The good news about terrorism
Paul Robinson
04/02/05 "The Spectator" (Great Britain)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8421.htm
...But as an academic, I am loath to scoff without investigating the facts. Since my speciality is international security, I attend many conferences with and about the military-industrial establishment. With a few exceptions, I hear the same view with monotonous regularity -- the world is more dangerous than ever before, the threat from Islamist terrorism is unlike anything we have ever known, our way of life and our very existence are menaced. Challenge this accepted wisdom and everybody looks at you as if you are an idiot. What is it they know that I don't?
Not a lot, as it turns out. Vested interests are involved. Ever since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact eliminated the need for 90 per cent of our armed forces, the defence establishment has been working overtime to justify its continued existence.
This analysis is interesting and unusual for our times: objectively, terrorism and warfare are in a substantial and rapid decline worldwide.
Robinson ends up pointing out that paranoid overassessments- the Iraq adventurism- are actually causing more far more harm than good at this point.
He doesn't say it outright, but the rationale for a large scale "War on Terrorism" is thus, is ultimately not about international terrorism but must objectively be- as has been fairly evident- merely to constitute a useful prop in American domestic politics.