Tag: terrorists

We will always have terrorists

The cancer of ISIS is metastasizing. As it losses its caliphate in the Levant, it is being reborn here and there across the globe. We will always have it or its successors or something like it, in the same way that we have always had gangs, mafia, murderers, and thieves. We can and should minimize their number and the damage they do but we will never eliminate them. The real issue is determining where we want the balance between freedom and security.

There are many reasons for the eternal existence of criminals and their crimes but one is that we are unwilling to create the police state and its repressive and intrusive measures that would be needed to eradicate them totally. In short, we prefer to live relatively free and accept some risks of terrorist acts relative to a safer alternative with significantly curtained freedom. As we evaluate government policies to protect us from terrorists, it is worth reviewing and keeping in mind where we have drawn the line between the risks of freedom and the restraints of greater and greater degrees of security. The line is always under review and adjusted a bit this way or that depending on conditions.

Some data from the U.S. helps us keep perspective. Over the past twelve months in the U.S. 104 people were killed by terrorists, 6 of whom were killed at the hands of Islamists. In comparison, 37,461 people died in automobile accidents in 2016. In response to the risk of death on the highway we regulate the right to drive, requiring a license, and enforce speed and other traffic regulations but we have not prevented people who qualify for a license from taking the risks of driving. A year ago I shared some interesting data on the causes of unnatural deaths in the U.S. in the following blog: https://wordpress.com/post/wcoats.blog/1025

On average 2,500 people choke to death per year while eating, yet the activity remains relatively unregulated.

Our Risks from Terrorists

“’The free movement of good people also means the free movement of bad people. Expect Schengen to dominate the EU debate next year,’ Nigel Farage, a leading British anti-E.U. campaigner, wrote on Twitter, referring to the area that allows for border-free travel in most of the European Union.” Washington Post /2016/12/23/

Fear of terrorists may destroy the EU or limit some of its finer features. In addition, government measures to protect us from terrorists often restrict our privacy and potentially our freedom from government interference with our lives. How should we determine the best balance between freedom and security when confronting terrorist threats? Answering that important question should start with putting the risk of death from terrorist attacks in broader perspective.

From 2001 to 2014, 3,043 people were killed on U.S. soil as the result of acts of terrorism. Almost all of them (2,990) died on 9/11/2001. An additional 369 Americans have died from terrorist acts abroad (excluding Afghanistan and Iraq) for a total of 3,412 souls. This is a terrible loss but should be seen in the perspective of other risks we face and accept.

Over this same period 440,095 died on American soil from guns. Put differently, for every person killed on American soil by terrorists, 1,049 were killed with guns.

Over the same period 534,137 people died in car accidents in the U.S. The good news is that deaths from car accidents have been steadily declining over this period, falling by 22%. Since its peak of 53,543 in 1969 deaths on American highways have falling by 39% . Given that automobile accidents are caused almost totally by human error, the expanding use of driverless cars will cause this figure to plummet.

Poisoning (drug overdoses) comes in second as the cause of deaths in the U.S. with around 39,000 deaths annually in recent years.

Falling kills around 25,000 people annually in the U.S. Most of these falls occur in the home. Two thousand seven hundred people die in fires annually and 2,500 choke to death per year while eating.

We rightly take practical measures to reduce all of these sources of unnatural death. Measures that pass the cost/benefit ratio test differ for each cause of death. In the case of guns, the right to bear arms is balanced with various approaches to regulating that right. Taking account of the use of guns for self-defense (as opposed to hunting), it is not obvious whether wider gun ownership increases or reduces public safety. No one has proposed outlawing cars.

Preventing terrorist attacks is devilishly hard. Attempting to guess who might commit a terrorist act (particularly in cases of isolated individuals who perform these acts alone – so called lone wolfs) aside from being basically impossible, can be extremely expensive with significant risks to our privacy and freedom as we have seen. I will not attempt to advise on how best to deal with the threat of terrorism. Rather, I want to stress how tiny the risk of a terrorist death is in both absolute terms and relative to all of the other accidental deaths we face. You are more than 100 times as likely to choke to death as to be killed by a terrorist and no one is proposing that we stop eating (which would also be fatal). Nor should we significantly restrict the freedom of movement in the world. We should not overly put our privacy at risk or significantly change our life styles and public policies in order to try to reduce the risks of terrorist attacks.

Emigration and Immigration

During the height of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall was built to keep the citizens of East Germany from leaving. We cheered as it and similar barriers to emigration from the Soviet to the Free World fell in 1989. But the right to leave awkwardly confronts the right of countries to choose who may or may not enter. The right to leave has little meaning if you have no place to go.

