Since September 11, 2001, American travelers have stood in lines, removed shoes, and given up nail files, tweezers, and, for a while, toothpaste: anything to stop the next terrorist.
And for the past five years, especially in the months preceding elections, the Bush administration has reminded us of what a fine job it's been doing protecting the homeland from another attack.
John Mueller doesn't buy it. In his new book, "Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them"(Free Press), Mueller argues that the threat of domestic terrorism has been greatly exaggerated by politicians and the media. We have wasted untold amounts of money and energy, he believes, on unnecessary and often counterproductive anti-terrorist efforts.
Mueller was a legendary, inspiring professor when he taught at the University of Rochester from 1965 to 2000. In 1997 he won the UR's Edward Peck Curtis Award for Undergraduate Teaching. He now holds the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies, Mershon Center, and is professor of political science at Ohio State University in Columbus.
("I change jobs every 35 years," he says.)
In addition to his many books, he has written numerous journal articles and op-ed columns in Foreign Affairs, Political Science Quarterly, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and dozens of other publications.
But global politics isn't everything.
Mueller is also a leading authority on dance, especially dance on film. He is the author of "Astaire Dancing --- the Musical Films of Fred Astaire." And he has not been just an observer. He wrote the book for "A Foggy Day," a musical combining a PG Woodhouse play with songs by George and Ira Gershwin. In 1998 and 1999, the show was produced at the Shaw Festival in Ontario, Canada, selling out all of its 250 performances.
Lately Mueller has been on the lecture circuit --- and on The O'Reilly Factor and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart --- discussing his new book and his contrarian ideas about terrorism.
In a recent telephone interview, Mueller talked about the book and his views on terrorism and war. An edited version of that discussion follows.
City: Why did you write "Overblown"?
Mueller: The conventional wisdom about terrorism seemed to be so overdrawn and the hysteria so under-justified. Extrapolating too much from 9/11seemed to be fairly foolish, or at any rate dangerous and unjustified. Looking at the total amount of damage that terrorism does, it didn't seem to justify the extraordinary attention and sometimes hysteria that it seemed to generate.
What do you hope to accomplish with the book?
It's been five years since 9/11, and we just got through this election, so I hope it's time for reconsideration of the whole thing. Are we really spending money wisely on this, or are we over-spending? How big a problem is it? Now that 9/11 has sort of receded, it might be time for more careful consideration.
Do you take any of the domestic terror threats of the past several years seriously --- for instance, the Lackawanna Seven sleeper cell?
Those guys had gone to a training camp [in Afghanistan] before 9/11. They've never been accused, as far as I know, of planning anything. All they're in jail for, I guess, is having aided Al Qaeda by going to one of its training camps. I guess it fits the law, but the FBI has basically said it's been able to find no true Al Qaeda cells in the United States after five years of intensive and well-funded snooping.
Some of these guys are probably pretty good to get off the street because they might hurt somebody --- probably themselves. But they don't represent an existential threat to the United States.
There have been no domestic terrorist acts since 2001, but looking at London, Madrid, Indonesia, etc., terrorism seems to have grown.
It's grown if you count Iraq as terrorism, but that's basically an insurgency. There are two sources that have listed Muslim-extremist terrorism outside of war zones, and the total number of people killed since 9/11 --- none of them Americans --- is about 1,000. That's about 200 a year, which is smaller than the number of people who have drowned in bathtubs in the United States. That includes Madrid, London, Indonesia, Jordan, and so forth.
Surely there is a profound difference when there are mass killings of non-combatants for geo-political reasons.
We talk about cold-blooded murder as opposed to accidental death. I'm not saying it's morally equivalent. I'm saying the total amount of destruction is pretty limited overall, and there are things which kill considerably greater numbers of people that we basically accept and don't go into cosmic concern about.
The basic point is, the number is really quite small. The best number would be zero, but you can say that about drownings in bathtubs, too.
You make the case that good police work would be a better solution to our problem than a war on terror. Police works seems to have paid off in the recent foiling of the plot to blow up planes over the Atlantic. Would you have treated September 11 as a police matter?
