Conor Friedersdorf asks us to see the flip-side of legitimate fear of terrorism:
Our thought process is as follows: terrorism is a threat, and it justifies waging war anywhere on earth where there are terrorists. As we all know, however, it's impossible to kill every last terrorist. Thus the war on terrorism rolls on. Even if we leave Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, it'll continue.
Give the hawks their due: terrorism is an ongoing threat to the United States. In fact, it's likely to pose a bigger threat with every year that passes, insofar as technological advances are permitting people with meager resources to obtain ever deadlier weapons. Heaven forbid they get a nuke or a killer virus. What the hawks fail to recognize, however, is that perpetual war poses a bigger threat to the citizenry of a superpower than does terrorism. Already it is helping to bankrupt us financially, undermining our civil liberties, corroding our values, triggering abusive prosecutions, empowering the executive branch in ways that are anathema to the system of checks and balances implemented by the Founders, and causing us to degrade one another.
Greenwald echoes the meme by watching Mark Shields on PBS:
Now that we killed bin Laden, we need civil-liberties-eroding measures like the Patriot Act more than ever. The notion that the death of bin Laden would trigger a winding down in the War on Terror — as though bin Laden was the cause of those policies rather than pretext for them — will prove to be one of the more absurd notions advanced on such matters.
The problem is that we do not have the same information the executive branch does and therefore have no concrete idea of the threat level. We have to trust them, and yet they seem not to trust us, by positing a risk-free security environment as the sine qua non of what Americans are prepared to live with. I'd be content to trade off some security for regaining some of the liberty we have lost since 9/11. But I do not even know if there is a trade-off.
This is the blind leading the afraid. There must be a better way.
The Dish 