The State of War and Domestic Terrorism

Chet Richards and John Mueller discuss where we're at five years after the 9/11 attacks.

Nick Gillespie & Jesse Walker from the October 2006 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

Reason: Do you see them losing a big war anytime soon?

Richards: Nope.

Reason: So do you feel like you’re writing science fiction? Or do you think the change is going to come from some direction; you just can’t predict where?

Richards: I think it’s the latter. What’s going on today just can’t go on.

It’s like working for General Motors 10 or 15 years ago. The handwriting was on the wall. Their market share was starting to come down. Their quality was still terrible. Their costs were going through the roof. You might not have predicted that it would be Toyota that finally shoved you over the brink. You just knew that you were eventually going to open up a big enough hole that somebody was going to walk through it.

General Motors is not going to make it. But thank God for Toyota. As General Motors goes down and outsources more U.S. jobs overseas, Toyota is insourcing more jobs into the United States. It and other companies that have adopted the Toyota-type production system are building better cars—faster, cheaper, quieter, more fuel-efficient.

Reason: So can I quote you as saying Al Qaeda is the Toyota of the military-industrial complex?

Richards: Probably more like the Yugo.

Residual Warfare

John Mueller on the future of terrorism

Interview by Nick Gillespie

In powerful, well-received books such as Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (1989) and The Remnants of War (2004), John Mueller argues persuasively that traditional global conflicts along the lines of World War I and World War II are effectively part of history, analogous to dueling and slavery, institutions whose time and support have come and gone. If world war in which highly advanced societies battle it out for global supremacy is gone, warfare continues nonetheless, generally within a given country’s or region’s borders, generally under weak governments, and generally fought by irregulars and terrorists who act more like criminal gangs than conventional armies (think the Balkans and Rwanda). Such “residual warfare,” says Mueller, the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies and a professor of political science at Ohio State University, requires policing actions, not a conventional military response.

Mueller is also the author of Capitalism, Democracy, and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery (2000), in which he contends that “capitalism is much better than its image, while democracy has turned out to be much worse than its image.” In 2002 he participated in a reason online debate about whether the United States should invade Iraq, taking the nay position because, to his mind, Saddam Hussein was “a feeble tyrant” who posed little or no threat to America.

Mueller’s next book, tentatively titled Devils and Duct Tape and forthcoming next year from the Free Press, applies his brand of contrarian analysis to questions of terrorism and homeland security. Based on “Six Rather Unusual Propositions About Terrorism,” his controversial 2005 article for the journal Terrorism and Political Violence, the new book will suggest, among other things, that the real cost of terrorism comes from governmental overreaction rather than direct damage to lives and property; that the “terrorism industry” stokes fear and anxiety; and that governments should try to reduce citizens’ fears as inexpensively as possible rather than trying to eliminate low-probability threats of violence.

Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie talked with Mueller in late May, as the professor was finishing a stint as a scholar in residence at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.