Yes. There's no way to get it through military means. With good gumshoe police work and the ability to put things together, they might have been able to foil it. Of course, sometimes the bad guys just get lucky. It's not clear that any police work would have detected it coherently, so sometimes you just have really bad luck.
Do you believe the war in Afghanistan was more justified than the war in Iraq?
Iraq didn't make any sense to me. Even in the case of Afghanistan, it's not clear to me that war was necessary. What happened after 9/11 was that you had this conversion of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two supporters of the Taliban. It's possible that enough pressure on them would have caused them to undercut or even deport or extradite bin Laden and his people.
The good thing about the war in Afghanistan is we got rid of the Taliban, which, in my view, was a pretty bad regime, but not one that was really all that much associated with terrorism except for hosting bin Laden.
In your book, you refer to "a tiny band of international terrorists" active in the world today. A recent article in the New York Times on the resurgence of the Taliban in Pakistan talked about a religious school where 500 or 600 students are being trained as suicide bombers. Thomas Friedman has reported on madrassas in Pakistan and other countries where children are being brainwashed and prepared for jihad. Do you think these reports are exaggerated?
They're recruiting soldiers for a guerilla war and insurgency in Afghanistan, not for terrorism with global reach. There's a growing conflict in Afghanistan, which looks worse and worse from the American standpoint. The main terrorist attacks have not been people out of madrassas. They've been local people who have been recruited to work in terrorist cells. The number of people is still an incredibly small number compared to the total number of Muslims out there.
Aside from kamikaze pilots in Japan during World War II, the term "suicide bomber" wasn't a part of our vocabulary until the past decade or so.
There was a lot of it in Sri Lanka. But it's true that the main innovation in the last several years has not been in weaponry but in the sociological ability to fabricate legions of suicide bombers, and that is the new thing on the horizon.
The Bush administration has crowed about preventing another 9/11. You believe there wasn't much to prevent. But it's kind of a chicken-and-egg issue. How do we know the administration's measures haven't worked?
What you need for a terrorist attack is an incredibly small number of people, like two, 12, or 19 in the case of 9/11. Though I do think it's harder to get into the country, and some of the measures have made it more difficult, these measures can't be so good that you can't get two, or 12 or 15 people into the country. You'd have to be perfect, and governments are never perfect as they showed at the time of Katrina --- incredible ineptitude.
There are over 300 million foreigners who enter the country every year, as well as the thousands who come across every day illegally. The idea that you couldn't get a few people in strikes me as being difficult to embrace. If they're not here, it's more because they're not trying very hard or they're not nearly as competent, as diabolical, as devilish, as capable, and as numerous as is usually assumed.
You downplay chemical and biological attacks. But while the anthrax scare of 2001 killed only a few people, it demonstrated how relatively simple it would be to cripple the mail system and greatly affect our economy.
The problem is not what the anthrax did, but the reaction to it. The fact that five people were killed is tragic, but the Post Office is spending $5 billion to deal with the anthrax issue. That's $1 billion for every person killed. The overreaction can cause more problems and sometimes more deaths than the terrorists do.
But is it an overreaction, when such small amounts can kill?
It's obviously a bad thing, and a horrible way to die. But the amount of damage that has been done by this is remarkably limited, and it suggests that the technological difficulties of pulling this off make it unlikely. My main point is not that they can't kill, but they can't kill massively. These are called weapons of mass destruction, but they can't kill masses of people.
In the book you mention Bhopal, India, where Union Carbide says it was sabotage that caused a disaster in 1984. Whether it was sabotage or an accident, doesn't it prove that thousands can be killed by chemicals?
Yes, but that was 20 tons of the stuff. It seems to me the lesson of 9/11 is not that they can get weapons of mass destruction, but that they can get stuff that already exists and find a massively destructive capacity in it.
AQ Khan, the Pakistani scientist, was known to have run an underground market for nuclear technology in recent years. Are you concerned about nuclear terror?
Yes. Even though I think the chances of terrorists getting nuclear weapons is small, that really is a weapon of mass destruction, and reducing their capacity is certainly a good idea. That's generally a reasonable expenditure, although I'm not really terribly concerned about it, since the difficulties of doing it are very high.
