The Enlightened Despot

In response to my post on Harry Reid’s Guantanamo bumbling, commenter Chuck said the following:

It would seem to me that the folks chickening out on closing gitmo have aided the enemy in their main goal.

The goal of a terrorist is ‘terror’ and the the folks who are legitimizing being too afraid of *captured terrorists* to keep them in a *prison* are doing the terrorists work for them.

This is true about hawkish views on terrorism more broadly. It’s an often made, but even more often ignored, point that the utility - such as it is - of terrorist strikes has much more to do with the reaction to them than with the harm they cause directly. Killing a few Americans civilians does not do anything directly to advance, say, the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate. The payoff is always in the reaction - whether by creating pressure to yield to terrorist demands, or more indirectly, by - to take a crazy, purely hypothetical example - goading us into unpopular wars in the Middle-East.

None of which is to say that we shouldn’t try to stop terrorists from killing us. For one thing, letting people get away with mass murder is always a bad precedent. For another, terrorists are crazy people, so even if we had a history of Zen-like calm in reaction to attacks, rendering their efforts futile, there’s little reason to think they wouldn’t give it the old college try anyway.

But, yes, it is certainly worth noting that being too terrified to deal with captive terrorists in the most efficacious manner available is Letting the Terrorists Win 101. This is why worries about WMDs in the hands of terrorists is so central to the terrorist hawk’s view of the issue. If you think of terrorism mainly through the lens of what terrorists have ever actually done, you can’t think of it as anything remotely like an existential threat. I don’t mean to be callous to the victims of terrorism, but in the second week of September, 2001 alone, Al Qaeda killed fewer Americans than tobacco (though, of course, Al Qaeda did a lot more property damage). And we have lost more lives in subsequent wars than in the attacks. I was and am a supporter of invading Afghanistan, but between the strategy we have actually embarked on, including Iraq, GITMO, the Patriot Act, and all the rest, and doing absolutely nothing, the latter would be a more rational response even if we knew we would suffer a 9-11 scale attack every 8 years.

So to the extent that the Neocon position makes any sense at all, it’s justification lies almost entirely on the possibility of terrorists acquiring and using WMDs. Which is to say that it’s not about terror at all. But if that’s what you’re worried about - and the Neocons are right, it’s what you should be worried about - then it makes very little sense to go around fighting terrorists wherever they might be. Rather, we should be securing nuclear weapons and other WMDs wherever they might be. Whoops.

Bad news from Ambinder:

The other big news of the day is the release of the Commission on the Prevention
of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism’s report on the most pressing problem facing the next American president.  Clinton-era defense official Graham Allison was on the panel; Mr. Allison is famous in national security circles for putting the odds of a nuclear explosion in an American city at 50% over ten years. The panel concurs: “It is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013. The Commission further believes that terrorists are more likely to be able to obtain and use a biological weapon than a nuclear weapon.”

You can read the report here.