How Many Terrorists Are There?

How big is the threat of terrorism in the US? In the last 15 years, I am aware of only a very few incidents of terror not carried out by the United States government or by one of the states. Some eco-terrorists have burned down buildings. Somebody put a bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center. The perpetrators were apprehended and tried through ordinary law enforcement channels. Somebody blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City. Again, law enforcement was called in, the perpetrators were caught, and they were brought to justice. A gang of about 20 Arabs and other Middle Eastern men hijacked some passenger planes and flew two of them into the World Trade Center and another into the Pentagon. The perpetrators died in the act. Thousands were killed in the incident, but the apprehension of co-conspirators was properly a matter for law enforcement.

In each case, the acts of terror were undertaken by relatively small groups of conspirators. Costs were low, and the technology employed was primitive. Frankly, there was probably not a heck of a lot anyone could have done to prevent the attacks. It is relatively easy to get into the US and to blow something up and kill people, especially if you are willing to die in the process. There’s not much anyone can do to prevent this, any more than we can prevent high schoolers from gunning down their classmates or postal workers from going postal. It follows, therefore, that there are not all that many people who are interested in committing terror attacks in the US. They would have done so by now, and if the US government had thwarted any such attacks they would be crowing about it.

My conclusion is that the risk of terror attack is small. I am much more likely to be a crime victim or to be killed in a car accident or to fall off a ladder. How much good does it do for the US to use military power in the Middle East in terms of reducing the threat? It can’t do much, since the threat is almost nonexistent already, and it seems to me to be a huge waste and misallocation of resources if the aim is to reduce the threat of terrorism. The threat is a nuisance and might be better ameliorated through law enforcement and intelligence. Some might argue that the use of the military as has been done actually increases the threat and inspires even more people to want to kill Americans. That seems to me to be stupid, unless the aim is to create a more credible threat. Let us give the government the benefit of the doubt and assume that their goal is to create more terrorists.