Immigration, especially in the U.S. and Europe, has become a very divisive and difficult public policy issue. Individual freedom and economic efficiency call for the free movement of people. The common market of Europe (the European Economic Community) requires the free movement of labor, capital, goods, and services among its members. This is a desirable and worthy goal, but in typically “take no prisoners” fashion, the European Union has applied this requirement without serious attention to the needs and sensitivities of recipient countries with regard to who enters and works in their country.

During the cold war, when our sympathies were with those behind the Iron Curtain wanting to get out, the East-West participants in the CONFERENCE ON SECURITY AND CO-OPERATION IN EUROPE in Helsinki in 1975 agreed to:

“Make it their aim to facilitate freer movement and contacts, individually and collectively, whether privately or officially, among persons, institutions and organizations of the participating States, and to contribute to the solution of the humanitarian problems that arise in that connection,

Declare their readiness to these ends to take measures which they consider appropriate and to conclude agreements or arrangements among themselves, as may be needed,…”[1]

The emphasis at that time was on “cultural exchange” and cross border employment. The right to emigrate, however, was a step too far.

Aside from the political dimension of a “right to migrate,” there are clear economic efficiency benefits from the free movement of labor, supplementing those of the free movement of goods and capital.[2] Leaving aside the special case of war refugees, people generally move, whether within their own country or to a new one, in order to take better jobs. One exception is the Brits who vacation or retire to sunnier parts of Southern Europe. They obviously bring their pension incomes with them. The Polish plumbers in England and the Filipina nurses throughout the world increase their own incomes but fill worker needs in their host countries as well. In short, immigration is generally a win win scenario.

Within the overall annual limits the U.S. has placed on immigration, the number of H-B1 work visas (those requiring high skills or education) has been squeezed by preferences to extended family members of existing green card holders, thus depriving American industries of the skilled workers they need. If foreign workers are not allowed to immigrate here, capital will tend to move abroad in order to produce what is needed overseas and import it. Opposition to immigrants by workers who fear that they will lose their own jobs are generally misinformed or motivated by other concerns.

Immigration can also ease the economic problems associated with an aging and shrinking population. Japan’s population is now smaller than it was in 2000 but more problematic is that it is also older. The percentage of those over 65 in Japan’s total population has increased from 17% in 2000 to 24% now. Its working age population has declined 9%. As a result, a growing share of income from those working is required to support those who have retired. This problem has been partially addressed by an increase in the number of Japanese women entering the labor force, but it has not been enough. Relaxing Japan’s very restrictive immigration laws would also help. As a general rule most Japanese are quite insular and not comfortable living and working with foreigners. According to The Economist: “The country has remained relatively closed to foreigners, who make up only 2% of the population of 127m, compared with an average of 12% in the OECD.”[3] But Japan’s demographic crisis is leading to a gradual liberalization of immigration requirements.

Workers who worry about immigrants taking their jobs are generally confusing the impact of technology on some existing jobs and job skills, and to a lesser extent the impact of increases in cross border trade. The disruptive, but income enhancing, impact of ever changing technologies does impose costs on those who must learn new skills, but it is the relative openness of Americans to such innovation and growth that has made America the wealthy country that it is.

However, there are limits to the pace of change (and the pace of immigration) that societies can comfortably absorb. The backlash of public concern with immigration, which played an important role in Britain’s recent vote to leave the EU, seems to reflect the upsurge in the pace of immigration in recent years. It also seems to have reflected misinformation about the extent of British control over that pace. While EU membership carried an obligation to accept the free flow of labor into the UK from other EU member countries, only half of the UK’s immigration was from that source. The UK government fully controlled the other half.

Donald Trump has linked his anti-immigration rhetoric to public concern with terrorism. His campaign website states that: “Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”[4] This statement, dated December 7, 2015, has been followed by increasingly nuanced (if that word can be used for Trump) formulations of Trump’s anti-terrorist immigration “policy” proposals. On April 16, 2016, “Donald Trump’s speech on foreign policy Monday focused in large part on his proposal to suspend immigration from dangerous parts of the world and impose a new system of ‘extreme vetting’ that would subject applicants to questions about their personal ideology.

“We should only admit into this country those who share our values and respect our people,” said Trump, proposing what he called an “ideological screening test.”[5]

Typical of Trump’s campaign, he is either ignorant of existing visa requirements or deliberately misleading his audience. At least since 9/11, visa applications from all but a few countries, whether work or tourist, require an extensive background check.[6] All green card recipients swear to uphold the American Constitution and its laws. These are reasonable and appropriate requirements and they have been in place for a long time.

And then there are concerns about the preservation of a country’s culture, a legitimate goal. And then there is plain old racism and protectionism (the protection of monopoly returns to jobs from entry restrictions via closed shop unions or licensing requirements and to firms from import tariffs).

