Terrorism is in the first place theater, and we have responded to it with a security system that is equally theatrical. Terrorism is theater that has a violent component to be sure, but that is not the main point. The last thing that our current terrorism is designed to do is provoke a real fight.
Today is the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which was intended to provoke a real fight. Japan wanted open war with us, and conducted her affairs accordingly. There is a type of terrorism that can occur within the context of that kind of open war, as when civilians are targeted in order to demoralize the enemy, and distract the military. The modern concept of total war, pioneered by Sherman, and applied in appalling ways since then, is a concept that includes terrorism within it as an accepted tactic. Think Dresden.
But what we call terrorism today is that particular kind of tactic, which has been detached from a regular, fighting war. It is applied within a larger system, not of regular troops fighting a regular war, but within a larger system of diplomats, negotiators, pressure groups, protests outside embassies, and so on. In this setting, it is essential that the terrorism not go too far.
Modern terrorism is making war on civilians in such a way as to advance your political objectives. In our modern circumstance, one of the central political objectives is that of keeping open war from breaking out. The point of terrorism is to administer death by a thousand cuts.
Theatrical security cannot prevent this kind of theatrical violence. If the point is simply to kill innocent civilians, this can always be done. This can be done at ball games, at recitals, at concerts, at public celebrations, at fireworks displays, and so on. The reason it does not happen the day after tomorrow is that it would not serve the goals of the terrorists to do so. If their goal were a series of mass killings, ten incidents a day for the next two weeks, all across North America, this would be easy for the terrorists to arrange on a practical level. The reason they do not do it has nothing to do with security. The bad guys could make a fertilizer bomb easily, and show up at a high school football game in Kansas somewhere. So why don’t they, when there is none of our renowned security guarding us against that prospect? The reason is that such a series of events, too much too quickly, would provoke a real fight, a real war. And if that happened, they would lose it. What they are doing depends upon their restraint, lest we abandon ours.
So the terrorist technique is that of provocation without too much provocation. The technique that we have adopted in our keystonekoppery response is that of pother and bother and rifling through this baggage and scanning that babe, so as to provide a buffer of busyness to keep their provocations from being seen as too much. We have an institutional entity that we could charge with doing “more,” or perhaps an entity that we could summon before congressional hearings in order to “reform” it in the light of the last disaster. We have an intermediate entity that we could assign proximate blame to. There is something related to these terrorist acts that we could tinker with, instead of going to war.
In this respect, the goals of the TSA and the goals of the terrorists have a weird sort of convergence. If an incident were to happen that resulted in the American public demanding a declaration of open war against, say, Iran, then that would mean that both the terrorists and the crotch-checkers had failed in their mission. Although their ends are completely different, the shared desire is to keep the public manipulable in order that they might continue to have ongoing opportunities to manipulate that public toward their respective, and very different, ends.