http://www.watoday.com.au/comment/we-need-to-harden-up-unreasonable-fear-of-terrorism-serves-the-enemy-20151207-glhkt0.html
We need to harden up: unreasonable fear of terrorism serves the enemy
Date December 7, 2015
Peter Hartcher
Sydney Morning Herald political and international editor
During a radio broadcast, Islamic State claim the couple believed to be responsible for the San Bernardino shootings were supporters of the militant group.
Why do political movements use terrorism? Because it works, at least initially, as recent events show. Not in the scale of its killing, which is very small.
"The success of these atrocities lies in the way they compel our attention," says Conor Gearty of the London School of Economics in his book Terror, published in 1991, long before so-called Islamic State or Daesh had been conceived.
Terrorists prey on our fears, and our fears exaggerate the dangers beyond any rationality. That's why it's called terrorism – it's the clinical deployment of terror to produce a specific behavioural response.
Illustration: John Shakespeare
That's clear even from the title of the Daesh strategy guide, the 2004 online book written by the man who calls himself Abu Bakr Naji. It's title: "The Management of Savagery". And, as an exercise in sowing wild-eyed fear, it still works every time.
The World Health Organisation's latest available figures tell us that about 56 million people die worldwide each year.
Far and away the biggest killer is heart disease, responsible for 7.4 million deaths in 2012. That's mostly death by lifestyle indulgence, and mostly in the rich countries. Another among the top 10 killers is road accidents, the cause of another 1.3 million deaths worldwide.
By contrast, terrorist attacks last year killed about 43,500 people globally, according to the Global Terrorism Database. Or about 0.08 per cent of all deaths. That's fewer than half the number where "alcohol" was listed as the cause.
Is terrorism in the top 10? Of course not. If it were ranked in the list of biggest killers, it would come in at number 65. Just ahead of appendicitis.
You can halve the number of terrorism-related deaths if you exclude war zones, like Iraq and Syria. And you can cut it by a further quarter if you subtract the deaths of the terrorists themselves, blown up by their own bombs.
So we're left with some 15,000 deaths of innocent victims a year worldwide, outside war zones. On the rankings of cause of death, that would put it somewhere between multiple sclerosis and leprosy. It's that rare.
But the terrorists measure success not in mass deaths but in mass audiences. "Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead," a US expert on the subject, Brian Jenkins, remarked in 1998.
Are you going to going to go around in a state of fearfulness because of a fear that you might die of appendicitis? Are you going to vote according to which political party is best to deal with the threat of leprosy? Is the Western world going to declare war on traffic?
Absurd, of course. Yet consider Western responses to the fear of terrorism. A third of people in Britain say they're afraid of going to public events such as concerts or football matches.
In this year's Lowy poll "found that of eight potential risks to Australia's security, Australians rank terrorism-related threats first, second and third."
Rather than growing hardened to terrorism, we seem to be growing more panicked.
For instance, the terrorist attacks on London's tube trains and buses in 2005 killed 52 innocent people and injured over 700. Most tube and bus services resumed the next day.
After the recent Paris attacks, that killed 130 and injured 368, neighbouring Brussels shut down its subway system for four days, the longest closure since World War II, plus it closed its schools and museums and many retail outlets and other facilities too.
Why? Because of threats, the Brussels authorities said, that were specific enough to close down the city yet not specific enough to indict the plotters. This is the sweet spot for terrorists.
It's a tremendous achievement that a handful of murderous thugs can cow any major European city into a four-day shutdown based on mere chatter, but how much greater is it when that city is the de facto capital of the European Union and the headquarters of NATO?
More rewarding yet for Daesh is the election result in France on the weekend. The far-right National Front party of Marine Le Pen won the biggest share of the vote in regional elections.
National Front has been gaining for several years now. It's been fuelled by anti-immigrant sentiment and economic anxiety.
But it seems to have been turbo charged by the terrorist attacks and the apparent vindication of its anti-Islamic stance.
The grand prize for Daesh, of course, would be US misjudgment. A rising anti-Islam hysteria in the US threatens to fuel the division and fear that the terrorists seek to promote. And by panicking the US political system, the terrorists seem to moving the US towards a military misjudgment too.
For four years, US president Barack Obama, like all Western leaders, has been guilty of wishing away the civil war in Syria. Obama is gradually coming to the conclusion that the US needs to lead a solution, not run from it.
It was the chaos of Syria and Iraq that nurtured Daesh. Its so-called caliphate there is its greatest trophy. An intelligent, co-ordinated, international strategy to bring a political solution to the Syria-Iraq continuum of chaos is a prerequisite to defeating Daesh.
So far there is no strategy. And so far the US and other Western countries are reacting to Daesh terrorist atrocities by reflexively sending more planes and troops in the absence of a strategy. This will add to the chaos, not solve it.
We need to harden up. The West needs to be as calculating as the terrorists, and as purposeful. Unreasoning fear and political panic only serve our enemy.
Peter Hartcher is international editor.
