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Why the U.S. CT Policy is failing, and why it can't easily be fixed
[War on the Rocks] According to a recent poll, Americans are more pessimistic about terrorism than at any time since 9/11. The CNN/ORC survey (full results in .pdf format) asked, "Who do you think is currently winning the war on terrorism -- the U.S. and its allies, neither side, or the terrorists?" Forty percent of respondents said that the terrorists were winning, while a mere 18 percent believed that the United States and its allies were winning. After the killing of Osama Bin Laden in May 2011, just 9 percent believed the terrorists had the upper hand.This recent poll, conducted in mid-December after the San Bernardino attacks, is hardly a fluke. Others have found U.S. fears of terrorism to be at or near all-time highs. "Although other issues -- particularly economic ones -- often crowded out terrorism as a topic of daily concern," explain my Cato colleague John Mueller and co-author Mark Stewart, "terrorism has won an apparently permanent space in the American mind." The fact that Americans remain fearful of terrorism is surprising in several respects. Judged in purely probabilistic terms, terrorism poses a far less significant threat to human life than a host of hazards, from lightning strikes, to collisions with animals, to falling household furniture. "An American's chance of being killed by a terrorist," note Mueller and Stewart, "has been, and remains, one in four million per year with 9/11 included in the calculation, or one in 110 million for the period since 2001." More Americans have been killed by weather incidents in the last two weeks than have been killed by attacks by Islamist extremists on U.S. soil in the last 14 years. Posted by: Besoeker 2016-01-08 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=441407 |