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March 2007                                                                            Volume 12 - Number 3

Perspectives...

The Risk of Terrorism
By John Pearce

Terrorism is defined as violence or harmful acts committed against civilians by groups or persons for political or other ideological goals.  Terrorism is also generally put into the grouping of unconventional warfare, and has been rather prevalent in modern history.  What generally makes the American people fear terrorist acts is the perception that future attacks will utilize weapons with far greater impacts to the loss of human life by leveraging nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.  We also tend to prepare for what is closest in our mind for past events, which explains the large amount of funding and effort that currently goes into airport security services.

When one starts to gauge the risk of another terrorist event, we must look at the reason such events occur.  Generally poverty and suffering breed anger against those more fortunate.  The prevalence of wealth tends to make a society complacent with the threats facing its existence.  When these to variables are aggregated, and then mixed with conflicting social ideologies, it is natural to conclude that there is indeed a highly probable chance of a significant terrorist attack in the United States in the years to come.  These attacks could range from leveraging transportation assets such as railways to cause harm, leveraging weapons of mass destruction, or the use of cyber attacks to cripple the nation’s economy or power system.  

The question that many ask when considering the risk of a terrorist incident is why after years of heightened security and operations abroad to combat terrorist entities the United States still faces this threat.  Russia is a good case study for why the United States still faces such a threat, while they do not.  The United States has taken a position of democratizing areas of terrorist influence in order to curb feelings of aggression that lead to terrorist activities.  The Russians on the other had have used a much more hard lined approach to the Chechen population that has posed the greatest terrorist threat to their population.  Through brutal tactics in dealing with Chechen extremists, as well as instilling a local government willing to utilize the harshest methods to quell unrest, the Russian government has successfully mitigated this threat to their society.  Additionally, the Russian President gets a much more respectful welcoming when traveling to the Middle East.  The United States on the other hand has leveraged a position of regime change, democratization, and for the most part the protection civil liberties in its approach to combating terrorist acts.  The United States is continually threatened abroad, and gets a much more difficult greeting by foreign governments.

When comparing these two methodologies for combating enemies that utilize terrorist acts, one must wonder if a western democracy is capable of naturalizing a terrorist threat.  A western democracy tends to have ideals on the treatment of others, as well as a more protective stance on human and civil rights.  These ideologies have made the United States the country that it is today.  However these same ideals can be interpreted as weak and divided by others.  It is this ideology that will continue to bring terrorist threats to the soil of the United States for the foreseeable future.  As long as impoverished people, fueled by an ideology that breeds hatred against American ideals exists, then this Nation will continue to face these terrorist threats, with a high likelihood that a terrorist attack will succeed.  To be able to achieve success in preventing terrorist attacks will most likely call the United States to severely compromise its ideals as a society, which is highly unlikely until a nuclear or chemical terrorist attack reaches America’s soil.