplish that is to do something that paralyzes him. Another way is to force him to lash out irrationally, so that he squanders his strength in pointless enterprises. Islamist terrorists are adept at both strategies. By making their attacks intermittent, they create a temporary sense that they have disappeared, so that readiness is reduced and there are squabbles about overreaction—a familiar cycle that has been playing out in Europe and the US for decades now. At the same time, the terrorists have caused the United States in particular to take substantial military action that has not succeeded in reducing terrorism. The cyclical nature of Islamist terrorism, coupled with large military deployments by the US, have created a cycle that oscillates between demands for extreme countermeasures and demands that we m ust not change our lives because terrorism is a marginal force. This cycle reflects the paralysis of the hyperactive—always doing, never getting anywhere.
People express a variety of beliefs about Islamist terrorism. One is that it is invisible but potent and ready to strike, and this assumption creates fear that the threat is imminent. The other stance dismisses this fear, arguing that terrorism isn’t war and so isn’t all that important. The latter attitude is essentially the one that Obama has espoused. His argument is that, since other things cause death more frequently than terrorism does, terrorism ought not to be granted unique importance. It should not be responded to disproportionately, but rather in the broader context of all potential threats.
The president’s argument is a powerful one in light of the terrorist’s mission, which is to terrify us into unwise actions. According to this argument, terrorism is one of the things we must live with. It has a definable size and shape—even if some of the perpetrators act irrationally or alone. We will do what we can to fight terrorism, but we will not let it fundamentally change the way we live. Otherwise, the terrorists have won.
We should not dismiss this stance. I do, however, disagree with it. First, I suspect that there is bit of denial involved in it. It’s true that terrorist attacks are rare and that few of us will die from them, but it is still possible that we, or our loved ones, will become the victim of an attack. If we’re playing terrorist roulette—and we are—we shouldn’t get too comfortable about our house odds. The probability of you or me dying in a terrorist attack is vanishingly small. But we are human beings, and if 100 people die in an attack and the president reacts by saying, “Only 100 people died. Don’t panic,” I suspect there will be public turmoil. Game theory might minimize the significance of such an event, but we can all imagine that the people lost in that attack were our own family members. Imagination is not comforted by statistical improbability, and our political leaders cannot get away with offering only a fal tering response to terrorism—even if we turn around and criticize them for intruding on our privacy. I don’t think Obama would be comforting us with comparisons to car accidents had the attacks in Paris or Brussels occurred in the United States.
The second argument against Obama’s view is that, in prior conflicts, the United States has always limited liberties in the course of formulating a robust response to our enemies. During World War II there was severe censorship. In the Civil War habeas corpus was suspended. These limitations were lifted after the wars. The United States has a superb history of managing national emergencies and then moving beyond them.
But of course, this is the problem. The present emergency may not end, because we will never know—and have no way of knowing—whether people who love death more than life have moved into the house next door. We can ban anyone and everyone from the country, as we ban drugs or once banned alcohol. But banning people won’t work. And even if it did, we would never be sure that the threat was really gone.
And that is why terrorism is effective. A terrorist need not be present among us in order to cause terror. Our imaginations are already infested with him. He wins if we can’t live with the terrors our imaginations conjure, inspired by acts already committed here and there around the world. But imagination is neither trivial nor a mere illusion. It is where we define our relations with the world. We win if we can control our collective imagination. But in naively purging our imaginations of a known threat just because there are more car accident deaths than terrorism deaths, we fail to understand the power of the jihadist army and the nature of the terrain of the imagination. In the end, we are only human, and we, for our part, love life.
George Friedman is editor of Mauldin Economics' This Week In Geopolitics.