democracyforcalifornia.com

Political Ecology

The London public transit bombings have received an enormous amount of publicity, as have other terrorist bombings in the developed world. I think it is a fair question to ask why the bombings (including 9/11) have resonated so deeply with people. Among the many possible reasons, three stand out. The first is because of the number of deaths. The second is because the terrorist attacks damage critical infrastructure. The third is that the response is driven by fear of the random violence.

Number of Deaths

Perhaps the reason that terrorism receives so much coverage is because of the large number of fatalities suffered in attacks. For example, Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people at Oklahoma City. The 19 highjackers killed roughly 3000 people in the 9/11 attacks. In the UK, the Irish Republican Army and its various factions have probably killed around a few thousand people.
ma city. The 19 highjackers killed roughly 3000 people in the 9/11 attacks. In the UK, the Irish Republican Army and its various factions have probably killed around a few thousand people

However contrast that with the fact that from 1979 to 2002 4,738 people died in from heat related reasons. That is, the victims’ bodies overheated and that killed them.

According to the CDC, during 2002 in the US, influenza killed 65,681 and heart disease killed 696,947. The numbers for influenza alone dwarf the number of people killed by terrorism in the US and Great Britain over the last few decades. So it would seem that people are not paying attention to terrorist attacks because of the vast numbers of fatalities. If so, we might expect to see a commensurately greater attention paid to heart disease, heat stroke and influenza.

In fairness, perhaps the real cause of the attention is that in a terrorist incident many people die at once. However, turning again to the CDC statistics, we see that in 2002 44,605 people were killed in auto accidents. That’s approximately 122 people a day, which is still higher than the number of fatalities in the recent London bombings. As of this writing, 37 people have died as a result of the London bombings.
That said, there is a potential threat of an enormous death toll from nuclear and biological weapons, although thankfully to date no one has perpetrated a mass attack using either of those modalities. In the Conclusion I will address responses to the threat of nuclear and biological weapons.

It seems unlikely that the sense of shock and the massive media coverage of terrorist incidents is caused by the current death toll. Furthermore, if the reason for the spending emphasis on terrorism is to save lives, then the government should spend commensurately more money on reducing deaths from heart disease and influenza. Unlike random terrorist attacks, medical science knows how to prevent deaths from heart disease. It’s a question of resource allocation, not intelligence gathering. The current death toll is not why the media and government are focusing on terrorism.

Critical Infrastructure Damage

John Robb has been instrumental in advancing the idea that terrorist attacks can cause damage by attacking key parts of the economic infrastructure. He discusses it as a matter of return on investment. For example, at the price of a few bombs and operatives, a group can blow up an oil pipeline. The “return” is that the attack can raise oil prices, which hurts industry and the lives of millions of people. Or, the terrorists can take down a securities exchange system (computers, trading floor, etc), throwing global finance into disarray. While a securities exchange may seem to have very little to do with the lives of average citizens, consider the fact that one of the big reasons that banks have been able to offer cheap mortgages to people with bad credit is because the banks package the mortgages and sell them on the open market. So in that sense, halting trading for a significant period of time could reach into the lives of millions of Americans.

In the case of London, the attacks ground the city to a halt. Great Britain already employs very stringent security precautions, a legacy of the long struggle against the IRA. Britain has also continued to reduce civil rights in terms of the warrant system as well as the strict anti-self-defense and anti-gun laws. What the recent attacks will probably do is force the British to spend even more money on counter-terrorism and security efforts in the capital. The net effect is to drain money away from other things, such as social programs or simply reducing taxes.

On the other hand, in media coverage I have not seen too much emphasis on the infrastructural component of the attacks. Mostly it has focused on pictures of the exploded bus, and bleeding pedestrians. This is consistent with coverage of other terrorist incidents. Admittedly, the Mercury News has run a couple of columns lately about the need to protect Bay Area residents from attacks against chemical plants. And on cable news I’ve seen a few segments recently about the importance of rail and transit security.

Still, consider that all over America transit infrastructure is decaying. Public transit systems suffer from inadequate funding, old stations, and dated trains. Recently I rode the SEPTA commuter train in Pennsylvania. The trains are still too dangerous to allow passengers to pass between cars. The pass-ways are open to the outside air, and it is very possible for a person to slip and fall into the tracks. In another example, the water systems of NYC and SF are both decrepit and reaching capacity. Yet, there seems to be no groundswell of coverage to fix the problems. If our real concern over terrorist attacks is that infra-structural attacks will cripple our economy, it would seem logical that other, just as serious threats would receive equal coverage. Yet, that is manifestly not the case. So, it seems that the danger to infrastructure is not the primary reason why terrorist attacks receive much media attention and government attention.

Fear of Random Violence

I believe that at the heart of the current debate on terrorism is a fear of random violence. Attacks seem to materialize out of nowhere, and they strike without warning in the midst of crowded areas, such as the World Trade Center or the London Subway. Much of modern life in the developed countries is channeled and directed by rules, both formal and informal. For example, in any major city you can see people who step off the curb as soon as the signal changes to “walk,” oblivious to whether the cars have actually stopped. The pedestrians trust that drivers will stop at the signal. Pedestrians replace the necessity for constant awareness with a trust in an institution, namely, that people stop at red lights. Even though there is nothing to stop a motorist from running the light and plowing into a pack of pedestrians in the cross walk, generally this does not happen, so people trust the rules to protect them. Terrorist attacks inspire fear because they interrupt the planned pace of life. They break the rules and kill people, forcing the survivors to realize their vulnerability to those who will not obey the law. It is the equivalent to the one car running the red light and slaughtering a crowd of people.

