There are far more deaths and property damage from lightning strikes than from terrorism. But we never had a war on lightning, we just rebuilt and let it go. The amount of money, resources, and human lives we wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan is simply absurd.
In fact, by having nonstop media coverage of attacks, we are giving the terrorists exactly what they want. Even on the small scale, this is true. When I was in middle school, we had bomb threats against the school every month. Once the school decided to stop telling the local TV stations about threats, they stopped happening.
Only 3,000 people died on 9/11, this is nothing compared to the number of people who die from car crashes and cancer every year. Why didn’t we have a “war on DUI” or “war on cancer”?
We just passed the 10th anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people, and it seems like a lot of people have forgotten that day.
In addition to murder, terrorists also tend to engage in mass violations of human rights. This can include religious oppression, elimination of free speech, using rape as a weapon, denial of basic legal protections, torture, and many other things. Often these affect tens or hundreds of thousands of people, and in some cases many millions.
How many humans are suffering from lightning and tsunamis inflicting such damage upon them?
Those deaths don’t seem as “interesting” to the media. Unfortunate but true.
Benjamin Franklin’s ghost disapproves.
The ideal mechanism to combat terrorism would be a relatively off-line government panel that approves assassinations, and these should be carried out against terrorist targets with as little hoopla or explanation as possible.
It is true that conventional war to combat terrorism is stupid, ineffective, and counterproductive.
You cannot quantify the effect of terrorism by comparing the number of deaths. Terrorism can incapacitate an entire society and its values. Note the loss of due process in sentence one, for example.
Some handy search terms for this phenomenon and how to adress it can be found by googling “under responding” and “over responding” like here.
Also, the newFreakonomics book has a nice chapter on the best way to deal with terrorism.
Who is “we”? Keeping the population scared is worth fortunes for corportions and lobbyists.
It’s also the longest-serving narrative in news. It’s like Diana - with a suicide vest.
Huge money in keeping the narrative going.
In stead of calling them terrorists they should call them crazy cowards, if they were not cowards they would not hide their faces. They like to kill innocent children or women.Getting on a bus or plane to kill a lot of people who are probably not against them,and just shows they don’t like to live themselves because life is hard.
I have to take exception with Monavis’ post. Killing civilians is a common form of warfare practised by most if not every nation state that is in the business of war. It is one of the biggest fallacies of modern life that terrorism is cowardly but dropping bombs from aeroplanes is noble & dignified. Every battle in history has had elements of ‘cheating’. It that wasn’t the case then war would consist of duels with strict rules like a sport.
Wearing a uniform does not necessarily make a soldier less cowardly. I wish the word terrorism is consigned to the scrapbook as it is worthless. Democratically elected governments are just as capable of these kind of outrages against civilians as illegal paramilitaries.
Wondering when we will win the war on terrorism is like wondering when we’re going to win the war on crime. You don’t “win” it, you just try to contain it the best you can. You can probably measure your success in some way like the way we measure crime levels but thinking you’re going to stomp it out for good is just a pipe dream.
By this lesser number logic you could argue against punishing for bank robbery as not many are happening.
Nobody’s arguing against punishing for bank robbery, just against throwing resources and concern at it in disproportion to its impact.
Or at least that we shouldn’t start two wars and turn our society inside out to prevent it.
Yeah, I think that’s pretty much it. The OP is on the right track, but mostly for the wrong reasons. It’s important to keep even the most heinous acts of terrorism in perspective, and make sure our response is appropriate. I’m exaggerating a bit here, but it seems that the US has this attitude that whatever we do to fight terrorism, and where ever it is we do it, it’s OK because, well, we’re FIGHTING TERRORISM!!
We tend to treat it as mainly a problem for the military to solve, and that just ends up with us looking like some Evil Empire raining bombs down on innocents. No other country in the world acts that way, except maybe Israel, but they really are, arguably, in an existential struggle against their enemies; we are not.
Did a bank robbery ever start a war that lasted 10+ years?
Being struck by lightning is categorically different from being attacked by terrorists because a person can take defenses against something like lightning; they can move out to the desert where it never rains, or install or a lightning rod, and so on. People can similarly take reasonable defenses against cancer or car accidents–by living a healthy lifestyle, or driving a safe car. The key here is that individual people can control their exposure to most forms of risk, and we therefore don’t necessarily need government to reduce these risks for us. But there isn’t any meaningful way a person can reduce their risk of death from terrorism, short of dropping out of society entirely. Because we can’t do this individually, we need to reduce the threat of terrorism collectively, which we have done through the war on terror. A person dying because they chose to clog their arteries with McDonalds or chose to play golf in a thunderstorm or chose to drive an unsafe car is not comparable to someone dying of terrorism, because victims of terrorists didn’t get to make that choice.
On the other hand, its better to fight them on their territory and keep the casualties over there. Tell the families of the 9/11 victims that their losses were an acceptable cost because we dont want to overreact to an external threat.
Maybe.
But isn’t this something that needs numbers attached before we just accept it on your word?
In 2013, there were maybe 18,000 terrorism deaths:
How does that compare with lightning? Well, I have no idea, because I can’t find worldwide statistics. Same with property damage, except that I’m not quite sure what that covers.
Of course, all these causes of death – terrorism, lightning, property damage – are mostly a developing world problem.
There’ are several reasons that terrorism is much lower in the US than Pakistan, even though many terrorists would love to have successful attacks in the US. I think one of them is better law enforcement. And that is expensive.
Now, if you ask me whether fighting in Afghanistan has protected the US, I fear the answer is mostly no. But as a general principle, preventing terrorism AKA militant attacks is legitimately a big deal in many countries, and not just high-terrorism places like Nigeria and Pakistan.
What about automobile accidents? Should we spend more on preventing them than on preventing terrorism? Really, this is so politically impossible that I’m not sure it is worth shooting down. Treating sporadic causes of death the same way as predictable and familiar ones is a non-starter that goes against human nature.
But then there are exponentially more lightening strikes than acts of terror.
I’d like to point out that the “War on Terrorism” has allowed the destruction of the Bill of Rights, allowed the government to wiretap anyone anytime w/o court order, furthered the militarization of police departments and been a windfall for defense contracters. We are not supposed to think about this, being loyal 'Murcans, but we LOST. Shortly after 9/11. Our lives are much less free, our privacy less private. We get to experience “security theatre” everytime we fly. The land of the free…indeed.