'Terrorism': Bush II redefines the term. (Of Several Minds).

Foreign ministers of the G-8 leading industrial nations met in Paris in early May to affirm that terrorism remains a "pervasive and global threat." Just a few days earlier, however, the U.S. State Department had announced that terrorism is at its lowest level in thirty-three years. That news had failed to reach the G-8 foreign ministers. One wonders if anything would have changed had it reached them. The war against terrorism, like the war against Iraq, functions in all but total indifference to facts.

An unnamed "senior Bush administration official" told the press at the time that he would be amazed if weapons-grade plutonium or uranium were found in Iraq. It was also unlikely, he said, that biological or chemical weapons material would be found. He said that the United States never expected to find such a smoking gun.

What was the Iraq war all about then? The official said that what Washington really wanted was to seize the thousand nuclear scientists in Iraq who might in the future have developed nuclear weapons for Saddam Hussein. He described them as "nuclear mujahideen." The preventive war, according to this redefinition, was not directed against an actual problem, but one that might have appeared in the future.

One might have thought the official's statement merely an excuse for the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found, but this time it is President George W. Bush who seems not to have been told. He is still assuring Americans that the illicit weapons will turn up.

In its annual report to Congress on terrorism, the State Department said that the 199 recorded terrorist incidents last year represented a 44-percent drop from the previous year, and was the lowest total since 1969. There were no terrorist attacks at all in the United States, 5 in Africa, and 9 in Western Europe. Nearly all the rest were in Asia (99), Latin America (50), and the Middle East (29), to which now must be added the May 12 attacks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (Forty-one of the total 50 incidents reported as terrorism in all of Latin America last year were bombings of a U.S.-owned oil pipeline in Colombia.)

What the report actually indicates is that virtually all the incidents identified by the U.S. government as acts of "global terrorism" in 2002 occurred in four places: in Colombia; in Chechnya, with its separatist war; in Afghanistan, with the continuing low-scale war; and with the Palestinian intifada. Elsewhere, the Bali tourist bombing by Islamic extremists caused some 200 deaths.

Before September 11, 2001, virtually none of this would have been called terrorism. It would have been called civil insurrection, or nationalist or separatist violence. Since September 11, vast global significance has been attributed to such episodes. They have been made the rationale for state mobilization and the restrictions of civil liberties in the United States (and at the American penal colony at Guantanamo Bay). Elsewhere, we have heard rationalizations of methods of state repression that in the past might have won the concerned governments a place in another annual report the State Department makes to Congress: on international human-rights violations.

The distorted account of terrorism has had extraordinary psychological effect on many in the United States, causing them to think they are exposed to a degree of personal risk that has virtually no foundation in statistics, or, indeed, in common sense.

The New York writer who recently said that since the fall of Baghdad he has, for the first time since 2001, felt himself secure from being blown to bits by a terrorist bomb while crossing Times Square, is one such case. Earlier this year, thousands of Americans, acting on warnings from the federal government, built themselves tape-sealed rooms stocked with provisions, including water and gas masks for a prolonged siege by terrorists. Polls indicate that American voters no longer really care whether weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq. The victory was not over a threat they really identified with Saddam Hussein. It was a victory over "terrorism." Now, in an official report few will read, or are expected to read, their government admits that terrorism is at its lowest level in three decades, and that the actual risk it poses is statistically negligible. At the same time, the same government tells them they must live in fear of "appalling crimes" and mass destruction. Where is this leading Americans?

[c] 2003, Tribune Media Services International.