A Culture of Fear

MANIFESTO

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
&mdash H. L. Mencken
While Zbigniew Brzezinski didn't exactly distinguish himself when he served as Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, he's recently shown himself to be an insightful critic of the Bushies. His newly published book, Second Chance, is receiving accolades, and his op-ed piece in today's Washington Post is certainly noteworthy.

In the newspaper column, Brzezinski maintains that

The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

... The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare -- political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.

But the little secret here may be that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a "war on terror" did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Support for President Bush in the 2004 elections was also mobilized in part by the notion that "a nation at war" does not change its commander in chief in midstream. The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being "at war."

Indeed, the Bushies have used this position to justify any number of anti-American practices—from spying on American civilians to an inane war in Iraq to setting up torture chambers overseas.

While Brzezinski refers to the complicity of too many Americans in all of this, he doesn't emphasize it enough. While more than 60% of Americans now feel that the occupation of Iraq is being mishandled, not enough of them felt that way in 2004. The Bushies had already shown their utter incompetence in the first 21 months of the invasion and occupation; it speaks volumes about the species that 50% of the voting populace thought that somehow the Bushies' plans would get better as time went on.