Are We Safer Since 9/11/01?

Are We Safer?

            Every September someone on the TV news asks someone else if we are safer today than we were before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Republicans say yes. The absence of terrorist attacks here since 9/11 is their proof. Democrats say no. The absence of attacks proves nothing.          

I say it’s the wrong question. The 9/11 attacks killed about 3,000 people, a terrible event and one that required a strong and intelligent response, but at that time we were a nation of more than 280 million. Do the arithmetic. Your chances of dying in a terrorist attack on that day were infinitesimal. On the other hand you have a one in 75,000 chance of dying in a bicycle crash, a one in 68,000 chance of choking to death, a one in 20,000 chance of drowning, and a one in 5,300 chance of dying in an automobile accident. Is anyone frightened enough to give up cycling, eating, swimming, or driving a car? The truth is that one thing keeps us safe: mathematical probability.

            I once heard terrorism described as theater: a terrible spectacle but of not much consequence to most people. Terrorists know that people are more likely to be influenced by a terrible dramatic act than by the dry recitation of mathematical probabilities. That’s why they do what the do; more importantly, we should always remember that they do what they do because they are weak. Acts of terror are all that they have.

            But terrorism works in perverse ways. For us that one terrible act on 9/11/01 led to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and 4,500 more American deaths, increased federal spending, the needless creation of a new cabinet department, needless delays in air travel, and the Patriot Act, which gives government agents new power to limit individual freedom – as if they didn’t have enough now.

            All of which works to the benefit of those who love the bloated warfare/welfare state: national security experts of all kinds and from all areas, D.C. think tank employees, defense contractors, K Street lobbyists, government employees, and big media organizations and their reporters whose favorite pig wallow is war and disaster.

How all this government activity affects potential terrorists is anyone’s guess. I suspect it has no effect at all.

            Are we safer? As I said, it’s the wrong question.