The seemingly scripted national response to the Boston Marathon bombing continues. Over the past few days that response has included expressions of patriotism and community spirit that have included ovations for law enforcement officers and special observances at baseball games. This is the lemonade-out-of-a-lemon positive side of responding to a lethal event. It is a reaching back to the larger but otherwise similar communal expressions after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, with Americans now attempting to revive and relive the positive side of what they remember from the aftermath of that earlier tragedy.
Defiance is one of the themes of the collective expressions. It was a theme of a rousing speech in which President Obama talked about how the Boston Marathon would be held next year with people running harder than ever and cheering louder than ever. The message is that Americans will not let terrorists disrupt their lives.
But Americans have been letting terrorists, including the latest two, disrupt their lives a lot. Just think about the week-long saturation news coverage of this one story, and of all the work that wasn't getting done and other matters not being tended to across the country as people followed the story. Then late last week was the extraordinary happening of a major American city and several of its suburbs being locked down for a day. This greatly lengthened the tally sheet of the costs and consequences of one terrorist act and, more to the point, the response to it. Possibly the lockdown offset some of the physical toll of the bombing in the form of fatal traffic accidents that did not occur and other violent crime that was not committed because the streets were empty. But the economic cost of shutting down a city-full of businesses, though impossible to calculate with exactitude, was certainly very large.
All of this was done ostensibly for the purpose of tracking down a single, bleeding, 19-year-old fugitive suspect. It was a prudent assumption that this person would have had little compunction about killing again if he could have and thought he needed to kill to stay at large. But there also was little or no reason to believe that at the time he was being chased he posed more of a threat to public safety than the average garden-variety armed robber whom the Boston police probably deal with every week.
One can understand and even sympathize with public officials who order something like the lockdown. Given the enormous public attention to the case, if the suspect had evaded the dragnet there would have been a chorus of recriminations about how this was Tora Bora all over again. But note that we are talking here not about terrorism, or even about fear of terrorism, but instead about the politics of the fear of terrorism.
All of this brings to mind the observations of John Mueller, who has written most extensively about how American reactions or overreactions to terrorism have entailed costs that greatly exceed the costs of terrorism itself. Mueller has made many comparisons between terrorism and other sources of death and destruction to make his point about terrorism being an especially overblown threat. It was if the fates wanted to punctuate that point that they also gave us last week an explosion at a Texas fertilizer plant that killed significantly more people than the marathon bombers but received much less attention in the news media.
Americans have inflicted on themselves, especially over the past eleven and a half years, costs from their responses to terrorism that go far beyond all that lost business in Boston. One of the biggest indirect costs came from Americans becoming so fearful and angry that they allowed themselves to be bamboozled into supporting a war against a country that had nothing to do with what had made them fearful and angry. There also have been severe, disgraceful departures from what otherwise would have been thought of as important legal and moral principles associated with the United States, involving especially the treatment and rights of detained persons.
It is as if once anyone utters the T-word, many American minds go haywire and suddenly forget legality, morality and longstanding American values and jurisprudence. And so we have Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte and Representative Peter King arguing that the suspect now recovering in a Massachusetts hospital should be handled as an “enemy combatant” rather than face justice in a criminal court. Why? Because of his Chechen ancestry? He is a U.S. citizen accused of committing a crime in the United States. Based on what we know at the moment, there is no more reason to treat the Boston Marathon bomber as an “enemy combatant” than to treat the Boston Strangler that way.
Comments
I think there's also somewhat of a flip side to Pillar's concern here and that is the taking of terrorism too lightly. Where, after all, was the thinking in supporting Israel so unreservedly from 1967 onward—despite seeing what terrorism did to Israel—that gee, does the U.S. really want to sign up to being a major terrorist target by doing so? That thinking just didn't seem to exist, with the result being that we ever more *look* like Israel now with machine-gun-armed forces ever more openly watching us, not to mention listening to us and looking at our papers and etc. Nor even now do we see much sober thinking about how deforming terrorism can be to a society, turning it into a police state, all because of the relative ease and cheapness of terrorism and how long it can go on due to the difficulty in stamping it out. Instead we seem to think we can run any kind of foreign policy we want and then, childishly, get mad that those who we are not favoring don't openly declare formal, traditional war upon us and only attack our military forces. (And this despite our own record even *in* formal, traditional warfare of openly attacking purely civilian targets such as the fire-bombings we carried out in Germany and Japan in WWII.) Pillar of course still has a point about not committing suicide merely because of a few terrorist incidents, but regardless of the sensibility of not getting over-excited about them the fact is societies *do* to a big degree anyway, even to the point of seeing a relatively radical change in their civil societies, and regardless of justice that's the apparent reality.
I could certainly criticize the shelter-in-place which was extended to at least 6 towns within the Route 128 beltway around Boston. For one thing we knew that the police had K-9 units available to them at the Marathon. They certainly ask for them whenever there is a child missing in the woods and they use them at Logan Airport on a regular basis. Instead, the choice was made to forego them in this manhunt. I am truly perplexed why it would make any economic sense to shut down so much activity to get a man who had abandoned his vehicle and was out on foot. Why not at least try the dogs?Many false sightings are still believed by the public: the alleged 7-11 hold-up never happened nor is the person on the video identifiable as either of the alleged bombers. The person who killed the MIT cop may still be at large, because he seems to have fit the description of a black man to some eyewitness.Suffice it to say that the game was afoot after these possibly non-related events, but everyone seems to accept them as gospel even as the CEO of 7-11 gets up and denies the connection (though I am sure the MIT police will not do the same, even though they have had nearby murders - including a drive-by - in East Cambridge and a serious incident in Kendall Square - all unsolved).To anyone from outside Boston, you have to realize that this is a tiny place - it's as though all the crimes happened in Disneyworld, just about. It's all walking distance - a mile here, a couple miles there - the scale is just tiny.Therefore the overwhelming force seems disproportionate - very unlike LA's Dorner event in which there were expanses of freeway and things going on miles around. The biggest danger to a cop might have been friendly fire in the recent event. However it is also true that every service involved in the hunt could point to it with pride, add it as a campaign ribbon on their battle flag. It's a Boston Strong job creation machine, I guess.Not too long ago, there was a dirty little crime in the town next to mine, Needham. A mentally ill contract worker got angry with an elderly homeowner, cornered him in the basement, and dashed out his brains with a baseball bat, one of the more primitive crimes you can imagine. No firearm was used. It was totally on impulse and rage. And the creep fled on foot, leaving his weapon on the lawn of the house and a witness, the homeowner's daughter.But the response was massive and not local. It involved SWAT teams rousting people out of cafes, schools in lockdown, a man outside a vehicle with North Carolina plates and dark windows, reporting about it in nearby Newton (which is how I first heard the story) with a voice of glee and excitement. Needham is a town about two hundred years old and it has its own police force, which was not thought up to the job on this. The mentally ill murderer was found cowering on a railroad embankment, wearing a shirt covered in his victim's blood. It turned out he was a bipolar former drug addict who had not taken his meds. But the town defined him as a terrorist.I don't know how you think of this. At one time we used DDT on everything, until it was pointed out that it was killing our birds. These militarized responses are today's DDT. They kill more than I think sensible people want them to kill. They are teaching a lesson to the young which is that you apply force as your first response, overwhelming force as you would in warfare.