On the Wall Street Journal op-ed page (8/7/13), veteran TV journalist Ted Koppel says it’s time to stop overreacting to the threat of terrorism:
Terrorism, after all, is designed to produce overreaction. It is the means by which the weak induce the powerful to inflict damage upon themselves—and al Qaeda and groups like it are surely counting on that as the centerpiece of their strategy.
It appears to be working. Right now, 19 American embassies and a number of consulates and smaller diplomatic outposts are closed for the week due to the perceived threat of attacks against U.S. targets. Meantime, the U.S. has launched drone strikes on al Qaeda fighters in Yemen.
He goes on to argue:
We have created an economy of fear, an industry of fear, a national psychology of fear. Al Qaeda could never have achieved that on its own. We have inflicted it on ourselves.
And:
There is always the nightmare of terrorists acquiring and using a weapon of mass destruction. But nothing would give our terrorist enemies greater satisfaction than that we focus obsessively on that remote possibility, and restrict our lives and liberties accordingly.
It’s hard to argue with any of that.
But it reminded me of an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times (10/2/06) that argued that the United States should ease up on sanctions on Iran–but only if we announced that we had a new Iran policy:
But this should also be made clear to Tehran: If a dirty bomb explodes in Milwaukee, or some other nuclear device detonates in Baltimore or Wichita, if Israel or Egypt or Saudi Arabia should fall victim to a nuclear “accident,” Iran should understand that the United States government will not search around for the perpetrator. The return address will be predetermined, and it will be somewhere in Iran.
OK–so the right way to deal with the threat of terrorism is to announce that the U.S. response to any act of terrorism anywhere will be to attack Iran.
Who wrote this? Ted Koppel. Either his analysis is evolving, or he believes that threatening to unleash massive unprovoked military attacks on another country is not terrorism.
Koppel’s resemblance to Alfred E. Newman is striking — and perhaps not coincidental.
Thanks for contributing to it, Ted Koppel, by subtly indoctrinating US viewers (as a proxy for your friend, Henry Kissinger) on your Nightline show that “dangerous” Iran had the upper hand and that we needed a real “leader” to handle the hostage “problem.”
Enter Reagan and his successors who sold us out to corporate America.
History has not been the same since. Ted Koppel has a lot to answer for.
Thank you so much, Ted!
It’s not a matter of “overreaction”
And Koppel is fully aware of that.
Fear is the dominators’ closest friend.
If “terrorists” didn’t exist, they would have had to invent them.
Which, in large measure, they did.
Maybe this is an opportunity to celebrate a major shift in thinking by Koppel? People can change their minds about things.
This is just one example of Koppel striking a new pose. Are there others?
One could always hope that Ted has awoken to the reality, a small hope to be sure, but hope is hope. I wonder if the GOP and their billionaire bed buddies are trying to down play things to make em look rosier for 2016.
Ummm Ted…Thanks for that um….. in depth and intelligent dissertation on the foreign policy direction this country should be taking.Now off to bed with you.Night night.Sweet dreams.Take your hot toddy with you.Sheeeesh!Now to clean this up…..We hope that the American people will not be consumed with worries of impending terrorism while at the same time our government is manning the castle walls and not sleeping on the job.To quote jack Nicholson because we probably don’t want to “handle the truth”.We have to go on with life.Keep the wheels turning.As far as responding to a nuke attack on our country….I think Bush made it clear we wont sit about waiting for two shoes to drop before we respond.That said Im not sure what message Obama sends.
What the critic’s of Koppel’s comments may be missing is the context within which the VARIOUS failures to “handle the truth” are occurring. OUR response to terror is the TRUTH. Or it should be. If our military community responds to cyber attack with calls for limitations on First Amendment freedoms, or Privacy, that’s one way of “handling” the truth. If our National Command Authority orders our military to take traditional kinetic military action against organizations which perpetrate “terror”, and we/Cheyney declares “war on terror” that’s another way of “handling the truth”. If we amend our Constitution, or even pass a statute to imprison people who disagree with the NCA that’s yet another way of handling the truth. Without necessarily agreeing or disagreeing the various views on Koppel’s opinions on terror (which I admit to find fairly attractive), it is my belief that when WE alter our Constitutional fabric because we FEAR the threats of the terrorists that they may repeat their prior bad acts, they have succeeded in their WAR AGAINST US. THEY have caused us to alter that very thing–OUR Constitutional system, OUR core values, that makes US different, that is the magnet for the hopes and dreams of millions around the world who imitate America, who aspire to be like Americans. who wish to and do immigrate to America–not just for the economic opportunity we offer, but for the social and legal context within which that economic opportunity flourishes. So when we react, or over react to the terrorists, we give them victories. The CHALLENGE, I would argue, is NOT what the President (who I think knows better, but over simplified for his NDU speech and his August 9 press conference) declared to be a BALANCING of civil liberties and Privacy rights against security interests (the formulation Ashcroft and Lieberman and Ridge and Chertoff advanced in creating DHS and passing the Patriot Act). It is not and never HAS been a ‘zero sum game’ of balancing these two fundamental national interests. Rather, the challenge, as Ben Franklin posited often, and critically during the siege of Philadelphia when he defended the Philadelphia lawyers defending Tory-loyal Philadelphians imprisoned by Continental Army forces, and whom the writ of habeus corpus was being sought, and for whom Americans argued vigorously “no”,SUSPEND the writ !! If we let these people out on the street of Philadelphia they will pollute our precious water supply, poison our little food and aid the British and force our surrender. Franklin is famously said to have spoken, paraphrasing his own earlier writings, “he who would surrender his own liberty for the sake of a moment’s security deserves neither, and will soon find himself without both”…That is, if you agree to suspend habeus corpus to keep these Torys in jail, you are undermining the very system of civil liberties for which the Revolution is intended to create a national haven. The genius of over 225 years of American Constitutional principle separating us from the terrorists is that WE can divine a means to achieve BOTH security AND civil liberties and privacy–to avoid the zero sum game, and NOT let the terrorists make us afraid.
Good points Michael and Elliot.I agree that when we change those seminal points of law that are our national identity for any reason at all…we no longer are the country we know as America.
On October 6, 1976, a CIA asset named Luis Posada Carriles blew up a Cuban airline that was carrying the national fencing team home from a match in Venezuela. That terrorist attack murdered seventy-three innocent people, all civilians. Luis Carriles is still wanted in Venezuela, but our government refuses to send him where he can stand trial for a despicable crime, a terrorist attack, in violation of international law. William Blum, a former American Foreign Service Officer that authored Killing Hope, has documented CIA terrorism dating all the way back to the beginning of the Cold War. One CIA clandestine maneuver occurred during the Eisenhower administration when it overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran whose prime minister, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, had nationalized Iran’s oil, thus relieving a British company of its franchise. (Don’t mess with big oil!) The blowback from this CIA misadventure came during Carter’s administration with the seizure of our embassy in Tehran. The United States has been engaged in terrorism for more than 65 years: we invented it. If we quit employing terrorism, we will experience no more terrorist attacks, but we cannot supply free bombs to Israel to drop on Palestinians and not have blowback. We cannot consistently veto Israeli international crime in the United Nations and not have blowback.