The College Fix

Is the war on terror irrational?

In his recent TEDx lecture, “The Irrationality of Politics,” Professor Michael Huemer asserts that it is.

As a two-time veteran of the conflict, I have more than half a mind to agree with him. But Huemer, a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado and an important libertarian thinker, missed the mark in his address.

I first saw Huemer’s 14-minute lecture some months ago when a link to a YouTube video of his address circulated around the CU philosophy department via email. That video has now garnered nearly 24,000 views.

Only the first couple minutes address the global war on terrorism, but these minutes deserve a response. Since one has not yet materialized, I will supply one here.

Huemer’s first slide shows the number of American deaths by terrorism between 1968 and 2009, citing statistics from the Rand Corporation. We see two red spikes: a little one over 1995 when the Oklahoma City bombing occurred, and a much taller spike where the September 11, 2001, attacks register. All other events are too small to register.

Huemer notes that the approximately 3,200 terrorism deaths of U.S. citizens look small next to the approximately 802,000 total U.S. murder fatalities that happened over the same time period. This raises the question of whether terrorism deserves so much attention.

Huemer has a point, but he speaks too quickly when he states that the number of Americans who have died from terrorist acts represents “the cost of the problem that we have to deal with.”

Philosopher Michael Walzer notes in his 2004 book Arguing about War an important difference between terrorism and ordinary murder: “Terrorists are like killers on a rampage, except that their rampage is not just expressive of rage, it is purposeful and programmatic.”

If terrorists’ purposes are achieved, these may be reckoned among the costs of terrorism.

A case can be made that jihadist terrorism has led to considerable restrictions on free speech regarding religion matters, and even equality under the law. Expressions offensive to Muslims elicit swift condemnation from public officials and serious talk of the need for prudent restrictions on free speech.

For example, when the obnoxious Florida pastor Terry Jones proposed to burn 200 copies of the Qur’an in 2011, he was under considerable pressure from the government to desist for fear of violent reprisals. Speech offensive to other religions meanwhile goes unnoticed or, in the case of Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” – a picture of a crucifix in a jar of the artist’s urine – publicly funded.

In his lecture, Huemer also compared the deaths caused by terrorism with the deaths caused by the war on terrorism. He noted the war on terror has claimed the lives of nearly 6,300 U.S. troops. The picture looks even grimmer when we consider the 236,000 foreigners who have been killed in the course of the war on terror.

Huemer’s summary is acerbic: “If you have a policy that kills 70 times as many people as the problem you are trying to solve, that’s usually like a prima facie indicator that it might be an irrational policy.”

The trouble is that Huemer compares domestic terrorism deaths with global casualties of the war on terror. Former President George W. Bush was clear that the global war on terrorism is – as the name suggests – a campaign for the worldwide elimination of terrorism. And the fatalities of that problem are much greater in absolute terms, even though they are still small in comparison with the global fatalities of crime, poverty and some other causes of death.

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) database contains detailed records of about 11,000 fatal terrorism incidents in the Middle East, 3,000 in Pakistan, 2,000 in India, 2,000 in Sri Lanka, 1,300 in South America, and 4,000 in Europe since 1970.

Huemer chalks every one of the deaths of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars up to the war on terror, even though many of them resulted from unambiguous acts of terrorism.

According to START, Iraq has suffered more than 5,000 fatal terrorist attacks, with an unusual proportion of high-casualty incidents. Some of these deaths should register as terrorism deaths.

This is not to say that American policy has no share in the blame for creating this situation – it is no accident that nearly all of these events happened after the 2003 invasion – but to emphasize the blame is shared. Were it not for terrorism disrupting the reconstruction, the results might have been different.

Not only does Huemer’s telling unfairly place the whole blame at the feet of American anti-terrorism policies, it also fails to distinguish between the follies of the war on terror from the folly of various policies within the war on terror.

Arguably, Iraq might have turned out very differently had the U.S. implemented reconstruction more effectively. A criticism of the decision of occupying forces to disband the Ba’ath Party, for instance, isn’t a criticism of the War on Terror per se.

A final point is that Huemer does not, in his lecture, define “the war on terror.” By default, he identifies it with the policies of the George W. Bush administration, a very narrow construal. After all, some critics of the administration accepted the need for a war on terror, but disagreed with some policies done in the name of it, especially the invasion of Iraq.

So while I agree with Dr. Huemer on many points about the folly of our global war on terrorism, his hasty treatment of the subject in his lecture distracts from his primary message—the imperative of ending political irrationality.

Fix contributor Spencer Case is a philosophy graduate student at the University of Colorado. He is a U.S. Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and an Egypt Fulbright alumnus.

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