"The purpose of terrorism is to cause fear and overreaction."
That reminded me of a similar take on that topic from The Economist's latest, which may be worth considering here:
"... conventional terrorism poses no major threat to America or to its citizens. But that's not really what it aims to do. Terrorism is basically a political communications strategy... For the president the war on terror is what the Vietnam War was to Lyndon Johnson: a vast, tragic distraction in which he must be seen to be winning, lest the domestic agenda he really cares about (health-care, financial reform, climate-change mitigation, immigration reform, gun control, inequality) be derailed. It's no surprise that he has given the surveillance state whatever it says it needs to prevent a major terrorist attack."
Computing how many people die from terrorism is completely beside the point. For the terrorists, terrorism isn't about counting up dead enemies. It's about enacting political change. We'd be fools not to understand the war on the terms it is being fought.
Do you honestly believe AQ has been fighting for decades just to get the NSA to take phone records from Verizon? You think Ayman is snickering in a cave somewhere chalking up a tally in the Win column because of that?
They have actual political goals, but they don't necessarily care about what America does internally. Certainly they don't send people to die just to give a farmer in North Carolina "irrational fear". They do it for strategic goals all their own.
In a manner of speaking, a full embrace of all civil liberties plays directly into their hands as it gives them much more freedom of communication and movement while affording the citizens only a very marginal increase in those civil liberties by comparison.
Obviously it doesn't make sense to swing way too far the other way and to restrict our civil liberties so much that they turn into security theatre (like the TSA) without any marginal increase in our ability to deter and defeat terrorism.
But acting like taking any change to deter terrorism "let's the terrorists win" is itself kind of missing the point. That's not even the game they're playing.
>Do you honestly believe AQ has been fighting for decades just to get the NSA to take phone records from Verizon?
As part of a larger strategy, sure. Osama bin Laden stated publicly that his goal was to bankrupt the U.S.[1] The NSA is wasting billions of dollars on this while we run enormous budget deficits.
>In a manner of speaking, a full embrace of all civil liberties plays directly into their hands as it gives them much more freedom of communication and movement while affording the citizens only a very marginal increase in those civil liberties by comparison.
Only if their end goal is to kill people rather than bring about some specific political result. Presumably the killing is a means rather than the goal, and if the goal is made unachievable through attacks because we resist overreactions to them then there will be no incentive to go on killing people.
