Peter Certo: Americans' absurd exaggeration of the terror threat against them

Via otherwords.org

One in 3.5 million: That’s the risk you’ll die from a terrorist attack in the United States, Ohio State Prof. John Mueller estimates. Rounded generously, that chance comes to 3 one-hundred thousandths of a percent.

That’s not how most Americans see it, though.

In a recent Gallup poll, 51 percent of respondents said they’re personally worried about becoming a victim. If you’ll forgive my amateur number crunching, that means we’re overestimating the terrorist threat by factor of about 1.7 million.

No wonder people play the lottery.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama is trying hard — with mixed results — not to get pushed into another Middle Eastern war. But that’s a tall order when Americans are more fearful of attacks than at any time since 9/11 — and when politicians like Ted Cruz are calling for bona fide war crimes like “carpet-bombing” Syria.

Obama tried hard to walk that line in his final State of the Union address.

He dismissed critics who likened the fight against the Islamic State to “World War III,” and insisted (correctly) that the group poses no existential threat to the United States. But he also assured listeners that the militants would be “rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed.”

To that end, Obama boasted, American planes had already launched 10,000 airstrikes on Iraq and Syria.

This appeal to the carpet-bombing constituency was Obama’s attempt to break the political taboo against counseling modesty about the threat of terrorism. Unfortunately, it only illustrates a much deeper taboo against admitting that foreign terrorism against our country is almost always a response to our foreign policies.

You know, policies like launching 10,000 airstrikes.

Political scientist Robert Pape should know. He’s studied every suicide attack on record.

Pape argues that while religious appeals — Islamic or otherwise — can help recruit suicide bombers, virtually all attacks can be reduced to political motives. “What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common,” he concludes, “is not religion.” Instead, there’s “a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention.”

In the years before al-Qaida pulled off the 9/11 attacks, for instance — and since, for that matter — Washington propped up repressive regimes in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which ruthlessly subjugated Islamist and liberal challengers alike. It armed and enabled Israel, even as the country bombed its Muslim (and Christian) neighbors in Palestine and Lebanon.

And in between its two full-scale invasions of Iraq, Washington imposed devastating sanctions that caused well over half a million Iraqi children to die from a lack of food or medicine.

In his letter explaining the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden mentioned all of these things and more to argue that U.S. intervention in the Muslim world had to be stopped. That’s an opinion shared by plenty of people who aren’t mass murderers.

Similarly, before it expanded to Syria, the infamous Islamic State emerged out of a Sunni rebellion against the repressive Shiite government Washington set up in Iraq after toppling Saddam Hussein. To the extent that it’s engaged in international terrorism, ISIS has mostly targeted countries — like France, Turkey, Lebanon, and Russia — that have plunged into Syria on the side of its enemies.

None of this excuses terrorism in the least. But it strongly suggests that senseless wars only increase the risk of attack — especially when there’s not a bomb on this planet (much less 10,000 of them) powerful enough to put Iraq and Syria back together. Diplomats may do that someday. Carpet-bombing won’t.

Until then, a 0.00003 percent risk of terrorism is high enough. Why multiply it by acting rashly?

Peter Certo is the editor of Foreign Policy In Focus and the deputy editor of OtherWords at the Institute for Policy Studies. IPS-dc.org

Biden's undiplomatic truth-telling

  I got a chuckle over the rumpus after Vice President Biden noted  that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have aided  Sunni extremists -- not directly the Islamic State but certainly members of the terrorist community, some of whom are now merrily murdering people  (yes, they clearly enjoy killing) as Islamic State recruits. Saudi Arabia, of course, is the country that brought us al-Qaida.

Of course this was very undiplomatic, as is truth telling in diplomacy generally. And Mr. Biden is a chatterbox.

Amanda Ufheil-Somers: Bombing I.S. will make matters worse

Once again, a U.S. president vows to eliminate an extremist militia in the Middle East to make the region, and Americans, safe.

And that means it’s time again for a reality check. Having failed in its bid to destroy the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan, the United States is still trying to dismantle both organizations. Over  13 years of war, that mission has spread to Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Mali and West Africa, as militant groups on two continents have adopted the al-Qaida brand.

Contrary to normal logic, the White House wants everyone to see this failure as a badge of expertise. As President Obama vowed in an interview on Meet the Press, fighting the Islamic State forces “is something we know how to do,” mainly because we’ve been battling similar groups “for five, six, seven years.”

Years of air strikes, drone-operated killings and covert operations have brought neither peace nor safety to the region and its people. Estimates of the death toll from U.S. attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia alone range from 3,100 to 5,400, including 570-1,200 civilians. Precise figures are impossible to obtain since the strikes remain classified, and investigating drone attacks is difficult and dangerous work.

Nor has the drone campaign halted the proliferation of groups seeking to link their — usually local — agendas to the idea of a global struggle represented by al-Qaida. Indiscriminate killing — and the constant fear of death from above — has only destroyed communities and provided easy recruitment material for extremist groups.

Obama promises that his plan to combat and destroy the Islamic State forces will also address the underlying political problems in Iraq and Syria. Such claims are tenuous, at best. What’s far more certain is that all military campaigns have unintended consequences, some of which don’t appear for many years afterward.

The Islamic State itself is largely a product of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Dismantling the Iraqi state and rebuilding it along sectarian lines produced an authoritarian government dominated by Shiite Islamists who ignored minority grievances and often suppressed dissent with bullets. The result? An entrenched civil war with no end in sight.

Although U.S. media coverage of the violence in Iraq subsided following the withdrawal of combat troops, sectarian attacks against civilians have continued. Car bombs, street assaults, and kidnappings have transformed Baghdad into a city segregated by sect. Large parts of the country, including the Sunni majority areas in the west and north, feel abandoned by the central government.

These political tensions are the reason why the Islamic State has found some support in the areas it has taken over. Bombing Islamic State targets — especially where they are embedded in communities and liable to cause civilian casualties — carries no promise of changing this dynamic for the better. It’s more likely to change it for the worse.

The Islamic State is indeed a danger to the people of the region and to efforts to resolve the political conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Yet the past decade has shown, again and again, that American firepower doesn’t solve these problems. Even if Washington manages to help destroy this al-Qaida spinoff, the grievances that give rise to groups like it can’t be bombed out of existence.

The campaign formerly called “the War on Terror” has only proven to perpetuate both war and terror. No amount of rebranding or wishful thinking will change that reality this time around.

Amanda Ufheil-Somers is the assistant editor of Middle East Report, published by the Middle East Research and Information Project. MERIP.org. This is distributed via OtherWords.org.