THE HOMELAND SECURITY DILEMMA Fear, failure and the future of American insecurity Frank P. Harvey London and New York: Routledge, 2008. 284pp, US$140.00 cloth ISBN 978-0-415-77515-1The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were a defining event in the modern of international politics and security. They buried the of history hypothesis, the unipolar moment, and other illusions of global security under American leadership that had taken hold since the end of the Cold War. They led the United States and its allies into two costly wars and spawned a huge domestic fortification and surveillance effort in the name of homeland security.Yet for all the justifiable recriminations after 9/11, the attacks might easily have failed or been thwarted. Terrorists had tried, after all, to bring down the Twin Towers in 1993 with a truck bomb that proved too small for the task. Plots to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels in New York were uncovered and stopped. An alert US Customs officer halted Ahmed Ressam on his way from Victoria to Los Angeles to detonate a huge bomb at LAX. And Manila police stumbled into Ramzi Yousef's apartment after an accidental fire, ending an al Qaeda plot to bring down 11 trans-Pacific airliners. Any of these attacks could have changed in the way 9/11 did. Similarly, had the 9 /11 plot failed, the US and other governments would have continued for many years to assume that the terrorist threat was under control.How then should we evaluate Washington's ambitious efforts to bolster internal defenses against terrorism since 9/11? Was the US too complacent before September nth, or has it badly overreacted since then? This is the question that Frank P. Harvey tackles in his thoughtful book The Homeland Security Dilemma, which should be required reading for the many pundits who have cavalierly declared the entire enterprise a failure.As Harvey notes, the administration of President George W. Bush did indeed prevent further terrorist attacks in the US after 9/11, yet public confidence in his administration's handling of terrorism nonetheless declined. The fundamental dilemma of homeland security, he argues, is that more security spending has made Americans feel less safe. He cites many reasons for this paradox, the most important being that government successes in foiling terrorism are largely hidden from view or difficult to prove, while failures (even ones that have nothing to do with terrorism like hurricane Katrina) are spectacularly evident. Indeed, the failures look worse each time because the focus on homeland security leads the public to expect that disasters will be prevented. Even publicized successes, like the arrest of 18 terrorist suspects in Toronto in 2006, have the paradoxical effect of increasing rather than diminishing public fears.So how should responsible officials respond to this dilemma? Harvey is particularly devastating in his critique of John Mueller's recent book Overblown and other similar analyses that claim terrorism would shrink as a problem if we all just took a deep breath and recognized the miniscule probability of dying at the hands of terrorists. Even if such a strategy could be sold to the public (and Harvey explains persuasively why it could not), it would be irresponsible. There are many reasons, for example, why terrorist groups are unlikely to acquire and detonate a nuclear weapon, but the consequences would be so devastating that preventing such a catastrophe must be a top priority.For all of its flaws, however, the Mueller hypothesis at least holds out the hope that a more level-headed political leadership could set rational limits to the homeland security buildup. …