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Defending the nation against terrorism could and should be, but isn’t a responsibility shared by government with the public. While government has the tools and authorities to pursue terrorists, only the citizen can erect barriers against terrorism. Whether this nation prevails in this battle of wills depends heavily upon how individual citizens respond to threats and acts of terrorism.
The first principal given in the September 2006 version of The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism calls for “a shared acknowledgment of the certainty of future catastrophes” and asks that “all elements of our Nation create and share responsibilities in a Culture of Preparedness.” Regrettably the role of the citizen—our very center of gravity in this struggle—receives scant mention in the nations strategy. Instead, as Stephen E. Flynn notes in his Foreign Affairs essay “America the Resilient”, the “American public has been relegated to the sidelines.”
If motivated and properly led by the next administration, citizens could bring to this struggle a resource that they alone possess: a resilient human spirit. As George Washington said, “Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.” While America confronts opponents who can’t be defeated in the sense that classic wars were brought to an end, the goals that terrorists seek can be denied them if our leaders and citizens can work together.
Franklin Roosevelt's depression-era admonishment about the “fear of fear itself” resonates today in this battle against opponents who employ fear as their weapon of choice. Irrespective of their varied objectives, or tactics, all terrorists employ fear to foment uncertainty to weaken the confidence and trust of citizens in their institutions, their governments, and themselves.
In his book Beyond Fear, Bruce Schneier emphasizes “The point of terrorism is to cause terror, whether to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred…and the people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage.” Terrorists look beyond the metrics of mayhem, blood and body count to evaluate the effectiveness of their brutal attacks. “The real point of terrorism,” Schneier adds, “is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.” Unfortunately, he avers, we are responding “exactly as the terrorists want.”
In Trapped in the War on Terror, Ian Lustick opines that mastering fear will enable government to fashion genuine if incomplete strategies to achieve genuine psychological and military security. “Government needs to talk coolly and calmly to the American people” says Georgetown University’s Daniel Byman, adding that “Public opinion is the fulcrum of counterterrorism. Terrorists rely on overreaction from a rattled public and government to do their dirty work. We shouldn’t indulge them.”
Commenting on the movie United 93, columnist George F. Will wrote “We are all potential soldiers. And we all may be, at any moment, at the war’s front because in this war the front can be anywhere.” How a citizen-warriors accepts, defines, and then apply their resilient spirit can help reshape governments homeland security policies and perhaps determine how long this struggle lasts and who wins.
But, our government has failed to recognize the critical role that the public must play and has not rallied citizen-soldiers to become partners in the struggle. Instead, as decried by Zbigniew Brzezinski, [the Bush Administration] has “created a culture of fear in America…that actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.” Lustick adds that the government’s “War on Terror…is not the solution to the problem. It has become the problem.”
How might citizens respond to this summons by government to help create a Culture of Preparedness? That answer will be conditioned by what citizens perceive is expected of them; and they have been receiving the wrong signals from their commander-in-chief. As Flynn writes, “For years, the fear of terrorism has been stoked and the federal government’s ability to defeat radical jihadists has been exaggerated. This has created a passive citizenry that oscillates between fretfulness and cynicism.”
Homeland security policies and practices appear to dismiss citizens as fear-driven, hapless collaterals: lemmings to be panicked by acts of terror and sent scattering into the streets, creating a globally publicized mêlée that cannot but whet the appetite of terrorists. That should and need not be. Instead of cowering in uncertainty and confusion, the resolute citizen-warriors could be alert, informed combatants who apprehend that their behavior under fire can shape the type, tempo and duration of this struggle.
Our citizens could respond with the stoic behavior of the stiff-upper-lip Londoners who differentiated between general threat and individual risk and “got back on the bus” after attacks on their public transport. The Economist commented, “Even if only a tiny proportion of Londoners ever fall victim to terrorism, they are all touched by it. Whether or not they are terrorized by it is a choice only they can make.”
