{"id":10598,"date":"2011-07-27T09:19:38","date_gmt":"2011-07-27T17:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=10598"},"modified":"2011-07-27T11:26:11","modified_gmt":"2011-07-27T19:26:11","slug":"inflating-the-terrorist-threat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2011\/07\/27\/inflating-the-terrorist-threat\/","title":{"rendered":"Inflating the Terrorist Threat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jason Ditz reported today<\/a> on the contradictory claims simultaneously coming from the government about al Qaeda’s strength or weakness now and going forward. Chris Preble has a related post up at Cato<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A front-page story in today\u2019s\u00a0Washington Post<\/em> reports that\u00a0al Qaeda is a shadow of its former self<\/a>, and finds that there is even talk among senior defense and intelligence officials of the organization\u2019s imminent demise.<\/p>\n

[…]\u00a0It is unfortunate that this story\u00a0is filed in the \u201cnews\u201d category. Al Qaeda has been on the ropes for some time. It is, at best, \u201ca fragmented and unmanageable movement.<\/a>\u201c\u00a0But if senior officials are willing to speak so publicly about our recent gains, it may signal something significant.<\/p>\n

As many have noted, one of AQ\u2019s goals (and the goal of many other terrorist organizations) is to induce a counterproductive and self-injurious overreaction on the part of its target audience or government. The best approach, though it is difficult to achieve in practice, is to\u00a0avoid terrorizing ourselves<\/a>. If, many years from now, historians conclude that AQ was never as\u00a0threatening as we made it out to be, they may deem the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on homeland security post-9\/11, and the trillions more spent on wars that were once believed connected to the so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT), to have been an enormous waste of resources. We will be seen as having played into\u00a0Osama bin Laden\u2019s \u201cbleed and bankruptcy\u201d strategy<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As for the contradiction in analysis vis-\u00e0-vis al Qaeda’s strength or weakness Preble speculates:<\/p>\n

If Secretary of Defense Panetta is feeling confident, the folks in Foggy Bottom\u00a0appear not to have received the memo.\u00a0This\u00a0policy disconnect\u2013with some officials believing we are safer while others warn of impending danger\u2013may be\u00a0caused by\u00a0bureaucratic inertia, the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, or merely an elaborate scheme to deflect blame in the unlikely event that an attack occurs at some later date.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He is perhaps partially right. Bureaucratic inertia and the covering-your-ass game of politics may certainly be a part of why the State Department and various political figures inflate the threat level al Qaeda poses, despite intelligence officials’ estimation to the contrary. But I think there are more fundamental reasons. First of all, this terrorist threat remains a principal pretext for imperial foreign policy. Without it, difficulties arise in attempting to justify fantastical and unnecessary new military targets<\/a> or invasive surveillance policies<\/a> or even just the prolongation of our occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan.\u00a0Secondly, there is a constituency for threat inflation throughout the electorate. Influential and active political lobbies<\/a> regard a focus on Islamic terrorism to be a prerequisite of any politician’s favorability. The rest of the public simply falls for a politics based on fear and paternalistic military hawkishness.<\/p>\n

If the intelligence community is correct about the relatively weakened state of al Qaeda and affiliated groups, as I suspect they are, this truly a miracle and speaks primarily to what a weak organization they were from the beginning. Virtually every step of the way, Washington has chosen and pursued exactly the policies which would exacerbate anti-American sentiment and influence potential extremists to engage in retaliatory attacks. If the threat is now weak, imagine how nonexistent it would be if America stopped supporting the systematic oppression of Palestinians, pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan, closed Guantanamo and other torture prisons, stopped giving money, weapons, and diplomatic cover to the worst dictatorships of the Middle East, ended the drone program in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, ended harsh sanctions and aggressive threats towards Iran, stopped bombing Libya unnecessarily and illegally, and dismantled our elaborate military empire. That is the real policy of “disrupt, dismantle, and destroy.<\/a>“<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Ditz reported today on the contradictory claims simultaneously coming from the government about al Qaeda’s strength or weakness now and going forward. Chris Preble has a related post up at Cato: A front-page story in today\u2019s\u00a0Washington Post reports that\u00a0al Qaeda is a shadow of its former self, and finds that there is even talk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-10598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10598"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10618,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10598\/revisions\/10618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10598"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=10598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}