It’s Not Paranoia: Be Very Afraid

The war on terror is a ploy. It’s not real. It’s not necessary. It’s just a horror show meant to keep us all cowed and passive while the government has its way. The Bush administration keeps us quaking in our slippers, issuing periodic vague alerts as an elaborate justification for its agenda of plundering the environment, demonizing nonwhite undesirables, quashing our civil liberties and attacking foreign countries with impunity.

This is a view that many people, including certain prominent intellectuals and Hollywood yahoos, appear to share: We live in a culture of fear, for no apparent reason except that Big Brother wants it that way.

This came up recently at a dinner party I attended, where the prevailing view around the table seemed to be that this cartoon worldview as depicted in provocateur Michael Moore’s film “Bowling for Columbine” was right.

“Why are we so afraid?” my companions asked. This struck me as an astounding question to pose in a post-Sept. 11 world, but one I nonetheless took seriously because these were intelligent, thoughtful people.

When I said the painfully obvious -- that we’re afraid because little more than a year ago terrorists attacked us catastrophically on our own soil and that we’re afraid because, duh, that’s why they call it terrorism -- I was greeted by a series of incredulous “yeah buts.”

Then it occurred to me that the problem wasn’t that these people weren’t aware of a terrorist threat, but that they didn’t really believe in it anymore. Or that, like communism, it had become an amorphous chimera whose danger they doubted. They had forgotten what exactly about this new form of terrorism was so terrifying.

Maybe they need to be reminded. Maybe we all do.

Islamist terror should scare us for very good reasons, the primary one being that it is genocidal and not preventable, a lethal combination. Al Qaeda is bent on annihilating us (the Western infidels), and it is very close to having the means to do so.

Captured videos show Al Qaeda operatives testing poison gas on dogs. We know that Osama bin Laden has tried to buy nuclear material on the black market. Though our enemies have obtained such weapons in the past, none before has been in a position to use them without facing retaliation. Mutually assured destruction has always been a deterrent to rogue nations.

Not so Al Qaeda because its members are blithely homicidal (they do not spare civilians, even their own) as well as suicidal. More important, they no longer are state-sponsored. They are widely dispersed, largely untraceable and therefore, as an entity, mostly unpunishable and possibly even unstoppable.

The danger is apocalyptic. What’s more, it’s insidious and ubiquitous. The terrorist diaspora has spread across the world in covert cells from Indonesia, Central Asia, East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula to Lackawanna, N.Y., where authorities arrested six suspected Al Qaeda operatives in September. They are indeed everywhere, around us and among us, striking randomly in New York City, Washington, Bali, Yemen, Kenya, Kuwait and Afghanistan and vowing more to come.

Is this fantasy? Is this paranoia? Hardly. Casualties are mounting on all sides, the enemy is invisible and we are the big fat designated target with nowhere to hide. I’d say we have cause to be very nervous.

This is not the Cold War. It’s far worse. Yet leftists are approaching it in the same spirit of insouciant denial with which they once dismissed the threat of communist spies in our midst.

As access to Soviet archives has shown, they were wrong then. And they’re wrong now. The evidence is in the rubble and the bodies.