What is the best way for terrorists to wreak havoc in the United States? That was the question posed, and answered, yesterday on the New York Times website by Steven D. Levitt, the University of Chicago professor of economics and author of the best-selling book, Freakonomics.
Levitt’s advice to al Qaeda, based upon the economic principle of generating the greatest quantity of harm with the least possible input of resources, would be to learn from the Washington D.C snipers of 2002. He suggests arming
20 terrorists with rifles and cars, and arrang[ing] to have them begin shooting randomly at pre-set times all across the country. Big cities, little cities, suburbs, etc. Have them move around a lot. No one will know when and where the next attack will be. The chaos would be unbelievable, especially considering how few resources it would require of the terrorists. It would also be extremely hard to catch these guys. The damage wouldn’t be as extreme as detonating a nuclear bomb in New York City, of course; but it sure would be a lot easier to obtain a handful of guns than a nuclear weapon.
This does indeed sound like a terrifying scenario and perhaps there is a terrorist cell hidden here that will carry it out.
Levitt believes that putting such suggestions in print for terrorists to read is “a form of public service.” By thinking of plausible ways of causing violent destruction, he writes, “it gives terror fighters a chance to consider and plan for these scenarios before they occur.”
Levitt’s column generated what he says today, in a subsequent posting on the Times website, was an immense amount of hate mail: “The people e-mailing me can’t decide whether I am a moron, a traitor, or both.”
But there are also quite a few letters on the site applauding Levitt, like this one from a person who identifies herself simply as Kelly: “I think you are doing a terrific job actually THINKING about our situation rather than reacting like so many of our fellow Americans.”
Is Levitt indeed performing a public service, or is he a moron, traitor, or both?
Answering this is not as easy as it might appear at first glance. The fact is that we do need to think carefully about the manifold ways terrorists might attack us again. The U.S. government has failed abysmally at that task in the past.
In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, CIA Director George Tenet recalls with some pride how on the evening of September 12, 2001, he was sitting in his office “kicking around ideas” with a senior agency official when they hit upon the idea of creating “a group with the CIA whose sole purpose in life would be to think contrarian thoughts.” Such a unit, duly created by Tenet and dubbed the “Red Cell,” was given the assignment of “speculat[ing] on what was going through Osama bin Laden’s mind.”
In other words, up until September 11, it never occurred to the clueless Tenet or anyone else in a position of responsibility at our premier intelligence agency to perform the elementary task of thinking systematically about how our terrorist adversaries were thinking about us, including about how they might attack us.
There is thus a case for a public discussion of the issue raised by Levitt. But raising the issue and generating actual scenarios in public are two different things. Levitt defends himself on this point by noting that “a lot of the angry responses [he received made] me wonder what everyday Americans think terrorists do all day. My guess is that they brainstorm ideas for terrorist plots. And you have to believe that terrorists are total idiots if it never occurred to them after the Washington D.C. sniper shootings that maybe a sniper plot wasn’t a bad idea.”
True enough. Or is it true at all?
Yes, there are terrorist masterminds out there who do not need our help cooking up the most intricate and lethal plots against the United States. The attacks of September 11 alone are sufficient evidence of that.
But there are also more than a few terrorists and would-be terrorists roaming around who might qualify as “idiots,” or something close. Most recruits for terrorist action in the Islamist cause are not sophisticated planner types like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed but angry, ignorant, low-level figures, used by the higher-level terrorist plotters as expendable “muscle.”
Richard Reid is one such figure. If he had been smart enough to set off his shoe-bomb in the privacy of the bathroom instead of while remaining in his seat, American Airlines Flight 63 might now be resting quietly on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean with all of it 197 passengers and crew.
Then there was Zacharias Moussaoui, who was encountering trouble in his Minnesota flight school. This deranged fanatic might have only needed scant prompting, perhaps by stumbling across a clever scenario cooked up by Steven Levitt, to find a way to work al Qaeda’s will that was easier than poring through aviation manuals and struggling to operate a Boeing 747 simulator.
