Nearly 10 years after the Sept. 11 attacks, 25 percent of Americans are still blindly alarmed about the threat of Islamic terrorism. They still tell USA Today/Gallup pollsters they’d willingly give up “basic civil liberties” to prevent further violence.
Back in early 2002, 47 percent of Americans said they’d sacrifice liberty for security, but that should be no surprise. Given the searing events of the previous fall, the wonder is that the percentage who favored security at any price wasn’t even higher.
A decade later, however, you’d think Americans would appreciate that jihadist violence can for the most part be contained without resort to extreme tactics — and that the common fear after 9/11 that we faced wave upon wave of attacks from domestic and foreign fanatics was largely unfounded.
Yes, terrorists have managed to penetrate our defenses — with a few, such as Major Nidal Hasan, achieving horrifying success. Yet what is remarkable is how few have succeeded and how few, apparently, have tried. After all, the U.S. has endured terrorism for decades and probably will for decades to come. So the past 10 years must be judged in context. And it turns out that the post- 9/11 years were far from the worst.
“The scale of the September 11, 2001, attacks tended to obliterate America’s memory of pre- 9/11 terrorism,” writes Brian Michael Jenkins in a report last year for the Rand Corp., “yet measured by the number of terrorist attacks, the volume of domestic terrorist activity was much greater in the 1970s. That tumultuous decade saw 60 to 70 terrorist incidents, mostly bombings, on U.S. soil every year — a level of terrorist activity 15 to 20 times that seen in the years since 9/11 … .”
More innocent people died in ’70s terror attacks — which featured such goon squads as the Weather Underground and New World Liberation Front — than in the post- 9/11 years, too.
Law enforcement techniques are no doubt more sophisticated today, but police and federal agents didn’t exactly sit on their hands in the 1970s, either.
Granted, there have been a number of close calls in the past few years, such as the Times Square bombing attempt in 2010, and plots that foundered only because of rank stupidity. Yet as Jenkins points out, “An individual can be dumb and dangerous.”
Nor would stupidity explain, he notes, why “there has been no sustained jihadist terrorist campaign” in the U.S. Most American Muslims clearly oppose such carnage, while terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda suffer from what Charles Kurzman calls “recruitment difficulties.”
Writing in the August issue of Foreign Policy, Kurzman, a University of North Carolina professor and author of “The Missing Martyrs,” says, “These organizations often claim to have waiting lists of volunteers eager to serve as martyrs, but if so they’re not very long.”
“The initial plans for 9/11 called for a simultaneous attack on the U.S. West Coast,” he reminds us, “but al Qaeda could not find enough qualified people to carry it out. [Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed’s claim that al Qaeda was ‘never short of potential martyrs’ seems to have been false bravado.”
Kurzman isn’t dismissing the threat. “The more I look at [jihadist] websites, watch their videos, and read their manifestos and discussion boards,” he writes, “the more I realize just what a brutal and inhumane bunch these people are. . . . But there’s good news, too, that is often overlooked: There aren’t very many Islamist terrorists, and most are incompetent.”
Someday terrorists will very likely inflict another traumatic blow upon America — not on the scale of Sept. 11, let’s pray, but with scores or hundreds of casualties. The odds are on their side. As the IRA said after failing to kill Margaret Thatcher or her ministers at Brighton in 1984, “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”
We will not be lucky always. Yet if the past 10 years have taught us anything, it’s that we can be lucky enough to live normal lives without embracing the idea of a total security state.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
