Is the risk of another terrorist attack in the U.S. like the San Andreas fault or like the phone call you\u2019re still waiting for from\u00a0that \u00a0cute boy you\u2019ve got a crush on?\u00a0 As time elapses without the anticipated event happening, in other words, does its likelihood increase (like an earthquake in a fault zone) or decrease (like the phone call that never comes)?\u00a0 During the Bush years, I used to ask various conservative pundits if we could ever recalculate the risk of a terror attack downwards as years passed without another hit.\u00a0 The answer was always no.\u00a0 Clark Kent Ervin, a former Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, encapsulated the conceit that no news is always bad news when it comes to terrorism in a Washington Post op-ed in 2006:\u00a0 \u201cThe very fact that there hasn\u2019t been an attack on a soft target in the United States increases the danger of one,\u201d he wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But despite such assertions, public terror rhetoric has gradually, imperceptibly, abated over the last two years.\u00a0 The muted reaction to the disruption of a possible bomb plot against New York City suggests that the public and media have recalibrated the relative risk and importance of the terrorism threat.\u00a0 Of course, the modest coverage of the arrest of suspect Najibullah Zazi may simply reflect the fact that they got him before rather than after an attack.\u00a0 But I would like to think that even if a terrorist did pull off a bombing in a subway or department store, we would react as the British have, seeing terrorism as a horrifying but manageable problem, not as a \u201ccivilizational threat,\u201d as it was commonly called during the Bush years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0The change in public discourse is really quite remarkable.\u00a0 Almost gone is a genre I used to call terror porn, which consisted of identifying a target, then positing an evildoer perfectly placed to destroy it.\u00a0 The terror pornographer\u2019s motto was: for every vulnerability, a terrorist.\u00a0 \u201cGot Toxic Milk?,\u201d a New York Times op-ed <\/a>from May 2005, was a locus classicus of the genre.\u00a0 Lawrence Wein, a professor of management\u00a0 science, detailed the consequences of poisoning the nation\u2019s milk supply with botulism, dwelling lovingly on how the victims would react. But he offered no evidence that any terrorist anywhere had ever contemplated an attack on the nation\u2019s milk supply; he simply conjured such a villain to produce the desired effect.\u00a0\u00a0 To be sure, we should remain on guard, wiretapping the heck out of all suspect communications<\/a>, and data-mining <\/a>all publicly available information.\u00a0 But the lowered volume of terror rhetoric is a welcome development.\u00a0 As Ohio State\u2019s John Mueller has pointed out, the greatest damage from terrorism comes from our own reaction to it.\u00a0 If some angry Muslims do set off a fertilizer or hair products bomb in a movie theater, the effect would be magnified if the public sees it as the long-predicted uprising of an army of domestic terror cells, rather than as what history suggests it is more likely to be: an isolated incident, probably to be followed by another long stretch of time without another attack.\u00a0\u00a0 Unfortunately, after we foolishly created a permanent bureaucracy dedicated to protecting the U.S. against terrorism, a looming terror threat must always be found to justify its care and feeding.\u00a0 But the Department of Homeland Security has adopted a lowered profile of late, and will perhaps simply mutate back into an immigration agency in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Is the risk of another terrorist attack in the U.S. like the San Andreas fault or like the phone call you\u2019re still waiting for from\u00a0that \u00a0cute boy you\u2019ve got a crush on?\u00a0 As time elapses without the anticipated event happening, … Continue reading
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\nIn fact, carrying off a high-casualty attack of the spectacular weapons of mass destruction variety is difficult, as the negligible number of such incidents over the last fifty years ought to suggest.\u00a0 Those terror methodologies which are relatively easy to accomplish will be duplicated within five years of their first occurrence, according to Rand\u2019s Brian Jenkins\u2014a pattern shown by aircraft hijackings and product tamperings.\u00a0\u00a0 Senate majority leader Bill Frist predicted in 2005\u00a0 that a biological attack was inevitable in the next five years.\u00a0 At the time, however, no known terrorist group possessed even a college-level laboratory and they still don\u2019t.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
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\nLoose nukes are the most powerful threat we face and unbroken vigilance against them is certainly essential.\u00a0 But despite presumed decades of trying, no terrorist has managed to steal a nuclear weapon, and building one without scores of state-supported physicists and equipment is likely impossible.\u00a0\u00a0 If a terrorist does manage to set off a nuclear device here, it should be well understood that we will presume that the return address is Iran or North Korea.\u00a0<\/p>\n