Today's deadly bombings in London have stirred up a familiar set of questions about foreign policy, anti-terrorism, and international security. How vulnerable is the United States to a similar attack? What preventive measures are possible? What happened to the "Iraq flypaper" theory of terrorism? Does the persistence of terror attacks justify Anglo-American policy or undermine it?
John Mueller is the Woody Hayes Chair of national security policy and professor of political science at Ohio State University. He has written on a wide range of subjects, from defense and security to the liberating power of capitalism. His most recent book, Remnants of War, argues that war itself is declining, largely abandoned by the developed countries and left now to small groups of thugs and criminals. Mueller spoke with Reason from his home in Ohio.
Reason: You're wary of the dangers of overreacting to events like this. Would you say the reaction so far today—at least in the U.S., where the Orange Alert has been issued, but only in specific areas—is appropriate?
John Mueller: It would be interesting to find out how much money it's costing, and ask the taxpayers whether it's worth it. I think you might get a negative answer from quite a few people to the idea that because something happens 3,000 miles away we have to spend all this money on heightened security. If it turns out it costs $1.98, it's definitely worth it.
Reason: What about the closing-the-barn-door effect? When they attack airplanes, we go nuts on air travel; now we're concentrating on ground-based transit—in both cases tightening security after the fact.
JM: And on exactly the same thing that was attacked. Presumably the terrorists would be wise enough to try something else rather than doing the same thing they did before. This is fairly standard procedure. It seems to me it's now physically impossible for somebody to hijack an airliner and fly it into a target. They couldn't even get into the cockpit, much less take it over, given how the passengers would react. Nonetheless we're spending an incredible amount of money to guard against a virtual impossibility. They could still blow up an airplane, but they can't take it over. The same thing applies with today's attack. You simply can't police every single metro train or bus.
Reason: You were opposed to the invasion of Iraq. All day today we've seen ghoulish opportunists on both sides of that debate making the claim that this proves their own view of U.S. policy. Is there any real conclusion we can draw from these attacks?
JM: In one sense it's going to help Bush because it supports his argument that terrorism is still out there. On the other hand it undercuts the argument that the reason there haven't been any terror attacks in the U.S. is because the terrorists are all tied down in Iraq. I don't know that anybody has made that argument officially, or if Bush himself has made that argument, but it's certainly been around. And Bush has implied it by saying Iraq is the central arena in the fight against terrorism. But this clearly wipes out that argument, which wasn't a particularly good argument in the first place.
Reason: It does seem striking that there have been major attacks on U.S. Iraq allies, but not on the European countries that sat the war out. Do you see a connection?
JM: Yes. In the case of Madrid, the terrorists were trying to have an effect on the country's Iraq policy. And they were very lucky from their standpoint, because the conservative government handled the attacks very badly. The election came out the way it did largely because of that. If you look at the claims on their websites about today's attack, it certainly seems plausible to me that they're attacking the U.K. over specific policy matters. But of course, we don't know if those sites are really valid.
Reason: What about factors specific to the U.K.—that it has a fairly radicalized population of first-generation Muslims, etc.?
JM: Well, an attack on the U.K., from the standpoint of the war in Iraq, would be a big achievement, because there is a huge number of people, in fact a substantial majority of people, who think the war was a really terrible idea. So it makes sense to try and get those people activated. The dilemma of the U.K., of course, is that they want to get out of the war, but they want to do it for other reasons, not because of a terrorist attack.
Reason: In your book The Remnants of War you see war as being increasingly de-normalized since the 18th century. How do attacks like these fit into that pattern?
JM: They're not war; they're terrorism. That's why we call them terrorism. Crime will always be here, and so will terrorism. There will always be some nutcase with a bomb or some chemicals like the Unabomber. So when it's really small like that, we tend to call it terrorism rather than war. When it gets large enough or sustained enough as in Iraq we tend to use phrases like guerilla war or unconventional war. Sporadic cases like this I don't consider war.
Reason: 9/11 was pretty large and spectacular, and had a massive body count. By that definition, shouldn't it count as an act of war?
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