There was also el Sayyid Nosair, an operative in the nascent al Qaeda operation, part of the band that was to attack the World Trade Center the first time around in 1993. In 1990, Nosair spent his time and energy planning and carrying out the assassination of the firebrand rabbi Meir Kahane. Given the combination of Kahane’s extremist views and marginal status, this act was senseless, and even counterproductive, from the point of view of Nosair’s own cause. In choosing his victim, Nosair could well have used some help from an economist like Levitt. Will Levitt now offer to provide a public list of superior human targets, whose deaths would be far more useful to the Islamist cause? The logic of his argument suggests that the answer would be yes.
But beyond the logic or illogic of Levitt’s argument, there is something else. Thousands of Americans died on September 11. Although Levitt minimizes the dangers that lie ahead, blithely writing that his guess is that “the terrorism threat just isn’t that great,” the fact is that, like everyone else, he does not know what he does not know. It is entirely possible that the United States will be hit again, and hit harder than we were on September 11.
To Levitt, however, this solemn subject is not solemn at all. He writes about it in a glib and flippant tone, as in his summons to the public to come up with even more lethal scenarios by which al Qaeda might wreak death and destruction on the United States: “I’m sure many readers have far better ideas. I would love to hear them.”
One of the better ripostes to Levitt on the Times website came from a reader named Steve: “Sir, unable to determine if you are demonic, but your actions are demonic. Contemplate this name, Christine Lee Hanson.”
Christine Lee Hanson was a two-year old who perished on board United Airlines Flight 175 when it plowed into the World Trade Center on September 11.
Eric,
Please comment on the following (which has been inspired by your prior posts on this subject): Israel must either clearly “grasp the nettle” and make total war on Hamas, no matter the cost, or must just as clearly opt for a much more limited, and I’d say, sly, strategy of attack and negotiate, much like the Arabs do. The second strategy would avoid making grandiose claims, and would essentially embrace a war of attrition, but on Israeli terms, and avoid getting the international community riled up. I think either strategy might work, but Israel has to choose one, and not fudge it.
Thoughts?
Los Angeleno
There has not been peace, there will be not be peace.
In fact, the continued search for peace, the desperate thrashing about, in some sordid and squalid display, where all see the infamous and demoralizing spectacle of civilized humans making one concession after another to those espoused in mind and soul to blood, to carnage, to supremacism, to racial assertion, to blashphemous religious jihadism, ——————————— this ongoing process is itself a moral grotesquerie!
And it must end.
For the mental and moral health of the West, it must end.
A moral inversion is occuring, so great is this moral inversion, it’s akin to a general blackening of the mental faculties of the elites of the West.
And upon this intellectual and moral confusion, is now heaped this uttery infamy, this jewel of irony, this “peace process,” which is the process whereby the Jews, and the national incarnation of the Jews, is to be strongarmed and browbeaten into a conformity with the prevailing intellectual and moral confusion.
And lurking in the very heart of the nave of this cathedral of confusion, exists a RAMPANT and soon triumphant detestation of the Jewish people.
Fifty years worth of the Palestinian drama has now resulted in a loathing of the Jewish people unknown for centuries.
What will we see if we allow this process to unfold, as it has unfolded, for the next fifty?
The nationalist aspirations of the Palestinians must be terminated.
It would be nothing less than a moral abomination for the people who jumped for joy on 9/11, to be ushered into the community of nations.
Can anyone recommend a good book on the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, starting with the war in 1947?
I’m looking for a not-too-lengthy account (approx. 300 pages or so, no 1000 page volumes!), from a historical perspective, not so much from an ideological or political one.
Any suggestions? Thanks.
