And that’s just what terrorists want the gut of George Tenet and every other American to think. “America is full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east,” Osama bin Laden said in a 2004 video. “Thank God for that.”
“Terrorism,” writes Brian Michael Jenkins, “is actual or threatened violence calculated to create an atmosphere of fear and alarm, which will in turn cause people to exaggerate the strength of the terrorists and the threat they pose.” Terrorists are not formidable foes. If they were, they would fight using other means. It is precisely their weakness that leads them to carry out the slaughter of innocents—the one form of attack available to even the feeblest combatant. In itself, such slaughter is unlikely to deliver a serious blow to the enemy. But it does generate fear, and fear can inspire reactions that terrorists hope will advance their cause.
Louise Richardson notes that terrorists always have two sets of goals, one political, the other tactical and immediate. They almost never achieve their political goals. But they often manage to advance their tactical goals and “it is this success that appeals to disaffected youths seeking a means of rapid redress.” These tactical goals can be summed up in three words: revenge, renown, and reaction.
“Revenge” is the only one of the three goals that the terrorists can deliver for themselves. The enemy wronged them—as they see it—so they kill the enemy’s people as retribution.
“Renown” refers to the terrorists’ image among potential sympathizers. They want to be seen as a major force—an army of honorable soldiers— with a realistic chance of hurting and defeating the enemy. They can do this in part by executing bold attacks—the “propaganda of the deed,” as terrorism was called by nineteenth-century anarchists. But that only goes so far. How damaging are the attacks? How powerful are the terrorists? Is the enemy seriously threatened? The terrorists don’t get to answer these questions. Enemy governments and media do, and so renown depends mainly on how they describe the threat.
“Reaction” is entirely up to the enemy, of course, and terrorists’ plans often hinge on it. A common hope is that terrorist attacks will provoke a violent overreaction. In the 1970s, Germany’s Red Brigades thought West Germany was a fascist state that disguised its true character behind a veil of democracy and consumerism. Terrorism, they hoped, would cause the government to tear off the veil and resort to its “true” character, which would push the nonviolent left to revolution. From what we can gather, Osama bin Laden seems to have anticipated that the 9/11 attacks would either lead to an American withdrawal from the Muslim world or an American invasion. For bin Laden, either result was desirable. If the United States abandoned the Middle East, the secular dictatorships supported by the White House— which were always bin Laden’s chief object of hatred—would be fatally weakened. If, however, the United States invaded the Muslim world, it would confirm bin Laden’s claim that the Islamic world was under attack by “the Jews and Crusaders” and bring recruits to the banner of jihad.
Seen from this perspective, the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 was emotionally satisfying but utterly wrongheaded. Define the attacks as war and the terrorists become soldiers and their organization an army. Define the war as a cataclysmic fight to the death—nothing less than the Third World War—and you effectively declare to the world that al-Qaeda is so powerful it could conceivably defeat the United States of America. Insisting that America would not be defeated—as Bush did over and over throughout his presidency—did not erase this implication. It entrenched it.
This was the greatest gift Osama bin Laden has ever received. Before Bush gave it to him, he was an outlaw forced to shift his band of followers from country to country until they wound up in the deserts of Afghanistan. He grandiosely “declared war” on the United States and was ignored. He bombed American embassies in east Africa and attacked an American ship on the Arabian coast and his profile rose a little, but he still had nothing like the renown he needed to become the voice of fanatical Muslims who wished to sweep away their corrupt governments and create a new caliphate. He got that when Bush declared him an existential threat to the United States. “To be elevated to the status of public enemy number one is just what a terrorist group wants,” wrote Richardson. “It gives the group stature among its potential recruits, which in turn wins it more followers. Declaring war on terrorists, in effect, hands it the renown it seeks.” Osama bin Laden clearly understands this and revels in his status as the great enemy of the United States. “It is easy for us to provoke and bait,” bin Laden gloated in a 2004 videotape. “All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen . . . to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda in order to make the generals race there. . . .”
The framing of the attack as global war also ensured bin Laden would get the reaction he sought. The invasion of Afghanistan was supported worldwide, and if the administration had stopped there, bin Laden would have been disappointed. But a modest intervention in a backwater like Afghanistan hardly seemed fitting for the Third World War. And so it was on to Iraq—an invasion that seemed to confirm the Islamists’ portrayal of America as a crusader nation bent on destroying Islam. In the 1970s, the West German government refused to be goaded into overreacting by the Red Brigades; George W. Bush delivered overreaction on a scale that is the stuff of terrorist fantasies.
“By declaring a war on terror,” concluded Richardson, “far from denying [al-Qaeda] its objectives, we are conceding its objectives, and this is why the war on terror can never be won.”
“Fear is the biggest danger we face,” wrote Brian Michael Jenkins. Many of those who hype the threat of terrorism would agree with this point, knowing that fear can be corrosive and prompt us to react in destructive ways. But they take fear and fearful reactions as something terrorism inevitably elicits, as if we have no control over our responses. That assumption is what lies behind the remark of General Richard Myers, the former chairmanof the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that a terrorist attack that killed 10,000 people would “do away with our way of life.” Why? Four times as many Americans are killed in car crashes every year, but no one worries that car crashes are a threat to the American way of life. What the general meant, of course, is that a terrorist attack of that magnitude would so terrify Americans that they would demand a police state in response. The terrorists wouldn’t destroy America; the terror would.
To some extent, it’s true that terrorism generates disproportionate fear, and there’s nothing that can be done about that beyond stopping attacks in the first place. Terrorism is vivid, violent, unjust, and potentially catastrophic. It presses all of Gut’s buttons. It is inevitable that we will feel it is a bigger threat than a Head-based analysis would conclude. But people are not slaves of their unconscious minds. They also have conscious minds that can overrule or at least modify their feelings. If, after the September 11 attacks, President Bush had loudly and repeatedly insisted that flying is safer than driving, even factoring in the risk of terrorism, and underscored the point by getting on a commercial jet himself, it probably wouldn’t have convinced everyone to ignore their jitters and return to the airports. But it would have got the media talking about risk and statistics, and a significant proportion of those who had switched from flying to driving would have realized it was foolish to do so and switched back. Lives would have been saved.