How to defeat terrorism

By Libby Spencer

Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek looks beyond Bush and has some very sage advice for Americans. It's a long article but this is the money graf:

We will never be able to prevent a small group of misfits from planning some terrible act of terror. No matter how far-seeing and competent our intelligence and law-enforcement officials, people will always be able to slip through the cracks in a large, open and diverse country. The real test of American leadership is not whether we can make 100 percent sure we prevent the attack, but rather how we respond to it. Stephen Flynn, a homeland-security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that our goal should be resilience—how quickly can we bounce back from a disruption? In the materials sciences, he points out, resilience is the ability of a material to recover its original shape after a deformation. If one day bombs do go off, we must ensure that they cause as little disruption—economic, social, political—as possible. This would deprive the terrorist of his main objective. If we are not terrorized, then in a crucial sense we have defeated terrorism.

That last sentence really nails it. Terrorists can't really take over our country. They're outnumbered and outgunned. Their only advantage is psychological. To win, they only have to scare us into defeating ourselves and so far they've succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Fear of terrorists has allowed the Bush administration to destroy our freedoms with barely a whisper of protest coming from the average American.

Bush has been allowed to dismantle our civil rights. Public dissent has been criminalized. He illegally spys on us. He can snatch any one of us off the street and hold us indefinitely without due process. He transformed the office of the presidency into a virtual dictatorship. He created a unitary executive that brooks no accountability and has shrouded his government in a cloak of secrecy so dark that not even the insiders can see what is happening right under their noses. And he has been allowed to get away with this, aided and abetted by a compliant press, in the name of an imaginary war against terror. Bush isn't fighting terror, he's creating it and then exploits the fear he relentlessly seeks to plant in the pubilc consciousness in order to further his own power.

By any objective metric the terrorists have already won their heart's desire. They don't have to invade us to take away our freedoms. We've already handed them over willingly and in doing so have lost the respect of the international community and with it our prestige as a world power.

Update: Kevin Hayden also posts on this piece and zeroes in on the same graf but brings up another relevant point:

The sole critique my cynical eye would add is he gives short shrift to the pernicious and corrosive influence of extreme capitalism on all our choices. War profits the powerful few. Profits buy elections. Materialism and consumerism waste our resources. And I fear money controls most of the possibilities with a chokehold.

What Zakaria portrays as a matter of wisdom and will looks to me like it can’t happen till we achieve clean elections publicly financed and temper the powers of the extremists of greed.

Kevin is right. The people won't be able to regain their influence on the decision-making process unless and until we wrest control of the electoral process from the big-money financiers of our politicians. It seems to me that the simplest way to do that is to start electing candidates who refuse to be bought. Now if only we could find some.

(Cross-posted at The Impolitic.)