Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them

Is it possible that there is a simple explanation for the peaceful American homefront? Is it possible that there are no al-Qaeda terrorists here? Is it possible that the war on terror has been a radical overreaction to a rare event? Consider: 80,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants have been subjected to fingerprinting and registration, and more than 5,000 foreign nationals have been imprisoned -- yet there has not been a single conviction for a terrorist crime in America. A handful of plots -- some deadly, some intercepted -- have plagued Europe and elsewhere, and even so, the death toll has been modest.

We have gone to war in two countries and killed tens of thousands of people. We have launched a massive domestic wiretapping program and created vast databases of information once considered private. Politicians and pundits have berated us about national security and patriotic duty, while encroaching our freedoms and sending thousands of young men off to die.

It is time to consider the hypothesis that dare not speak its name: we have wildly overreacted. Terrorism has been used by murderous groups for many decades, yet even including 9/11, the odds of an American being killed by international terrorism are microscopic. In general, international terrorism doesn't do much damage when considered in almost any reasonable context.

The capacity of al-Qaeda or of any similar group to do damage in the United States pales in comparison to the capacity other dedicated enemies, particularly international Communism, have possessed in the past. Lashing out at the terrorist threat is frequently an exercise in self-flagellation because it is usually more expensive than the terrorist attack itself and because it gives the terrorists exactly what they are looking for. Much, probably most, of the money and effort expended on counterterrorism since 2001 (and before, for that matter) has been wasted.

The terrorism industry and its allies in the White House and Congress have preyed on our fears and caused enormous damage. It is time to rethink the entire enterprise and spend much smaller amounts on only those things that do matter: intelligence, law enforcement, and disruption of radical groups overseas. Above all, it is time to stop playing into the terrorists' hands, by fear-mongering and helping spread terror itself.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Thanks Goodness the Truth!, 2008-07-18
Finally there is truth in publishing when it comes to terrorism. We all have been so programmed to put plastic on our windows duct them the windows and doorways and then hide our heads in the sand while we shake like a washing machine that is off center when we hear there is a red alert. This book tells the entire truth and shows how politicians, the media and people out to make fast and easy money use those fears against us. It also shows how politicians use the threat for their own gains and political advantages. This book covers everything and I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the subject; even if you're not it will help you get a better understanding of how our fear of what happened on 9/11 is being used against us. The truth finally came out.


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Great Book, 2008-03-13
About a year after 9/11, I was thinking there are so many little things terrorists could be doing, Why aren't they? All of a sudden we went from not being able to prevent planes from being hijacked to being able to prevent suicide bombers from blowing themselves up in malls. Or is it simply, there just aren't that many that want to attack us and have other concerns (moderate Islamic gov't's, European countries). This book discusses all this and more. Very enlightening read that rightfully questions conventional wisdom.


3 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

Wacko 9/11 conspiracy theorists, 2007-08-17
You can easily understand what this author and his book are all about by observing his actions. Recently, he appeared at a panel on "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter". For those of you who don't know, Carter basically advances the view that the problems in the middle east are all caused by the uncomfortable fact that jews exist in the region and that the way to solve these problems is to get rid of them. Since the only way this is going to happen is through genocide, that is what he supports. He also makes it quite clear that ANY behavior by the muslims in that region, no matter how heinously evil, is justified. This horror fest was cosponsored by a local group that promotes the view that 9/11 was not an act by muslim terrorists but rather a nefarious plot by our own government.

These are the types of people Mueller groups himself with.....dangerous lunatics who support national socialist style fascism. This says everything you need to know about his book. It also says everything you need to know about people who read books like this and find merit in them. You might as well shave your head and tattoo a swastika on it (or maybe a crescent). Because that is what YOU are all about.


11 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

Subtitle: Terrorism -- Not a big deal, 2007-04-08
Mueller's thesis, in brief, is that terrorist movements cannot succeed and have never succeeded in their political goals. The violence they employ is not widespread enough to overthrow governments or forcibly change societies to their liking. Thus, for Mueller, to react militarily to terrorism instead of treating it like organized criminal violence simply exacerbates the problem.

Some issues Mueller does not seem to consider or is outright incorrect about:

First, although it is true that terrorists have never won (i.e., overthrown a government, upset a society), Mueller seems completely unaware of the work done by Walter Laqueur and others that note the world is in a "new age" of terrorism. While terrorists can't win by employing truck bombs and pizza-parlor massacres, theoretically they now have the power to win by using weapons of mass destruction, the technology related to which is "open." Most terror academic and governmental experts -- neither of which Mueller is -- have esssentially concluded that it is just a matter of time before the world experiences this. What then? A few arrests and trials?

A second problem is the illogical claim that *the response to terrorism causes it*. Mueller again seems completely unaware of the mountainous work done by scholars such as Bernard Lewis that demonstrate the millenia-and-a-half effort by the Islamic world to extend its control throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe using both conventional and non-conventional war such as terrorism. For that matter, Mueller seems completely unaware of early 20th century terror movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, movements that existed prior to the Iraq war, the Israel-Palestinian issue, the very creation of Israel itself, the US being a world power, and indeed, prior to the birth of anyone reading this. Mueller wants arrests but no military response -- it's as if he doesn't realize there's a war going on.

