The greatest enemy of freedom, we now are learning, is not international terror but fear of international terror. In the name of security, democracies, not least the United States, have curtailed the liberty of their subjects. This fearful restraint of rights which are supposedly fundamental to the ordering of democratic societies is a profound contradiction that gives an immediate victory to international terror.
In the name of security, the Bush administration has exceeded presidential powers and authorized phone tapping without the knowledge of a judge. It has created a Department of Homeland Security — supposedly to coordinate the efforts of America’s many intelligence agencies. In reality this expensive new layer of bureaucracy is little more than a political sop — a tenuous feel-good factor for an anxious electorate. There are some in the US Coastguard who resent and despair of this new cadre of officials who have barged into the matter of port security. With much justice, the Coastguard point out that some of the billions being spent by Homeland Security could more usefully be deployed to replace their ageing fleet of vessels.
Some 3,000 people died in the 9/11 atrocities which were spectacular acts of wickedness. But the loss of life hardly compares to the annual carnage on the world’s roads as a result of accidents. It certainly bears no comparison with the annual African death toll from AIDS. But scared populations in democracies have lost all sense of proportion. They have been prepared to let the effectively minor consequences of a terrorist outrage change the fundamental values which on Sept. 10, 2001, they would have held so dear.
This has happened before. The name Wayne Morse is now largely forgotten in the US. Morse was an anti-communist Republican senator who refused to buy into the “Reds under the Bed” hysteria of the McCarthy era in the 1950s, three hysterical years that were arguably the most shameful episode in US history. Morse was threatened and vilified for his stand on behalf of civil liberties and in the end, to his subsequent admitted regret and shame, compromised his position. But this fundamentally brave man survived politically. In 1967 he was one of only two senators who voted against US involvement in Vietnam after the fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which North Vietnamese patrol boats were falsely accused of attacking a US destroyer. He voted against involvement because he predicted catastrophe.
The similarity with the phony WMD allegations against Saddam’s Iraq is striking. So too are the disastrous consequences for US arms in both campaigns. In both cases US presidents corralled a nervous citizenry into supporting a belligerent course of action thanks to a tissue of falsehoods. Concomitant with this deception was the nonsense that in order to defeat “the enemy”, the United States would have to compromise on values it thought it held dear. If the Americans and the Europeans too focused on their liberties rather than on their fears, they would be better armed to defeat Al-Qaeda.
