Again, this will be a callous, heartless diary. So if you are easily offended, or think that non-Londoners have no right to write about the kind of reaction we should all be having to the recent London bombings, do not read on.
I will make two simple points:
- you are much LESS likely to be a victim of terrorism than to win the first prize at the lotto/lottery;
- it is IMPOSSIBLE to prevent a terrorist from blowing itself up in the metro or a bus.
My conclusion is that we should NOT care so much about terrorism. Our perceptions suggest otherwise, so public policy with regards to terrorism should endeavor to correct these public perceptions rather than indulge them.
I will add up here one other element gefore you decide to read on: as the father of a 4-year old boy diagnosed with a brain tumor (probability of occurence: 1 in 15,000) and, as a result, a paralysed arm, I do know about the real-life consequences of senseless statistically-rare events.
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We all feel concerned by the London bombings, even if we are not Londoners, because many of us have been there, have been in the metro, possibly in the very same station(s), and even if we have not, we have been in the metro of our own city or of other cities we visited. So it
could happen to us. But the problem is that we seem to have a very poor grasp of how likely that is. Just like the lottery, it is a very, very, very unlikely event that yet seems likely to happen to
us - so we pay for lottery tickets, and we fear a metro bombing and make a big deal out of it even though it will never happen to us.
About 1 billion passenger trips are made per year in the London Underground, or slightly under 3 million per day. So, if you consider that there were 700 victims from the bombings, that's less than a chance in a million to be a victim over the year. Even if you take the number for that day, you had less than one chance in 5,000 to be a victim if you took the London metro that very day, and one in 50,000 to be killed. Again, that's pretty much the same numbers for the daily probability you have to be injured or killed in a car accident - except that these are true every single day of the year, every year. Over the past 4 years, you were 1,000 times more likely to be injured or killed by a car accident than by a terrorist attack, and there is no reason to think it will be different in the coming years.
Look at this page: taiing the school bus (the best proxy for the metro in that list) is actually less dangerous than living - i.e. you are less likely to die riding public transport than most other activities you can do in your life.
But what about intent? Terrorists are actively trying to kill us, whereas car accidents are just random, and an accepted risk. There is actually a very simple response to that: terrorists are trying to kill randomly, and thus it absolutely makes sense to talk about it in statistical terms. To which will be responded that it is really callous to treat the victims of these acts - and their close ones - as mere statistics. To which I will reply that car victims and their families suffer just as horribly, on an individual basis, as the victims of terrorist accidents and their families. Go tell the mother of a kid who was killed by a drunk driver in an out-of-control car that that death is less significant than that from a terrorism act. For us, as individuals, terrorist attacks are just as random, unpredictable and unavoidable than car accidents - only much rarer.
The intent should be taken into account in the prosecution of the crime (sentences should be harsher than for a road death) and in the preventive measures that should be taken (about which more below), but not in how we organise our life.
Thus the comparison with the lottery: we all feel concerned (or anyway those that buy lottery tickets or take the metro, i.e. a significant portion of the population), there is the similarly inflated hope or fear that it will happen to us, and, well, it simply doesn't.
So there it is: terrorism is NOT A STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT EVENT FOR OUR COUNTRIES.
That does not mean that we should do nothing about it, but that hard fact should heavily influence what we actually do about it - and what we should NOT do about it.
Which brings us to the second fact above: it is physically impossible to prevent a suicide bombing in public transportation. The Israelis have the most experience in that, and despite very efficient secret services, extremely tight security procedures, and a vigilant population, they were never able to prevent all attempts. In massively bigger systems like big city metros with relatively rare attacks, it is even harder. You cannot control everybody (for comparison - you have 100 times more people everyday in the London metro than taking a plane in Heathrow, one of the busiest airports around, so you cvan imagine the impact of the same security controls), and people simply are not vigilant when nothing has happened for a couple of years. Sure, we'll have heigtened security and care in the coming few weeks, and, as nothing happens, we'll slowly go back to our normal state - as we should.