A third problem is his general dismissal of terrorism as much of a risk to innocent civilians. Mueller believes other risks, such as automobiles and cigarette smoking, cause far more death and injury than does terrorism. The obvious rebuttal: we *choose* these other risks. Perhaps not the consequences (no smoker really wants lung cancer), but we certainly choose the undertake the risky behavior. But who chooses to be a target of terrorism? All of the other risks Mueller discusses are preventable by making the choice not to engage in them -- lung cancer, for example, would end if people stopped smoking and DUI-related deaths would end if we didn't drink and drive. But terrorism-related deaths won't end until the terrorists are killed and their political motivations are defeated. But Mueller evidently hasn't noticed the difference between the chosen risk of smoking and the unchosen risk of being a terror victim.

A fourth problem is that Mueller seems unaware of domestic terror cells in America. In fact, he claims that there aren't any. Readers can find discussions of domestic terror cells on web sites such as Jihad Watch, that of Middle-East scholar Daniel Pipes, and elsewhere that offer lengthy discussion of domestic terror cases.

The core problem with Mueller's book is that he simply wasn't qualified to write it. He makes error of both scholarship and fact that no undergraduate students of terrorism would make. He might as well have written a book on 19th century French literature or on plate tectonics -- his discussion and his conclusions would have been equally thoughtful.



19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

Required Reading for Chicken Licken, 2007-03-25
This is an interesting, valuable and important book, and I'm fairly sure almost no-one has or, for that matter will, read it. I will do what I can to change that.

John Mueller is from a venerable but sadly rare tradition of Academic commentators: the skeptics. It's that perspective he lends to our "troubled times" and over this course of this tidily executed, thoroughly sourced and entertaining book, Mueller systematically demolishes much of the public hype which holds us up in airport terminals, eats up our tax dollars and does its level best to prevent us sleeping soundly in our beds.

He makes, and repeats, a point which many otherwise perfectly sensible and well-informed commentators can't fathom: The biggest source of terror in our lives is not terrorists in Afghan caves, but our own politicians and media pundits constantly blathering about them. The terrorists themselves cause sporadic but, in fact, very limited mayhem.

The thousands of hungry mouths who comprise the "terrorism industry" on the other hand - the politicians, civil servants, defence contractors, security analysts and media commentators - each of whom is primarily interested in justifying his own existence or convincing us to open our wallets - each has a vested interest in persuading us we should be soiling rather than sleeping in our beds. Their statements, therefore, we should take with a pinch of salt.

But even though we all know we ought to, we don't. We acquiesce: we put up with speculative, unsourced, unattributed, and frequently credulous nonsense - we tolerate queues and being unneccesarily fondled at airports, hikes in tax rates and restrictions on our civil liberties. John Mueller's book sets out to provide us a reality check and ask, pointedly, why we are so easily prepared to do that.

By way of preface Mueller lists a series of items which ought to be - but aren't - conventional wisdom. They're all very big points, among them:
* Terrorism just doesn't do much damage considered in any reasonable context (nine times as many Americans are struck by lightning in the average year as are killed by terrorists)
* Even where Terrorism has horrendous results, it tends to be one-off events (despite six years of anxiety, there has not been another terrorist attack in the U.S. *at all*, let alone one on the scale of 9/11)
* Catastrophic events are by their nature are hard to repeat (never again will a plane full of unsuspecting passengers sit and allow unarmed men to fly them to their deaths without intervening, since the assumption "we'll be used as hostages so we're safe for now" no longer holds)
* Terrorist actions tend to be counterproductive on almost every level any way: far from throwing New York into chaos, panic and Hobbesian brutality, the direct and immediate result of 9/11 was the sudden blossoming of compassion, cooperation and cohesion in the city on a completely unprecedented scale - a place not usually known for its neighborliness or Samaritan spirit
* The cost (both human and economic terms) of the "War on Terror" has been far greater than the cost of Terrorist actions themselves (even taking into account the financial losses sustained in the capital markets)
* The "War on Terror", being as it is a war on an idea, is utterly unwinnable. There is no practical way of eradicating the possibility of individuals, for whatever reason, engaging in entirely destructive acts of violence. Like road fatalities (of which there are tens of thousands each year in the US) the risk of terrorist attacks are a fact of life in built up areas which we should take reasonable, dispassionate, measures to minimise bearing in mind the opportunity costs of doing so.

Mueller doesn't take an (overtly) political position - his arguments are not based on views about foreign policy nor the moral rights and wrongs of the situation, but an statistical analysis of the costs and risks of the terrorist threat, and acknowledgment of the personal agendas which inevitably inform those who shout loudest. "If it bleeds it leads" - people don't buy newspapers to read good news, so in a competitive market it is no surprise if newspapers tend to dwell on worst case scenarios. Yes, terrorism is dreadful, Mueller says, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep it in perspective.

In short, this book is a long overdue and much needed dose of common sense.

Olly Buxton

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