When queried during a news conference about the role of the public in disaster planning, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff called for an engaged public that would build a "resilience factor" in dealing with terrorism.
Here are three attributes of such a “resilience factor”. Foremost is the ability of the citizen to manage fear by distinguishing between the threat of attack and the risk to an individual. Schneier defines threat as the potential of attack and risk as the likelihood of a successful attack on any given individual. He asserts that "terrorism is rare…the threat is serious…the risks are lower than people think…and our responses are out of proportion to the risk.”
Citizens regularly and routinely make choices about risks to life and limb. But, these decisions become flawed if they exaggerate spectacular but rare risks while downplaying common ones. Americans accept tens of thousands of deaths on highways; build on flood plains; shrug off health risks from drugs and burning soft-coal; and suffer thousands of deaths each year from guns. John Mueller attaches numbers to this argument in Foreign Affairs, writing “Even if there were a 9/11-scale attack every three months for the next five years, the likelihood that an individual American would number among the dead would be two hundredths of a percent (or one in 5,000.)”
The parent of a victim in the 1999 Columbine High School killings wrote to students shocked by the slaughter at Virginia Tech, that while “these experiences will be painful…as much as possible they should be viewed as challenges rather than burdens.” When pressed by columnist David Broder to suggest changes that would reduce the risks of campus violence, students at the University of Memphis replied that they would “simply have to adjust their own lives to deal with this risk, along with all the other uncertainties of the external world.”
Next, as Homeland Secretary Chertoff reminds “…this war requires our patience and resolve.” One might add persistence and subdued expectations to Chertoff’s definition. However, none of these nouns spring quickly to mind in characterizing the American psyche. In a speech given during the Cold War, former defense official Norman Augustine used the title from a popular movie to characterize public attitude about conflict. He referred to the "America High Noon Complex": a reluctance of the public to mobilize, yet when aroused are expectant of quick and decisive victory, followed by a rapid return to peacetime stability. Public attitudes about the war in Iraq suggest an unchanged psyche.
Patience and resolve are further challenged by the prospect that there may be no end to this struggle with terrorists. Every War Must End is the title of former Undersecretary of Defense Fred Ikle's book, but he writes of wars with nation-states, recognizable leaders, tangible and vulnerable centers of gravity and negotiable policy objectives. None of this applies to a struggle with terrorism which Professor Eliot Cohen describes as "an unusually invertebrate insurgency, without a central organization or ideology, a coherent set of objectives or a common positive purpose.”
The third attribute of a resilience factor asks the public to acknowledge that terrorists plan their activities anonymously and with virtual impunity in cyberspace, and that intelligence and law enforcement agencies must have legal authority to aggressively troll the Internet seeking the digital fingerprints that can foretell malicious activity. Unfortunately, there are as yet no agreed rules for waging war in cyberspace, generating fears of abuse to civil liberties and personal privacy. Indeed, the defense department’s intelligence chief, James R. Clapper Jr., acknowledges that “the history of the intelligence community is replete with instances of abuse of civil liberties—well intended, but abuse nonetheless.” Accordingly, the senior partner in this new Culture of Preparedness absolutely must provide the judicial oversight to mitigate such abuses.
Finally, the resilient citizen-warrior brings only a defensive mechanism to this struggle and historians will caution that defense alone never won any war. Nonetheless, that adage may not apply to a struggle whose outcome will be determined by a combination of persistent government pursuit of terrorists, supported by citizen-soldiers who recognize that government can reduce but not eliminate the threat.
A resilient society can send messages to the next administration and to our adversaries, be they Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, other zealots or simply leaderless wannabes. First, our center of gravity may be shaken-up but it cannot be taken down by fear. Accordingly, our elected representatives can cease expressing fear on our behalf and our government can re-think the security measures evoked in response to 9/11. These steps might induce our adversaries to assess whether mayhem and murder are the right means to the ends they seek. A resilient public may be unable to win this war, but it could prevent us from losing one.
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