So public policy should focus on the following things:
- prevent non-suicide attacks: that's mostly possible by doingthings like looking out for abandoned bags and asking people to do the same
- make suicide attacks more difficult, through random controls, and painstaking intelligence work amongst likely groups (something our intelligence services, at least in Europe, have at least 20 to 30 years of experience, experience they have been sharing with the US as much as they could in recent years);
- work on the root causes: the West's unseemly support for the dictatorial regimes of the Middle East, and its inability to work towards a real peace in the Israeli-Palestine conflict (not much done there);
- in the meanwhile, not do anything else to make this more significant than it is (Bushco and Blair certainly did not take this one to heart...)
This is not a civilisation clash. This is not a war. This a small group of extremist militants that uses assymetric warfare to get out governments to react to them. They CANNOT hurt us themselves, but they can easily
cause us to harm ourselves by our knee-jerk reactions.
Think of them as mosquitoes. Sure, it stings, but if you start trashing your room to try and swat them all, what will have done the most damage in the end?
Similarly, if we start curtailing our civil liberties, spending billions on a mostly useless security apparatus, and hundreds of billions in meaningless wars that destroy our forces and create more enemies than we ever had, who is doing the real damage. Worst of all, if we live in a climate of fear, stop trusting neighbors that look foreign or different, and suffer from needless worrying, we will just have spoilt our lives and given the enemies a very real victory.
The rational reply is not to "go shopping", but to simply put such terrorism in perspective, not let it define our foreign policy and give it the importance it does not deserve. They are mosquitoes. You do not go on a war on mosquitoes when you have been bitten. You put some balm on the bite, you get a mosquito net or similar preventive medicine, and you get on with your life. You don't make this the overriding element of your life, and you don't scare everybody around you into doing the same.
Our governments have a responsibility to keep things in perspective, even we cannot do it easily ourselves. They should tell us not to worry instead of inflaming us, because the only losers are whoever we go bash in "revenge" (today, Iraqis) and our own domestic rights. They should certainly reinforce the police and intelligence work to find perpetrators after and before, respectively, they strike, and increase their international cooperation. They should conduct foreign policies that help reduce the problem instead of increasing it.
I'll address one more argument that has been given in my previous diary: what about a terrorist nuclear attack? To which I will reply that the only kind of wmd attack which will cause really statistically significant damage is a real nuclear bomb. Neither a dirty bomb, nor a bioterrorist attack are likely to cause more damage than 9/11 in real terms. A nuclear bomb certainly would, so we should certainly focus on preventing that, and the easiest way to do that is to control the necessary nuclear material, all of which is controlled by a small number of States, which are susceptible to diplomacy. Instead of pissing them off, we should do 2 things: (i) make absolutely clear that they will be help directly responsible if their material is ever used in a nuclear bomb (and the physics of these bombs makes it a certainty that we can identify exactly where the materials came from) and (ii) work with them now to make sure that these materials are secure and that we acknowledge their control over it. That means two different things again: (a) give enough money to the Russians to keep their scientists happy and their bombs secure and (b) give the appropriate security guarantees to countries like Iran and North Korea. (It also means we whould stop attacking non-nuclear armed countries...) I personally would be much more comfortable with Iran and Pakistan as openly acknowledged and accepted nuclear powers, with the corresponding rights and responsibilities, than the current twilight zone situation we have.
But that involves painstaking nuclear diplomacy, something our governments are thankfully mostly good at, but which is hard to publicise as a manly reaction to terrorism. It would also require some changes in our stance to a number of countries.
I'll just add a word about our energy policy. The biggest reason we have fucked up diplomacy with the Middle East is because of the oil that happens to be there, and that we are so desperate to get that we did and still do a lot of silly thing to and with the people that happen to live there, acts to which they have reacted, among other things, via the large scale use of terrorism. How about we did something about this, if we care so much about terrorism, by reducing our dependency on oil and thus our need to meddle in these countries. How about we actually showed that we care by all doing what we can at our individual level by adopting energy saving behaviors. Now that would be a rational response.