So what should a country’s immigration policy be? Aside from war refugees, whom the U.S. and most countries have taken a moral/humanitarian obligation to accept,[7] a country’s immigration policies should serve the economic needs of the country and respect the cultural traditions and security concerns of its citizen’s. The United States has benefited enormously and famously by accepting all people seeking a better life who are committed to our laws and values. However, pragmatism calls for regulating the rate of immigration to numbers that can be readily assimilated and limiting it to people of good character committed to abiding by our laws and values.[8]

U.S. immigration laws suffer from a number of defects. The overall number of immigrants permitted per year has not kept pace with the growth in our population and economy. But more important, as noted earlier, the number of actual workers, and especially high skilled workers, has been seriously crowded out by a preference for extended family members of existing residents (not core family, but extended family).

The U.S. has a special problem because of a relatively large number of illegal immigrants who have become an important part of our labor force for some time. It is important for our laws to effectively limit immigration to legal channels while enlarging those channels. It is also essential to resolve and normalize the status of those who came here illegally in the past. Several years ago a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators, the so-called Gang of Eight, fashioned immigration reform legislation that addressed these issues. Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 No one was happy with every provision of the draft law but it enjoyed broad support as a compromise and was passed by the Senate. It was never brought up in our dysfunctional House of Representatives.

The Senate immigration bill is a good basis upon which to renew the discussion of immigration reform in the U.S. Hopefully, following the November elections in the United States its Congress can return to the important business of fashioning laws that promote economic growth, well being, and fairness. This should include adopting a comprehensive immigration reform law.

[1] CONFERENCE ON SECURITY AND CO-OPERATION IN EUROPE FINAL ACT concluded in Helsinki, Finland, August 1, 1975, Page 38.

[2] https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2016/08/03/trade-and-globalization/

[3] The Economist, August 20, 2016, page 31.

[4] https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-statement-on-preventing-muslim-immigration

[5] The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/trumps-immigration-plan-raises-many-unanswered-questions/2016/08/16/754fba76-6382-11e6-b4d8-33e931b5a26d_story.html

[6] Some countries, such as England and German and other parts of Europe do not require a US visa to enter the US, though they should have criminal checks when applying for a Passport in their own country.

[7] Of the 4,812,993 Syrian refugees registered outside of Syria (several million displaced Syrians remain inside Syria) as of March 2016, only 7,123 have settled in the U.S as of July 2016. Germany has accepted 600,000 and about 4.5 million have been registered in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. It is estimated that there are an additional 2 million Syrian refugees that are unregistered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_of_the_Syrian_Civil_War

[8] Six years ago I wrote these proud words about our immigrants. Please note the last sentence: https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/a-nation-of-immigrants/ My comments on Syrian refugees almost a year ago are also worth rereading (in my humble opinion): https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2015/11/19/what-to-do-about-syrian-refugees/ as are my comments on immigrants and terrorists two months ago: https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2016/06/11/the-challenges-of-change-globalization-immigration-and-technology/

Fighting Terrorists, Part II

How do we as a free society protect ourselves from terrorists without in the process losing our freedom to our protectors? To the extent that terrorists are part of organized groups, our counter terrorism agencies need to identify and track the members of such groups with tools and techniques that do not violate our individual privacy. As such groups often operate internationally, the information collected should be shared with similar agencies in other trustworthy countries, though this has been and will remain challenging given quite different data standards from one jurisdiction to another. Individuals identified as part of a terrorist network, or suspected of such involvement, or suspected of having potential interest in such involvement should be closely watched wherever they are. The risks of such state scrutiny to our civil liberties are obvious, but should be pursued with proper oversight and care. The careful balancing of these conflicting objectives is a critical aspect of successful, largely free societies.

The above measures can be helpful up to a point, but they cannot eliminate all risks of terrorism even if we should give up all of our liberties to a security garrison state, which hopefully we still have the courage to resist. Throwing up our arms and bunkering down every time a terrorist blows himself and others up only feeds the enthusiasm of the terrorists. Just as even the safest societies have and will always have some criminals, we can never be fully free of terrorists. Effective policing and a respected, fair, and efficient court system will minimize but not eliminate crime. Most mass murders in the U.S. have been the work of mentally disturbed individuals. While we can do better at identifying and helping those who might otherwise undertake mass murders, we will never succeed fully even if we lock up every person we think has such potential, and those Americans who still value their freedom enough to face such risks would not want to live in such a society.

In the past, terrorist attacks and mass murders in the U.S. have been perpetrated by a wide range of groups and individuals, including white supremacists, black extremists, anarchists, anti-Semites, Puerto Rican nationalists, anti-abortion radicals, and the emotionally disturbed, to name a few. Today’s best identified terrorist risks come from the Islamic State (Daesh) and the radical Islamists who join them or are inspired by them, though the vast majority of deaths in the U.S. from mass murderers since 9/11 have not been at the hands of Muslims.

