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“Sweep it up. Related or Note" heckuva stupidity, that's what they want - alert! My note: This essay wrote timely and wisely about issue we
talked every where theseo days. I read Paul Krugman's
essays regularly because Paul Krugman, graduated at MIT, a place held in my heart, won Nobel Prize in
economics, columnist at New York Times. He's distingushed professor at Princeton
University, and City University of New York.
Read through, pay attention to his style of writing: Direct, logic
flow, clarity of thinking, sharpen argument, simple plain English, his choie of words -
master pieces! W?e need our scholars acting like him! ******************* ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Source of Inspiration ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ **********************
Fearing Fear Itself, NOV. 16, 2015
281Comments
Paul Krugman
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/opinion/fearing-fear-itself.html?src=trending&module=Ribbon&version=origin®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Trending&pgtype=Blogs
Like millions of people, I’ve been obsessively following the news from
Paris, putting aside other things to focus on the horror. It’s the
natural human reaction. But let’s be clear: it’s also the reaction the
terrorists want. And that’s something not everyone seems to
understand.
Take, for example, Jeb Bush’s declaration that “this is an organized
attempt to destroy Western civilization.” No, it isn’t. It’s an
organized attempt to sow panic, which isn’t at all the same thing. And
remarks like that, which blur that distinction and make terrorists
seem more powerful than they are, just help the jihadists’ cause.
Think, for a moment, about what France is and what it represents. It
has its problems — what nation doesn’t? — but it’s a robust democracy
with a deep well of popular legitimacy. Its defense budget is small
compared with ours, but it nonetheless retains a powerful military,
and has the resources to make that military much stronger if it
chooses. (France’s economy is around 20 times the size of Syria’s.)
France is not going to be conquered by ISIS, now or ever. Destroy
Western civilization? Not a chance.
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So what was Friday’s attack about? Killing random people in
restaurants and at concerts is a strategy that reflects its
perpetrators’ fundamental weakness. It isn’t going to establish a
caliphate in Paris. What it can do, however, is inspire fear — which
is why we call it terrorism, and shouldn’t dignify it with the name of
war.
The point is not to minimize the horror. It is, instead, to emphasize
that the biggest danger terrorism poses to our society comes not from
the direct harm inflicted, but from the wrong-headed responses it can
inspire. And it’s crucial to realize that there are multiple ways the
response can go wrong.
It would certainly be a very bad thing if France or other democracies
responded to terrorism with appeasement — if, for example, the French
were to withdraw from the international effort against ISIS in the
vain hope that jihadists would leave them alone. And I won’t say that
there are no would-be appeasers out there; there are indeed some
people determined to believe that Western imperialism is the root of
all evil, and all would be well if we stopped meddling.
But real-world examples of mainstream politicians, let alone
governments, knuckling under to terrorist demands are hard to find.
Most accusations of appeasement in America seem to be aimed at
liberals who don’t use what conservatives consider tough enough
language.
A much bigger risk, in practice, is that the targets of terrorism will
try to achieve perfect security by eliminating every conceivable
threat — a response that inevitably makes things worse, because it’s a
big, complicated world, and even superpowers can’t set everything
right. On 9/11 Donald Rumsfeld told his aides: “Sweep it up. Related
and not,” and immediately suggested using the attack as an excuse to
invade Iraq. The result was a disastrous war that actually empowered
terrorists, and set the stage for the rise of ISIS.
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And let’s be clear: this wasn’t just a matter of bad judgment. Yes,
Virginia, people can and do exploit terrorism for political gain,
including using it to justify what they imagine will be a splendid,
politically beneficial little war.
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Recent Comments
JT FLORIDA
15 minutes ago
Israel seems to have learned the point of your column through years of
various attacks. When a terrorist attack occurs, the scene is
quickly...
Cathy
15 minutes ago
One of the things I have read is that a strategy of Al Qaeda, and now
Daesh, is to draw the region in to war, to create a vacuum that the...
Pierre Lehu
15 minutes ago
This is a propaganda war more than anything and I think that's where
we are losing. First, I'd stop calling them terrorists because to
them...
See All Comments
Oh, and whatever people like Ted Cruz may imagine, ending our
reluctance to kill innocent civilians wouldn’t remove the limits to
American power. It would, however, do wonders for terrorist
recruitment.
Finally, terrorism is just one of many dangers in the world, and
shouldn’t be allowed to divert our attention from other issues. Sorry,
conservatives: when President Obama describes climate change as the
greatest threat we face, he’s exactly right. Terrorism can’t and won’t
destroy our civilization, but global warming could and might.
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So what can we say about how to respond to terrorism? Before the
atrocities in Paris, the West’s general response involved a mix of
policing, precaution, and military action. All involved difficult
tradeoffs: surveillance versus privacy, protection versus freedom of
movement, denying terrorists safe havens versus the costs and dangers
of waging war abroad. And it was always obvious that sometimes a
terrorist attack would slip through.
Paris may have changed that calculus a bit, especially when it comes
to Europe’s handling of refugees, an agonizing issue that has now
gotten even more fraught. And there will have to be a post-mortem on
why such an elaborate plot wasn’t spotted. But do you remember all the
pronouncements that 9/11 would change everything? Well, it didn’t —
and neither will this atrocity.
Again, the goal of terrorists is to inspire terror, because that’s all
they’re capable of. And the most important thing our societies can do
in response is to refuse to give in to fear.
Read Paul Krugman’s blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, and follow him
on Twitter.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 16, 2015, on page
A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Fearing Fear Itself.
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