Snatching Defeat From the Jaws of Victory

By John Ballard

More than once I have read/heard that Abdulmutallab's failed attempt as a suicide bomber was a matter of little consequence in most of the world until Americans, with our customary hunger for high-profile celebrities, converted his fifteen minutes of fame into a potential fortune. A story of failure turned upside-down into yet another successful poke in the eye of the US. And thanks to the president's obligatory use of warrior-speak for strictly political reasons what should have been a forgotten failure is instead another notch on the Al Qaeda belt.

Paul Campos, a blogger and law professor at the University of Colorado, wrote a WSJ column about this most recent American international public relations clumsiness.  H/T Charli Carpenter.

I'm not much of a basketball player. Middle-age, with a shaky set shot and a bad knee, I can't hold my own in a YMCA pickup game, let alone against more organized competition. But I could definitely beat LeBron James in a game of one-on-one. The game just needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and when I score, I win.

We might have to play for a few days, and Mr. James's point total could well be creeping toward five figures before the contest ended, but eventually the gritty gutty competitor with a lunch-bucket work ethic (me) would subject the world's greatest basketball player to a humiliating defeat.

The world's greatest nation seems bent on subjecting itself to a similarly humiliating defeat, by playing a game that could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

1. The game lasts as long as there are terrorists who want to harm Americans; and


2. If terrorists should manage to kill or injure or seriously frighten any of us, they win.
   

[...]

Consider that on this very day about 6,700 Americans will die....

Consider then that around 1,900 of the Americans who die today will be less than 65, and that indeed about 140 will be children. Approximately 50 Americans will be murdered today, including several women killed by their husbands or boyfriends, and several children who will die from abuse and neglect. Around 85 of us will commit suicide, and another 120 will die in traffic accidents.

No amount of statistical evidence, however, will make any difference to those who give themselves over to almost completely irrational fears. Such people, and there are apparently a lot of them in America right now, are in fact real victims of terrorism. They also make possible the current ascendancy of the politics of cowardice�the cynical exploitation of fear for political gain.

Unfortunately, the politics of cowardice can also make it rational to spend otherwise irrational amounts of resources on further minimizing already minimal risks. Given the current climate of fear, any terrorist incident involving Islamic radicals generates huge social costs, so it may make more economic sense, in the short term, to spend X dollars to avoid 10 deaths caused by terrorism than it does to spend X dollars to avoid 1,000 ordinary homicides. Any long-term acceptance of such trade-offs hands terrorists the only real victory they can ever achieve.

[...]

For obvious reasons, politicians and other policy makers generally avoid discussing what ought to be considered an "acceptable" number of traffic deaths, or murders, or suicides, let alone what constitutes an acceptable level of terrorism. Even alluding to such concepts would require treating voters as adults�something which at present seems to be considered little short of political suicide.

Yet not treating Americans as adults has costs. For instance, it became the official policy of our federal government to try to make America "a drug-free nation" 25 years ago.

After spending hundreds of billions of dollars and imprisoning millions of people, it's slowly beginning to become possible for some politicians to admit that fighting a necessarily endless drug war in pursuit of an impossible goal might be a bad idea. How long will it take to admit that an endless war on terror, dedicated to making America a terror-free nation, is equally nonsensical?

What then is to be done? A little intelligence and a few drops of courage remind us that life is full of risk, and that of all the risks we confront in America every day, terrorism is a very minor one. Taking prudent steps to reasonably minimize the tiny threat we face from a few fanatic criminals need not grant them the attention they crave. Continuing to play Terrorball, on the other hand, guarantees that the terrorists will always win, since it places the bar for what counts as success for them practically on the ground.

This is not a new message.
Did you catch the reference to "a few fanatic criminals"?

I don't like playing "Terrorball." I'd rather piss away part of my little discretionary income on lottery tickets. At least with lottery tickets there is a chance of winning.