The threat from Daesh is particularly challenging because it is built upon religious beliefs. The radical religious beliefs of Daesh are incompatible with modern civilization.[1] Killing non-believers, whether by suicide bombings or otherwise cannot be justified by the religious or moral beliefs held by most of humanity, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, humanist, or whatever. Virtually all terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11 have been, and can be expected to be, committed by Americans. Of those few claiming to act in the name of Islam, we have benefited from American Muslims reporting radicalized, potential terrorists in their midst to the authorities. This helps explain why so few of these attacks have been by Muslims. Attempting to protect us from such attacks via the police methods noted above cannot stop those who are driven by what they believe is right in the eyes of their god (or those who are mad more generally). They are prepared and even eager to die for those beliefs. If some individuals are willing to blow themselves up for what they believe in, it will never be possible to totally prevent them from occasionally achieving their goal.

Deterring radicalized Islamist youth from their terrorist plans would require convincing them that their understanding of Islam is wrong. Given their willingness to die for their beliefs, undermining those beliefs is likely to be insufficient, though it is important. Virtually all young people seek an understanding of the purpose of their lives and moral values to guide their behavior. Muslims are best equipped and best placed to convince radical Islamists that their understanding of their religion is wrong. But all of us through our Churches, Mosques, Synagogues, schools and our culture more generally must do a better job teaching our young the moral values, and where appropriate the religious beliefs, that should guide their and our behavior toward our fellow man appropriate to living together in the modern civilized world. Coercion will not be enough.

[1] See my earlier blog: https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/fighting-terrorists/

Life and Death in Boston

We will all die and can hope that our passing and the passing of our loved ones will be peaceful and painless. It is sad when anyone dies prematurely. It is very disturbing when someone’s death is the result of a deliberate act. And is seems worse yet, when the targets of murder are random. How should we react to each of these?

I am struck by how differently we have reacted to the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon that killed (initially) 3 innocent soles and injured over 180, the Texas fertilizer plant blast two days later that killed 14 (at the time of this writing) and injured about 200, and the 88 deaths on American highways on average every day (down from the high of 150 per day in 1972). No one would think to propose closing all of the highways, yet much of the area around Boston and Cambridge has been locked down (a term I know very well from my many trips to Iraq and Afghanistan) for over a day.

There is of course an important difference between the dangers of driving and a 19-year-old killer on the loose. However, Ed Crane’s comment (in a private email) introduces what I wish to reflect on: “Since when does the government shut down half of Massachusetts (stay in your house!) to catch one 19-yr-old?  If everyone in Boston had a gun there would be no shut down.  Just a dead 19-yr-old.” Ed is the founder and until last month the President of the Cato Institute here in Washington D.C.

Where it is possible and/or necessary to take precautionary measures to protect the public safety, it is prudent to do so. However, zero risk is not the standard we live by or automobiles and much else would be banned. Were we safer or did we feel safer a few years ago when signs and laud speakers kept announce that the city was code orange so be on alert?  At best such measures were silly and at worst they were part of a pernicious campaign to make us all feel more dependent on the government.

Public safety is a legitimate concern, but needs to be pursued sensibly. But what about the impact of our reactions on those wishing to terrorize us? We do not yet know what motivated the Chechnyan brothers Tamerlan, 26, and Dzhokhar, 19, Tsarnaev to blow up some joggers. Young Dzhokhar lived in the United States most of his life. What was his point? If it was to terrorize us, for whatever reason, our reactions have fulfilled that goal beyond his wildest dreams.

This brings to mind another recent case where our reaction to intimidation has surely rewarded the intimidator, another near child, beyond any reasonable expectation. I am speaking of (probably) 29 year old man child Kim Jong Un, the ruler of North Korea.  It is only prudent for the U.S. government to take defensive measures in response to the daily threats coming from young Kim. But why reward his behavior so loudly with such importance and publicity.

Consider the comments by Professor Andrei Lankov from Seoul’s Kookmin University: “The North Koreans are very, very rational. … Why do the foreign media, why do people overseas consider Kim Jong Un to be suicidal? … If he attacks he will be dead in 10 or 15 minutes and he knows it perfectly well. He is not suicidal. He is a young boy who is madly in love with his wife, who loves fast cars and a slice of pizza. And the people around him are not suicidal. They are hard-nosed, cynical Machiavellians who survived decades in the cutthroat world of a Stalinist palace. … They are not ideological zealots. They are just brilliant manipulators.” “Threats and crises are just normal North Korean diplomacy”

I am not suggesting that it is easy or obvious what measures should be taken to keep the risks of living in balance with its joys. But life has always been a risky undertaking. If our big brother government insists on trying to reduce its risks to near zero, which is not possible anyway, it will not be worth living.