The Song Remains the Same

Responses to "Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?"

Round 2 (posted September 11, 2006)

by Jessica Stern

Jessica Stern is Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the author of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill.

James Fallows is correct that John Mueller is courageous in taking on the prevailing wisdom and putting forward a falsifiable hypothesis. Those who publicly underestimate threats are far more vulnerable than those who exaggerate them, even though this is not particularly fair, given that threat exaggeration can carry large costs too. And Mueller is certainly correct, as I noted in my first post, in pointing out that some people have exaggerated the current terrorism threat deliberately.

Still, even if global jihadists might not pose a threat to the existence of the United States, I think it is premature to call them simply a "nuisance," as Fawaz Gerges suggests. Paul Pillar has it exactly right: The terrorism threat may be exaggerated these days, but even a hyped threat can be real.

Specialists on the perception of risk tell us that people tend to underestimate greatly the probability of unusual threats, but overestimate the probability of dangers that are easy to imagine or recall. Most of us who were alive on 9/11 have difficulty forgetting the shock of what we saw -- passenger jets flying directly into the buildings, people jumping from the windows, some of them holding hands as they leaped to their deaths just before the towers fell. With such images in the collective mind's eye, people are prone to overreact and imagine the worst.

Long-time students of terrorism are quite familiar with fluctuating public attitudes toward the subject. Before 9/11 we were seen as eccentrics, rambling on obsessively about a supposedly non-existent threat. Afterwards, we were seen as Cassandras, with our worries suddenly taken very seriously indeed. Despite the shift in popular attitudes, however, the professionals' views didn't change all that much. Before, they thought the probability of a major attack was real but relatively low, and they think the same thing now.

The one area where all the Roundtable participants seem to agree is that terrorists aim to make us react in ways that threaten our security, in essence doing their work for them. This is sometimes referred to as an "auto-immune response" to terrorism: They attack us, we attack ourselves in response. The jihadists behind 9/11 set out to provoke us into taking actions that would reduce our security, prestige, and moral authority, and measured against that objective, they did pretty well. One can point this out, however, without making light of the continuing threats that the jihadists pose.