redblueamerica.com

John Tierney has a fascinating look at the fear of terrorism:

The officials promoting fear of terrorism in America can point mainly to the images of one day. The Sept. 11 attacks were said to be the start of a new age of international terrorism in America, but you wouldn’t know it from the six quiet years on the home front since then. Of course, that could change any day, and it’s possible that much worse is in store if terrorists get their hands on weapons of mass destruction. But as John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, points out in “Overblown,” these predictions of terrorists causing mass destruction were made for much of the past century without any of them coming true.

He goes on to compare the fear of terrorism with the fear of Communism -- the "Red Scare" of the early 1950s left in its wake a deep-seated cultural wariness long after the news coverage and Congressional hearings had ended. It could take decades before our current obsession with terrorism subsides -- even if there are no new major attacks.

Tierney:

That’s a depressing thought. It means (to quote the common phrase after Sept. 11) that “the terrorists will have won” even if they never pull off any larger attacks in the future.

That's correct. I don't get on a plane without experiencing a brief moment of fear that I'll crash. But I know that plane crashes are so unusual that there's little real chance I'll be in one; that allows me to fly. It makes more sense -- and will be less burdensome to our freedoms -- than the "one percent doctrine."