There is a historical analogy to the current situation. Before the invention of the reliable cartridge firearm, large carnivorous predators struck fear into the hearts of people everywhere. Anytime a person ventured out into the woods, they risked being killed or maimed by a predator like a grizzly bear. With better senses that humans, animals could strike without warning. Similar to terrorist attacks, the attacks would seem random and very hard to defend against. Once the tide shifted with the development of better firearms, people reacted in many places by simply killing off the large predators. In California that would be the California grizzly (extinct) and the mountain lion (almost extinct at one point). Even though, looking back, we can see that mountain lion or grizzly attacks were certainly not a major cause of death, people tried to exterminate them anyway. While killing off the grizzly bears made it easier to live in California, it also negatively impacted the ecosystem by taking down a predator at the top of the food chain. While fewer people are killed by grizzlies, we have lost an irreplaceable part of the California ecosystem. There will never be another California grizzly, aside from the one on the state flag. That’s a tragic loss of biodiversity at the minimum.

I believe that the randomness of the attacks increases the anxiety level beyond rational levels. Similar to the effort to extinguish the grizzly and the mountain lion, the efforts to eliminate civil liberties and focus spending on counter-terrorism are distorted beyond the actual dangers. Furthermore, the effects of ever diminishing civil rights and ever growing military budgets may be worse than the problem.

Anxiety over terrorism is real, and to the extent that it cripples our economy and governmental system it is a threat. Perhaps the best way we can fight it is to accept that the risk of dying in a terrorist attack is less than that of dying in an auto accident.

Conclusion

I think our greatest fight is to come to terms with random death. The British experience suggests that even creating a surveillance society and restricting civil liberties is not enough to trump terrorism. It really would take the creation of a totalitarian, North Korean style state to end the threat of random death from terrorism. We should strive , as John Robb has pointed out, to make our infrastructure resistant to random terrorist bombing attacks. This safeguards our economies, and the livelihoods of ordinary people.
Nuclear weapons however, present a bigger problem than the train bombings or even airliners because of the sheer number of potential deaths. A nuclear weapon could kill tens of thousands immediately, and many more thousands thereafter from radiation. However, one nuclear detonation in the continental US cannot end the United States. It would profoundly change the nature of the country, but it would not be the end of the world. That is not to diminish the severity of such an attack; rather, it is to realize that such an attack, though terrible is still survivable.

Neither can it destroy the potential for retaliation. For 50 years the doctrine of mutually assured destruction prevented the US and the USSR from going to war. The theory was that neither side would pull the trigger on nuclear weapons if it meant ending humanity. No attack on the continental US could eliminate the base of the nuclear triangle. Those are the guided missle submarines, that, even now, traverse the depths of the oceans, each carrying the equivalent of millions of tons of TNT. So while it is conceivable that a terrorist group could obtain one or two nuclear weapons, the fact is that they are not going to get enough to end the United States in one swoop. Furthermore, any state that provided the nuclear weapons would be instantly vaporized when the US discovered who they were. This means that deterrence is still a possibility. States have a disincentive to provide nuclear weapons or materials to terrorists if they know it will end in their destruction. Another thing that makes dealing with nuclear weapons easier is that the nuclear weapon production process is classic 20th Century heavy industry. Mining and enriching uranium is a big foot print process, which means that it leaves traces for intelligence agencies to detect. Deterance worked for 50 years of the Cold War, and it can still work today.

Probably more dangerous are biological weapons. This is because they require fewer resources to create, and have a smaller footprint. Experts are concerned about them because of the extremely high lethality, and the currently underfunded and underprepared state of public health in America. The answer to thi likely involves improving public health reporting, and improving medical organization and technology generally. The benefit is that money spent on public health will save not only potential lives in the event of a bio-weapon attack, but also do something to save the tens of thousands of people that die every year from something as simple as the flu.

The most important thing to strengthen is not public health or transit infrastruture, but our internal infrastructure. The British response to the train bombings has been impressive. British citizens have pressed on with anniversary celebrations for the Second World War despite the attacks, and despite the fact that the attackers are still at large. As citizens of democracies we need to start viewing the deaths of civilians in bombing attacks as the deaths of soldiers for democracy. We accept that soldiers die in battle to preserve our nation states, and, at least notionally, freedom. We should thus accept that people who die going about their business in a democratic society are also fighting for freedom. I realize that it is a lot to ask of ordinary people, to ask them to view themselves as fighting for democracy. Yet, by making a conscious choice to risk death by train bomb rather than give up on democratic and open ideals, people are fighting for democracy. Every day.

Once upon a time we over reacted to the threat of wild animals by driving many into extinction. Let’s make sure that our civil liberties do not suffer the same fate as the California grizzly.

Posted by Tim at July 22, 2005 10:39 AM