"Because of offensive actions against Al Qaeda since 9/11, and defense actions to improve homeland security, we believe we are safer today. But we are not safe."
-- The 9/11 Commission
In next week's acceptance speech, John Kerry will no doubt offer a long list of issues and beliefs on which he and President Bush disagree. But there's one disagreement that I suspect won't be on the list, though it is sorely needed. I want to see Kerry look the cameras squarely in their lenses and say to the American people: "Despite all the threat alerts and doomsday scenarios, despite the horrors of 9/11, despite the daily pronouncements from the current Administration that we live in deadly times, despite all that, I am here to tell you one thing: you are safe."
Why should our leaders reassure us, rather than strike fear into our hearts? Not because I want them to sugar coat bad news; not because there's no point in living in fear when there's little you can do about it. I want our leaders to reassure us because there is plenty of evidence that we are safe, and because it's in the nature of a sensationalist media (not to mention government) to distort the risks that we do face.
If Kerry were to make such a pronouncement, he'd want to defend it with these four supporting arguments.
First, the most obvious point: we're far safer than we were on 9/11 because practically the entire world has devoted itself to breaking up major terrorist groups, and looking for signs of suspicious activity. Sure, many holes exist, but many have been plugged, and there's no doubt that Al Qaeda has suffered major setbacks in both personnel and operations. The government is obsessively tracking the slightest hints of plots; even if they haven't fully upgraded their information architecture, I find it very hard to believe that a clue like the Phoenix memo would get ignored today. In fact, I'd wager Tom Ridge would be on Fox News an hour after it was filed, announcing to the country to look out for suspicious flight school attendees.
Secondly, a private-sector extension of the first point: since 9/11 the number of "eyes on the street" of ordinary people on the lookout for suspicious behavior has surely increased by several orders of magnitude. Would the hijackers have gone unnoticed and unreported by the many people they interacted with in the years leading up to 9/11 if the national mood had been as suspicious and on alert as it is today? I suspect not. It's a lot easier to be a terrorist in a society that isn't obsessed with terrorism.
Thirdly, certain crimes -- like neighborhoods -- can be victim to destructive success. The very fact that someone pulled off a crime with such spectacular results ends up making it impossible to commit the crime in the future. I wager that no one will hijack planes and crash them into buildings again -- not just because of increased security, but also because 9/11 broke the bond of conventional hijacking scenarios, where the passengers agree to let the hijackers take over in the hopes that they'll be released once the hijackers get their wishes. From now on, everyone will assume that the hijackers' wishes are to die, and so every hijacked plane will be like Flight 93 from the second the hijackers announce their plans. (9/11 may have even put conventional hijackers out of business -- the ones who just want a million dollars or their buddies released from jail.)
Finally, the most important point of all. Say for the sake of argument that points one through three are not true, and the US is just as vulnerable to attack as it was on September 10, 2001. Say Al Qaeda manages to recruit a vast army of followers despite all our best efforts, and the worst case scenario happens: we have a dozen attacks a year, each killing on average the same number of civilians as the 9/11 attacks did. Or we have one massive attack each year that kills ten times as many people as the 9/11 attacks. It's an almost unimaginable scenario, but if it were to take place, you'd still be TWICE as likely to die in a car accident than in a terror attack. How many of us -- myself included -- walk around with a sense of background dread anytime Ridge and Ashcroft holds a press conference, or raise the alert level? But even assuming we have a 9/11-scale event every five years, the threat posed to me by a highway collision is a hundred times more pressing than the threat posed by Al Qaeda. And yet most of us aren't petrified with fear every time we get into our cars. For good reason -- because cars are safe.
To be clear: terrorism is a threat to us, and our politicians and law enforcement officials should be focused on ridding the world of those threats as effectively as they can. But those leaders should also be focused on giving us a sense of proportion. By any reasonable statistical measure, ordinary Americans are safe from terrorism. It would be nice, for once, to have our leaders remind us of that.
