John Feffer

Posted September 16, 2008 
What Ever Happened to Terrorism?

Reposted from Foreign Policy In Focus

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-feffer/what-ever-happened-to-ter_b_126757.html
http://tinyurl.com/63jt5j

In Aesop's famous fable, a shepherd boy amuses himself by crying out wolf
just to watch his fellow villagers rush up to the pasture to defend the
sheep. There's no wolf; the villagers are furious. The boy does this
several times until finally when the wolf really does appear, his cries for
help go unheeded. Bye bye sheep.

I would like to update this story. In my 21st-century version, the boy cries
wolf several times and the villagers respond with ever diminishing concern.
Everyone is obsessed with the wolf. Is it near? Will it attack? How do we
defend ourselves? Meanwhile, the sheep develop hoof-and-mouth disease and
all die. Same result. Different cause.

The shepherd boy, in both versions, identified a real threat. He didn't
cry "minotaur." He didn't cry "Martian." The point wasn't whether wolves
existed or not - after all, they had attacked in the past - but whether
they posed a threat when he cried out their name. In my version of the
story, he and the villagers were so concerned with the wolf that they
missed the threats closer to home.

We are now being told that our current "wolf" - namely terrorism - is no
longer the threat that the Bush administration and its anti-terrorism
comrades-in-arms made it out to be. Incidents of terrorism are on the
decline. According to Gallup polls, the number of Americans identifying
terrorism as the most important issue the nation confronts has dropped from
25% between 2002 and 2004 to 16% in 2006 to a mere 4% today. According to
Foreign Policy magazine's polling of national security experts in its
annual Terrorism Index, 83% believed that the threat of global terrorist
networks was increasing last year and only 55% believe so today. 

We could attribute this declining significance of terrorism to the Bush
administration's crying of wolf when the wolf was not in fact at the door.
Others might derive the lesson of Aesop's fable: we villagers must still
remain vigilant despite the administration's very political use of the
terrorism threat to build support for its own policies. The wolf is still
out there. It is planning to attack when we are lulled into complacency by
the bombardment of lies from our government. 

Perhaps. But I prefer my modified fable. While we have focused on terrorism,
other threats have undermined our security: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
global warming, economic inequality, the persistence of nuclear weapons,
and so on. The point is not whether terrorists exist. Yes, they do, even
though nearly one in four Germans believe that the United States itself was
behind the September 11 attacks and an astounding 43% of Egyptians believe
that Israel was the culprit (according to a recent WorldPublicOpinion
poll). The point is: the Bush administration has focused our attention on
terrorism while it has waged war, ignored global warming, widened economic
inequality, tried to build new nuclear weapons, and engaged in many other
dangerous pursuits. We've been hit by the political equivalent of
hoof-and-mouth disease.

Even the new Republican Party platform has recalibrated its threat
assessment. Terrorism certainly appears in the document. The relevant
section chides Democrats for naively believing that "international
terrorists could be dealt with within the normal criminal justice system"
(when, in fact, law enforcement is responsible for the major advances
against terrorism, and "above the law" approaches like Guantanamo only
served as a terrorist recruitment campaign). But that section of the
platform focuses on the specter of nuclear weapons and the imperative to
reduce nuclear arsenals. The Republicans almost, but not quite, sound like
peaceniks.

Elsewhere in the platform, however, the Republicans offer a continuation of
Bush foreign policy. "Despite the Clinton administration's increases in the
already bloated military budget after the end of the Cold War, the
Republican platform insists that 'national defense was neglected and
under-funded by the Clinton Administration,'" writes Foreign Policy In
Focus (FPIF) senior analyst Stephen Zunes in Assessing the Republican Party
Platform. "The platform then calls for a significant increase in the size
of the American armed forces, even though the United States - at barely 4%
of the world's population - already accounts for over one-half of the
world's military spending."

So, the shepherd is not crying wolf quite so often or so loudly as he was
before. But he still wants to spend the village funds on a huge arsenal of
weapons to defend against all the threats hidden in the forest. He has
chums in the stave and pitchfork factories. He's worried that without a
clear and present danger, the village will replace him with a more sensible
shepherd. He sits on the hill surrounded by his new weapons. And meanwhile,
one after another, his sheep are falling sick and keeling over in plain
sight.

-- 
Facts are sacred ... but comment is free