Religious apartheid, Warsaw Ghetto 2.0, a supposedly democratic society with a theocratic national identity, the #1 defecator on Human Rights in the “free” world, highest and shadiest secretiveness about the nuclear arsenals, progenitor of aggressive settlement campaigns in violation of international law (and when those settlers are bombed we know where the blame goes), the evocator of past atrocities (however unfortunate) in order to brand every opposition to brutality as anti-semitic (when people’s beef is with the brutality and ruthless segregation), one of the GODMOTHERS of the reactionary tendencies of the middle-eastern populace (of course not the only party to blame); how much longer can these shining tenets and qualities of a democracy survive the assault of Palestinian TERRORISTS and the EVIL peace-mongers (how dare they!) with liberal tendencies? Can the Anti-Defamation League, now mouthpiece for Israeli interests more than an opponent of bigotry (ironically perpetrating the biggest bigotry and silence in American Media and Politics,) or COMMENTARY who, in our first encounter, provided me much appreciated information about curing gayness (speaks volumes about their legitimacy), survive much longer against the onslaught from every goddamn legitimate publication and party in the world not excluding the UN or Human Rights Watch? These are grim times; peace is not possible because these goddamn Palestinians dropped from the sky with their longass range rockets from whatever arab country, infested overnight the holy city of Jerusalem, thanks to the plentiful visas and travel freedom they get (and you know there are no walls or anything) lobbied all the biased-thinkers in the West, through a wondrous network of publications and communications have spread anti-Semitic propaganda, and since journalists can enter and move around at will in the FREE COUNTRY OF ISRAEL, have fed them lies while the Israelis were hiding in their settlements, fearful of both the Palestinian devils and their Western overlords.
@Dan: How stupider could you get? “A loathing of the Jewish people unknown for centuries?” Are you serious? There are certain events that might elude your memory that happened only about 60+ years ago. Ignoramus tsk tsk.
Dangie, I’m sure Hamas would be happy to cure your gayness.
Dangie, meet Mr. Paragraph. Mr. Paragraph, meet Dangie. As soon as you get acquainted, I’d like to introduce Dangie to Ms. Sentence.
John, meet Long Sentences. Long Sentences, Hartland is confused; we’ll let him return to his Hooked on Phonics and Enid Blyton books.
Richard Romano -
Probably the best place to start is Myths and Facts of the Arab/Israeli conflict – edited by Mitchell Bard. You can read most of it online at the Jewish Virtual Library.
Arab/Israeli conflict for Dummies is very good.
Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial is another source that many have found to be valuable, though I have never read it.
Once you have read one of those, the novel Exodus, which is based upon the founding of Israel is a great work of historical fiction.
Bravo, Eric, for your insightful comments and right-on-the-mark perceptions. Unless Israel unambigously defeats the Hamas monster, then the terrorist group will continue to rear its ugly head — and the cycle of violence will continue. Israel must put a stop, once and for all, to the daily rockets that its citizens have endured. It’s a matter of ‘ein bre’reah” — no choice.
Thanks J. Lichty! I’ll give one (or more) of those a try
Complete defeat of Hamas may not be possible. Hamas is like the guy in the Monty Python movie, his arms are cut off, his legs are gone, and he’s still saying “Come on, you’re afraid to fight me.” Before Israel inflicted that much damage, the world would have a fit. But the way things are proceeding, perhaps Hamas’ ability to aggress will be seriously diminished, the people of Gaza will see that Hamas makes their lives miserable, and maybe they will eventually vote Hamas out of power. Which leaves us with Abbas, whoever he is.
Is the current situation really so bad?
Never has Israel been assailed in a more irrational and indefensible way. Who does not gasp and shake his head in wonder at the temerity and fanaticism of the Gazan leadership? Never has Hamas given better evidence of its fanaticism and unreason, and never have its supporters appeared more twisted and despicable. Even the Palestinians, when they forget themselves, in moments of grief, rail at Hamas.
I think eyes are being opened. Rational people, regardless of their sympathy for the Palestinian people, are becoming aware of Israel’s dilemma and are being drawn to her side.