The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [127]
The Bush Administration’s Fear Machine
From the beginning, the language of the administration was apocalyptic. “Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen,” President Bush proclaimed in late September 2001. The following January, in his State of the Union Address, he announced that our enemies were not only bin Laden and al Qaeda, but an “axis of evil” consisting of Iraq, Iran, and Korea, as well as any nation that harbored terrorists. At home, Americans should brace themselves for attacks by members of al Qaeda sleeper cells who lived among us, as the 9/11 terrorists had, and could strike at any moment.52
The administration began warning of a far more distant danger as well. Throughout 2002, they claimed that Iraq had aided bin Laden and was building weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Those claims have since proved false, but the administration used them to garner broad support from Congress, pundits, and the public for its 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. And over the next five years, as casualties mounted and the financial costs of Bush’s self-described “crusade” soared to several trillion billion dollars, it was crucial to the administration that Americans remain frightened about possible terrorist attacks on U.S. soil so that they would continue to support the Iraq war and broader “war on terror.”
As time passed and such attacks did not occur, skeptics began to ask the obvious questions: Why hadn’t terrorists blown up freeways and bridges? Poisoned the water supply? Gassed the subways? Grabbed an automatic weapon and shot up a mall? The most reasonable conclusion was that sleeper cells full of impassioned, highly trained terrorists did not exist. How, then, to keep the fears alive?
In large measure, the Bush administration relied on an entity of its own founding, whose very existence suggested both imminent and never-ending dangers. Formed in 2002, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) placed a number of federal agencies under one umbrella organization created “to secure our country against those who would disrupt the American way of life.” The mission of the DHS was to prevent and respond to terrorist attacks in the United States, because “today’s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time and with virtually any weapon.”53
One of the DHS’s first creations was a color-coded terror alert chart that reflected what the department deemed the degree of risk at any given time. An ingenious mechanism for fear mongering, the color chart reminded the populace, graphically and continually, that they were in danger. Sometimes the risk was greater, sometimes lesser, but always there was danger.
Between its inception in March 2002 and June 2003, government officials repeatedly issued terror alerts, citing “code orange”—a “high” risk—eight times. In each instance, a public official such as the attorney general or the director of Homeland Security appeared before the press, promised that the alert was based on “credible” or “reliable” sources, and offered no further information. No attacks occurred, but the Bush administration benefited from the scares. A study published in 2004 in the journal Current Research in Social Psychology found that when the terror warnings increased, so did Bush’s approval rating—an effect that was not lost on the administration. In a memoir published after Bush left office, Tom Ridge, the first director of the Department of Homeland Security, reported that senior members of the administration had pressured