Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. National Center for Disaster Preparedness, How Americans Feel about Terrorism and Security: Two Years after 9/11 (New York: Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, 2003), see also Siobhan Gorman, “Shaken, Not Stirred,” National Journal, September 13, 2003, 2776–81. 2. Data are readily available on this at http://pollingreport.com. 3. Brian Ross, “Secret FBI Report Questions Al Qaeda Capabilities,” ABC News, ABC March 9, 2005, http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=566425&page=1. Accessed 11 March 2005. 4. Michael Ignatieff, “Lesser Evils: What It Will Cost Us to Succeed in the War on Terror,” New York Times Magazine, May 2, 2004. 5. Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 146–47. Ignatieff patiently explains in some detail how we will destroy ourselves in response. Although Americans did graciously allow their leaders one fatal mistake in September 2001, they simply “will not forgive another one.” If there are several large-scale attacks, he confidently predicts, the trust that binds the people to its leadership and to each other will crumble, and the “cowed populace” will demand that tyranny be imposed upon it—and quite possibly break itself into a collection of rampaging lynch mobs devoted to killing “former neighbors” and “onetime friends.” The solution, he thinks, is to crimp civil liberties now in a desperate effort to prevent the attacks he is so confident will necessarily impel us to commit societal, cultural, economic, and political self-immolation. Ignatieff, 46–48. 6. Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 19–20, 375–76. Also see the excellent review essays on this literature by Daniel Byman in World Politics, October 2003, and National Interest, Spring 2005. 7. Paul Pillar, “Counterterrorism after Al Qaeda,” Washington Quarterly (2004): 102, 106. 8. Russell Seitz, “Weaker Than We Think,” American Conservative, December 6, 2004. Interestingly, historian H.P. Willmott observes of the Japanese army in World War II that “not a single operation planned after the start of the war met with success.” H.P. Willmott, Empires in the Balance (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1982), 91. 9. For a discussion see Robert H. Johnson, Improbable Dangers: U.S. Conceptions of Threat in the Cold War and After (New York: St. Martin's, 1994). I very much share Crenshaw's enthusiasm for this book. It is now out of print, but by arrangement with the author and publisher I have been able to make it available on the web in PDF form at no charge. Information is at http://psweb.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/jmueller/books.html. 10. On Allison, see my article above. On Perle, see his comments on “Kim's Nuclear Gamble,” Frontline, PBS, April 10, 2003. 11. John and Karl Mueller, “Sanctions of Mass Destruction,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999, 43–53. 12. For a thoughtful examination of this puzzle, see Clark R. Chapman and David Morrison, Cosmic Catastrophes (New York: Plenum, 1989), chapter 19. For analysis by one whose attention has been arrested by such dark possibilities, see Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 13. At least according to http://unisci.com/stories/20022/0523024.htm. Accessed 30 July 2005. 14. John Mueller, Remnants of War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), chapters 6, 9. As David Keen has observed, counterinsurgency forces have “repeatedly alienated their potential civilian supporters, and this has often continued even when evidently counter-productive from a military point of view,” and clever rebels—as in Kosovo—have often sought to provoke them in hopes that it “will have precisely these counter-productive effects.” David Keen, The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, Adelphi Paper No. 320, 1998), 21. 15. For a discussion, see John Mueller, “Simplicity and Spook: Terrorism and the Dynamics of Threat Exaggeration,” International Studies Perspectives 6, no.2 (2005): 208–24.