Terrorized by the War on Terror

By choosing to regard terrorist attacks as acts of war rather than criminal acts, the Bushites not only gave terrorists the identity they craved—the identity as warriors that would inspire new recruits—but they both hyped the threat and used the resulting fever to justify extreme acts, including official patterns of brutality.

The terror of terrorism is in surprise, and the power of terrorism to inspire fear is directly related to its novelty as well as the violent imagery associated with it. It is certainly not proportional to the threat.

Ben Friedman in the San Francisco Chronicle Insight (February 19, 2006):

Conventional wisdom says that none of us is safe from terrorism. The truth is that almost all of us are.

Most homeland security experts say that Hurricane Katrina's flooding of New Orleans shows how vulnerable we are to terrorists. In fact, it shows that most Americans have better things to worry about. By any statistical measure, the terrorist threat to America has always been low. As political scientist John Mueller notes, in most years allergic reactions to peanuts, deer in the road and lightning have all killed about the same number of Americans as terrorism.
In 2001, their banner year, terrorists killed one twelfth as many Americans as the flu and one fifteenth the number killed by car accidents.

Even if attacks killing thousands were certain, the risk to each of us would remain close to zero, far smaller than many larger risks that do not alarm us, or provoke government warnings, like driving to work every day. And if something far worse than Sept. 11 does occur, the country will recover. Every year, tens of thousands Americans die on the roads. Disease preys on us. Life goes on for the rest. The economy keeps chugging. A disaster of biblical proportions visited New Orleans. The Republic has not crumbled. The terrorist risk to the United States is serious, but far from existential, as some would have it.