Anti-Terror To Pro-Liberty
by George Liebmann
Issue 119 - November 5, 2008

The present financial crisis should prompt the reflection that the greatest dangers to America arise not from external threats but from what we do to ourselves. Although both presidential candidates have sounded uncertain trumpets, there must surely be an end to our fixation on ‘Islamic terrorism’ as the major national problem rather than an irritant, but if addressed with a sanity heretofore often absent, only an irritant. With the campaigns safely over, it is now safe to say that the much greater threat is to our own liberties.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a former member of the Reagan administration remarked to me that the late President’s reaction would probably have been to emphasize the protection of liberty rather than security as the highest goal. Our leaders instead chose the opposite course, in the process propagating a ‘great fear’ with their ‘red, yellow, green’; alert system, acquiescing in and encouraging the fortification of even mid-size office buildings in provincial cities, and permitting an event staged by twenty suicide bombers with box-cutters, five years in the planning, to rearrange the American budget, foreign policy, and Constitution.

The broad extent of the measures taken might have been justified had the attacks come from a resurgent Russia or Germany. As a response to a plot hatched by isolated fanatics in caves in Afghanistan they were, to put it mildly, wildly disproportionate.

The illusion that these measures have ‘kept us safe’ ignores the purposes and aims of terrorism. Terrorism is a weapon of the weak. Properly dealt with, it isolates them further by exciting moral disapprobation and denying them sympathizers. Terrorism succeeds only if its targets allow themselves to be terrorized and alter their behavior in important ways. A cardinal principle in dealing with terrorists is not to make martyrs of them, thereby gaining them sympathizers. A second principle is not to assist them in reaching their objective: a weakened economy and a brittle, unpopular, and vulnerable centralized state

Martyrs we have produced in quantity: the naked prisoners of Abu Ghairab; the victims of torture and prolonged detention who have made belated appearances in American courts; two million Iraqi refugees and five million persons displaced within Iraq.

Our European friends, often much derided, have understood the basic principles. The British endured decades of terrorism from an Irish Republican Army indistinguishable from the rest of their population, and thereafter from native Muslims in the London transit system. They have forsworn prolonged detention without trial, having learned in Northern Ireland that it is counter-productive. Their Conservative party resisted efforts to extend periods of executive detention beyond 28 days. Their courts, unlike ours, have released numerous individuals found to have been improvidently accused; that some go on to commit bad acts is accepted as a normal consequence of a functioning justice system; their appellate courts, unlike ours, have not become citadels of delay and procrastination. The Germans have kept the system of provincial control of criminal justice that we insisted on in the post-war occupation, and did not panic in the face of a program of systematic assassinations of political leaders and industrialists carried on by the Baader-Meinhof Gang and Red Army Faction.

No British or European politician has proclaimed a purpose of the fight against terrorism to democratize the Middle East by force. None entertains the illusion that democracies are more pacific than dictatorships; there is too much in their own history to the contrary. They have not sought, openly or by stealth, to further centralize their policing institutions; unlike the American administration’s attempts, repudiated by Congress, to facilitate federalization of the National Guard and eliminate Senate influence over the choice of U.S. Attorneys. No European government has promulgated a series of morbid executive orders relating to succession to public office in the event of calamity, recognizing that the ability of local and provincial leaders to step into any breach is one of the features that give free governments strength. Neither the British nor the Germans have forgotten the central principle of Magna Charta and the due process clauses of the fifth and fourteenth amendments: that ‘liberty’ in the constitutional sense does not mean abortion rights or ‘gay rights’, or even a particular definition of property rights, but freedom from arbitrary confinement by the executive . As former Chairman Greenspan recently put it, "to be largely free of fear of a secret police arbitrarily hauling us off for interrogation for ‘crimes’ we never knew existed is something not to be taken for granted."

Let us hope that the new president founds national strength not on military action abroad and excessive executive power at home but on self-control abroad, law at home, and on the improvement of the education of the people. Let us hope that he fosters what De Tocqueville called "that salutary fear which makes men keep watch and ward for freedom, not ... that infirm and idle terror which depresses and enervates the heart."

George W. Liebmann, a Baltimore lawyer, is volunteer executive director of the Calvert Institute for Policy Research and the author of Diplomacy Between the Wars: Five Diplomats and the Shaping of the Modern World (Palgrave Macmillam, 2008).