The terrorist’s fumbled Christmas attempt to blow up the Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines plane certainly has been a homeland security wake-up call. But to what is this call awakening us? To be sure, we’ve been startled into recognizing that we must deploy more – or different – measures to protect ourselves from terrorist attacks. But we also should be awakened to the effectiveness of security measures since September 2001. Most important, we should be waking-up to the reality that there’s nothing we can do to shield ourselves 100 percent and that by trying to do so, we unacceptably may erode our freedoms and liberty.
Perhaps we expect our President to demand, as Barack Obama did Wednesday, that we must erect a security system that will “save innocent lives — not just most of the time, but all the time.” Yet the tough reality is that any attempt to create an impervious shield either will fail or will impose what should be unacceptable burdens on our lives, freedoms and living standards. In the eternal tensions and trade-offs between security and liberty, America’s tilt always should be to liberty.
Clumsy & awkward bombs.
First, a nod to what we’ve been doing that works. The Nigerian terrorist’s clumsy attempt to detonate himself as a bomb testifies to actually how effective we’ve been. Surely, scores of plots have been hatched by this or that al Qaeda cell and other terrorist bands since 9/11. We’ve stopped every one of them. We’ve erected so many barriers and checkpoints that they can’t sneak powerful and easy to explode weapons onboard planes, reducing them to deploying lone jihadists with clumsy, hard to assemble and awkward to detonate devices stuffed in underwear. When the Nigerian aboard Northwest Flight 253 fumbled, courageous passengers attacked and subdued him, preventing disaster. Yet passengers would have no chance to react courageously were terrorists able to sneak powerful grenades, pipe-bombs and other easily-exploded weapons onto planes. Thus, in answer to the question now widely and loudly asked, “What have we got for our billions spent to stop terrorists?” we confidently can answer, “Quite a bit. Quite a bit.”
That’s not to say, of course, that we can’t do more. There are holes to be plugged, new techniques to be tried. Every intercepted terrorist threat teaches us something and these lessons must be applied. Tuesday’s hastily assembled White House meeting of anti-terrorist officials undoubtedly will yield a long list of changes. Undoubtedly too there will be calls for more effective data sharing by our intelligence agencies – though they already are cooperating at a level once unimaginable. And, as intelligence veterans all know and as Obama acknowledged Wednesday when he said that the failure to detect the Christmas terrorist was the failure “to connect the dots,” the problem seldom is insufficient data. The problem is so much data that they overwhelm the threat-evaluation process (just ask the Israelis, who failed to appreciate the Arab forces’ build-up on their border just before Israel was invaded in the 1973 Yom Kippur War).
No strangers to trade-offs.
There are other limits to what we can do. Some urge that we emulate the impressive Israeli approach to air travel security. But Israel is a tiny speck of a place. We are just huge. Massive. We’re the planet’s third most populous country, with a 7,458-mile land border plus 12,479 miles of coastline. In last year’s first nine months (the latest figures from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics), 533,000,000 passengers flew on 7,242,000 flights operated by U.S. airlines; of these, the 612,000 international flights, from whence come the greater security danger, carried 65,900,000 passengers into or out of America. And that’s just on our own airlines, not counting flights and passengers on planes operated by other countries. Daily, America’s air traffic controllers handle 28,000 commercial flights, with 5,000 planes filling America’s skies at any moment.
Yikes. Such staggering numbers mean that even if we perpetually are at the highest alert, some threats can slip through – and we can become victims of a terrorist attack. This reality should force us to be prudent and reasonable in forging our response to the Christmas terrorist. We must look hard at what proposed new measures will cost us in dollars, in invasiveness of our lives, in inefficiencies, in erosion of freedoms. We must recognize the tradeoffs we will be asked to make. As it is, we’re no strangers to such trade-offs. All the time we willingly trade lives for freedoms. After all, we could prevent our 37,000 annual traffic deaths by imposing a 5 mph speed limit on all of our roadways. Yet we don’t. We all realize the huge cost this would inflict on our freedom of mobility, our living standards and our commerce. To be sure, losing lives to a terrorist is not exactly the same as losing lives in a traffic accident. What is the same, however, is the notion of tradeoffs. [Click for my earlier post on Highway Fatalities and Terrorists.]
In the near-term, Tuesday’s White House meeting and Wednesday’s Obama statements suggest that we’re likely to ignore tradeoffs and instead react sweepingly to the attempted Christmas attack. That’s unfortunate, but probably unavoidable. Obama politically needs to be perceived as being very tough, smarting, as he is, from GOP accusations that he has not taken terrorists threats seriously. This echoes charges throughout 2008’s presidential campaign, when it was not only Republican John McCain, but Democrats Joe Biden (now, of course, vice president) and Hillary Clinton (now, again of course, secretary of state) who repeatedly attacked him for lacking national security experience, warning that he could not stand up to America’s enemies. The GOP already is sniffing its likely gains from making Democrats, once again, as they were for decades after the late 1960s, vulnerable on national security.
Paying the price.
Politics, thus, understandably will drive the immediate response to the Christmas terrorist. Beyond that, we should slow down enough to recognize that it is not a matter of being tough or weak. It’s a matter of waking up to the tradeoffs – to the price that too tight a security regime can exact from our freedoms. We often intone our willingness to pay the “price for liberty.” Accepting an imperfect security shield is part of that price.
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Such a reasoned approach. I guess you don’t agree with people who call the screening process “theatre”. . . But I must say there doesn’t seem to be any gratitude out there for how much does NOT happen to us – and that surely cannot be by chance. it’s like the CIA – you hear of the failures and not the successes.