Georgia10 wrote a very interesting story yesterday about the "War on Terror," and that got me thinking about a better way to frame it. Let's try this on for size and see what people think about it.
As much as president Bush has done to fight his "War on Terror," the public is still dissatisfied, still doesn't feel safe. To take away the weapon of fear, we need a whole new mindset.
You have to give president Bush credit for using all the military tools at his disposal to fight terrorism. He's certainly spared no expense. He adopted the "War on Terror" meme and tried to fight terror as if it were a small war. That didn't work so he expanded the war, and is still threatening to expand it into a bigger and bigger war, even calling it "World War III."
But the reason his policy isn't working is that he has a mindset that's too narrow. We forget that the Soviet Union ran its civilian government on a military model, with top-down planning and secrecy, based on fear of the United States. That sure didn't work. Our system worked better because we take advantage of the smarts of hundreds of millions of people, using open institutions such as the free market and free press.
We need a really different model, a whole new and more resourceful mindset, if we're going to be successful fighting terrorism. The military is still part of it, but there's much more to it. We need to give every individual, every business large and small, and every civilian institution a chance to try to help. We need to build a free market economy around it, make it benefit us and not just constrain us. We need to fight terrorism like a disease.
How do we do that? The same way we create any other market for something people want, in this case security. The same way markets are built around public health threats.
First, the supply side. We seed the creative side of the market by making a lot of information available to a lot of people in universities, research labs, and private industry. We need to stop worrying about what the terrorists know, and trying to keep secrets. If there are hundreds of millions of us working together openly to develop new ideas, and only a few thousand of them having to stay in hiding, we'll always know far more than they do. Let's really exploit that advantage.
We also need institutions that guide an orderly process of research and technology transfer, that keep the market open and keep fueling private sector creativity. A Centers for Disease Control for terrorism, and professional associations to run conferences and publish research openly. This will keep the industry from being captured by narrow interests or donning blinders. It's essential that the flow of ideas stay fresh, that we stay far ahead of the terrorists in creativity. The market does a much better job of that than the government.
The market also needs a demand side. The Federal government is certainly a part of that, but we need more. Individuals want products and information that help them feel more in control of their own security. The color-coded Homeland Security threat system gives us very little information and just makes people feel less secure, because it doesn't allow them to do anything to get some control. People want and need a much wider array of information products, and would be willing to pay for it in the same way as they pay for information about celebrities, hobbies, health, and politics. State and local governments, and corporations also are willing to pay for products that improve their security and lower their risk.
Most of all, let's not try to dictate to the market what the products and services need to be. This is a place where we have to have some trust in market forces, where government should do less, not more. That's one huge difference between the "War on Terror" meme, where we rely solely on government for command and control, and the "Terrorism as Disease" meme, where we rely on every part of society, public and private, to do its part and decentralize decision-making.
Sure, the US hasn't experienced any big terrorist attacks in five years. So why is the public so unhappy? Because our government's policy is doing the work on behalf of the terrorists. If we're spending $300 billion, killing tens of thousands of people, losing our freedom, building a wall of secrecy and distrust between the government and its citizens, why would terrorists need to do any more? Osama bin Laden is like anyone else, happy to sit in his cave and read the newspaper if someone else will do his work for him.
Just as terrorists can use a commercial airliner as a guided missile, they can use a government as a weapon. Just like the passengers of United flight 93, we can stop it once we realize what's going on.
When we give government full control of the response to terrorism, it's like confining ourselves to the tiny world of single metal tube, like the passengers on flight 93. Working from that position our options are extremely limited. All we can do is make it crash. We put ourselves in a much stronger position if we don't confine ourselves in this way, but instead treat terrorism like a disease where government and industry work together openly to respond, where 300 million people and the full weight of our universities and businesses are fighting alongside those brave passengers.