Our own worst enemy
by George Jonas
National Post
January 9, 2010
Western-style democracies can survive terrorists. Whether we can survive our own security bureaucracies is a different question. We're stuck in the groove of an obsolete mindset that isn't helping us in the age of asymmetric warfare. Many security measures, far from defeating terrorism, are doing the terrorists' job for them.
A security fallout has been playing havoc with air travel ever since Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound jetliner on Christmas day. A trip aboard a commercial flight, already a trial, has turned into an ordeal. Without damaging anything except some seat cushions aboard Northwest Flight 253, the young Nigerian's mission has been a resounding success for terrorism.
Last week, when a passenger used the exit instead of the entrance to access a secure area at Newark Airport, his mistake (or misdeed) halted operations for hours. The "security incident" caused sufficient delays around North America to make the national news. A day or two later, an unruly passenger (i.e., a drunk) aboard a Hawaiian Airlines flight made jet fighters scramble from a base in Portland, Oregon. Needless to say, 99 cents of every dollar's worth of disruption came not from the hapless Abdulmutallab's attempt to light the explosives in his underwear, but from panicky officials laying down barrages of bureaucratic bumf to bar the barn door after the horse had escaped.
It doesn't help when security apparatchiks are political appointees, such as Janet Napolitano, who drew fire even from the normally suppliant liberal press by her initial insistence that "the system worked" after the Christmas Day fiasco. Mistaking a system screwing up big time for a system working shows Napolitano hasn't a clue what "the system" is supposed to do.
In her defence, she isn't alone. Since terrorists win by blowing up airplanes, many people think that whenever they fail to blow one up, they lose. But this isn't so. Terrorists don't have to blow up anything to win. They win by reducing travellers to Alcatraz inmates. They win by turning a free country into a police state.
Terrorist acts are unspeakably evil but -- compared to other belligerent acts -- they rarely do much damage. Even the worst terrorist attack, such as 9/11, is no Pearl Harbor. A terrorist act doesn't injure the economic or fighting capacity of a country the way other acts of war, military engagements, invasions, battles, or even extensive bombing raids can. Terrorism is disgusting, heartbreaking and deplorable; it targets innocent people; it's inexcusable -- but as an act of war, it's small potatoes.
Our best shield in the war against terror would be a refusal to give more weight to terrorist acts than they actually have. Tying up the economy in red tape under the guise of security makes terror a festering wound. Underwear-toting suicide bombers can do us only a limited amount of harm unless we multiply it for them. If we cause interminable delays while we body-scan grandmothers from Idaho and insist on wheelchair-bound retirees removing their shoes on route to Florida, we double the damage. If we disrupt commerce and discourage civil aviation, we quadruple it.
In asymmetric warfare, the trick is to let the enemy do himself the injury you have no capacity to inflict on him -- and we're falling for this trick.
The suicide bomber is asymmetric warfare's guided missile. When Islamists changed themselves from reusable into disposable terrorists, they made high-tech biometric defences obsolete before we could deploy them. You don't meet a human bomb twice. Full-body scanners, unless used selectively, are good only for producing endless lineups. Letting ourselves be body-scanned without profiling passengers for ethnicity, religion, and behaviour is a waste. Technology is dandy, but no substitute for common sense.
If the same authorities that confiscate toiletry from matrons in Miami had bothered to profile Abdulmutallab, his scorched private parts would be in better shape today. The "system" Napolitano thought worked just tickety-boo had cheerfully waved aboard an Airbus a 23-year-old Muslim male from Nigeria travelling without luggage, who had purchased a one-way ticket with cash at the airport, was already on a terrorist watch-list, and had been denounced by his own father for being a radical. What could a $100,000 full body scanner tell officials about a man who all but had "suicide bomber" pasted on his forehead? Technology can't cure stupidity.
Medieval minds roasting puny penises in preparation for paradisiacal virgins are turning our airports into replicas of Devil's Island. Gutless officials say our defence is taking off our shoes. I say, keep them on. Fighting terrorists wisely means paying them whatever attention is commensurate with the danger they represent, no more. Islamists with their exploding jockey shorts can bring down a planeload of vacationers. Maybe even an office tower. That's all they can do. They cannot endanger us as nations or societies. Let terrorists perish of irrelevance.