Do the growing nuclear capabilities of Iran and North Korea concern you, especially in light of the fanatical leaders of these countries?
You get huffing and puffing by two-bit dictators; I call them Devils du Jour in the book. Look at some of the rhetoric of Qaddafi in the 1980's; it's basically the same thing as Osama bin Laden calling upon Muslims to kill Americans everywhere.
These guys have sort of faded into the woodwork or the dustbin of history. I think these guys in North Korea and Iran are much more likely to be like that than they are to be like Adolf Hitler, to whom they're constantly compared.
Religion --- specifically radical Islam --- is usually somewhere in any discussion of the current world situation. Your book hardly mentions religion at all. Is it not a factor?
A lot of the fanatics are definitely religious, but I don't think they really represent very much. Fawaz A. Gerges' book, "The Far Enemy," points out that they are a fringe group of a fringe group. Even many of the other violent jihadists think attacking the United States is really immoral and stupid. One of the big reactions after 9/11 from radical jihadists is that Osama bin Laden is a nutcase.
In "The End of Faith," Sam Harris suggests that the combination of religious fanaticism and chemical or biological weapons is potentially catastrophic. What do you think?
I don't have much disagreement in terms of their motives or intentions but more about their capabilities. Aum Shinrikyo [the Japanese doomsday cult] certainly was flaky beyond belief, and they managed to kill 12 people.
They tried biological weapons several times, and no one even noticed. They had hundreds of millions of dollars and a bunch of scientists working for them. So there are difficulties in executing this. Most biological weapons rot very quickly. They have to be exactly honed the right way and sprayed as an aerosol at the right temperature.
John Kerry got in trouble during his presidential campaign saying that we should treat acts of terrorism as more of a nuisance than a nightmare.
As far as the US is concerned, we've already gotten there. Bush made a similar statement, and he was jumped on by the Democrats. They both had their moment of truth and were blasted away by the realities of politics. Then they both went to their macho mantras about victory and spending more than the other guy on this.
But the amount of damage terrorism does is quite limited. The chance of being killed is 1 in 80,000 over your life span, and the only way those odds could change very much is if terrorists got nuclear weapons. And that seems to be pretty unlikely.
In your book, you consider a series of historical examples --- from Pearl Harbor to Vietnam --- to suggest what might have been a better course of action if cooler heads prevailed. But how do we learn to take a deep breath and apply logic, when we don't have the perspective of hindsight?
Beats me. Read my book and believe it, I guess. Politicians sometimes don't over-react, as in the case of the Lockerbie bombing and the Beirut bombing in 1981. Kennedy and Nixon took airplane hijackings in stride, so it seems to be possible.
I'm not very optimistic that there's going to be a huge amount of change in this. The problem is the politicians are acting naturally, the bureaucrats are acting naturally, the press is acting naturally, the pork-barrel leaders are acting naturally, and all of those people have some incentive to exaggerate the threat.
You call the "War on Terror" a war on a tactic, but isn't it because there is no particular country to fight? In Israel's short war with Hezbollah, only one side wore uniforms. Your previous book, "The Remnants of War," theorized that war is declining and that most modern warfare is waged by criminals and bullies. Are we moving into an era where conventional war will be obsolete?
Yes. There have been hardly any conventional wars in the last 15 years. Almost all are guerilla wars or insurgencies. If you use standard definitions of war, combatants fighting combatants, the number of wars left in the world is close to one: Iraq.
There are two or three that kind of creep over with enough casualties to consider them to be wars. Essentially, the definition requires them to have 1,000 battle deaths per year. If you use that definition, the only war that shatters that is Iraq. You have ethnic cleansing and genocide, but they are not wars.
I hope you prove to be right about all of this, but have you ever been accused of being an optimist?
I've given a lot of talks since this book came out. When I started venturing out, I expected to be lynched. But the most common response I get in talks is "I agree with everything you say," which is kind of unsettling, because I was trying to shake them up. The second most common is, "Why isn't anyone else saying this?" Most people seem to go away thinking, "He's got a good point, and we should really be thinking about this."