The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [120]
This distinct American advantage—testament to the country’s ability to assimilate new immigrants—is increasingly in jeopardy. If American leaders begin insinuating that the entire Muslim population be viewed with suspicion, that will change the community’s relationship to the United States. Proposing to wiretap America’s mosques and comparing religious leaders to Nazis are certainly not steps in the right direction.
Though Democrats are more sensible on most of these issues, the party remains consumed by the fear that it will not come across as tough. During the 2008 campaign, its presidential candidates vied with one another to prove that they were going to be just as macho and militant as the fiercest Republican. In a South Carolina presidential debate in 2007, when candidates were asked how they would respond to another terror strike, they promptly vowed to attack, retaliate, and blast the hell out of, well, somebody. Barack Obama, the only one to answer differently, quickly realized his political vulnerability and dutifully threatened retaliation as well. After the debate, his opponents suggested that his original response proved he didn’t have the fortitude to be president. (In fact, Obama’s initial response was the right one. He said that the first thing he would do was make certain that the emergency response was effective, then ensure we had the best intelligence possible to figure out who had caused the attack, and then move with allies to dismantle the network responsible.)
We will never be able to prevent a small group of misfits from planning some terrible act of terror. No matter how far-seeing and competent our intelligence and law-enforcement officials, people will always be able to slip through the cracks in a large, open, and diverse country. The real test of American leadership is not whether we can make 100 percent sure we prevent the attack, but rather how we respond to it. Stephen Flynn, a homeland-security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that our goal must be resilience—how quickly can we bounce back from a disruption? In the material sciences, resilience is the ability of a material to recover its original shape after a deformation. If one day bombs do go off, we must ensure that they cause as little disruption—economic, social, political—as possible. This would prevent the terrorist from achieving his main objective. If we are not terrorized, then in a crucial sense we have defeated terrorism.15
The atmosphere of fear and panic we are currently engendering is likely to produce the opposite effect. Were there to be another attack, two things can be predicted with near-certainty. The actual effects of the attack would be limited, allowing the country to get back to normal quickly. And Washington would go berserk. Politicians would fall over each other to pledge to pulverize, annihilate, and destroy . . . someone. A retaliatory strike would be appropriate and important—if you could hit the right targets. But what if the culprits were based in Hamburg or Madrid or Trenton? It is far more likely that a future attack will come from countries that are unknowingly and involuntarily sheltering terrorists. Are we going to bomb Britain and Spain because they housed a terrorist cell?
The other likely effect of another terror attack would be an increase in the restrictions on movement, privacy, and civil liberties that have already imposed huge economic, political, and moral costs on America. The process of screening passengers at airports, which costs nearly $5 billion annually, gets more cumbersome every year as new potential “risks” are discovered. The visa system, which has become restrictive and forbidding,