Passive security measures cripple law-abiding citizens and don’t prevent terrorist actions.
       
By Angelo M. Codevilla
       
The search for security through “homeland defense” — comprising the establishment of a Cabinet-level czar, the passage of legislation expanding police powers and the proliferation of “security measures” around the country — will make the United States less secure and more divided against itself. The United States would become like Israel, which has coupled security measures more pervasive than Americans ever would accept along with attempts to get along with terrorist regimes.

This approach has undermined Israel’s national unity and worsened terrorism. U.S. officials are willing to risk following this hopeless path because they fear the alternative: encouraging the American people to take responsibility for our own safety and — as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has argued — ending enemy regimes.

Passive security does not work. The U.S. airport-security systems established in the early 1970s are pretenses, penetrable by minimal ingenuity. Even without suicide, modern technology makes it well-nigh impossible to keep bombs or guns off airplanes, never mind sharp edges, pointed objects, blunt instruments or garrote strings. Committing terrorist acts by impersonating officials is even easier. Well-trained men could have pulled off the Sept. 11 hijackings with bare hands.

Indeed, the security system established in 1972, which disarms everyone on board (except, of course, those who want to evade it) made the hijackers’ task easier. Recall that since 1972 the U.S. government has instructed passengers not to resist hijackers. The ordinary citizens aboard United Airlines Flight 93 — not anyone in the vast airport-security system — were the only ones who mitigated the disaster. They did so by fighting armed terrorists with bare hands, without anyone’s permission, and in violation of government regulations. Had the passengers on all the hijacked planes followed their instincts rather than regulations, had a few carried guns instead of cell phones, thousands of innocents still would be alive.

As a result of the events on United Airlines Flight 93, terrorists have learned that passengers now are unlikely to submit and that sheer numbers can overwhelm even handguns. Hence, the era of hijackings may well be over and air travel may be somewhat safer, though no thanks to security.

Our bureaucrats, however, seem to have learned nothing. Their ideology prohibits weapons, even on persons licensed to carry them. The directive that passengers are not to resist has not been revoked. Instead, they have ordered up more useless uniformed personnel doing useless checks, more stupid questions, more irrelevant regulations, more harassment of innocents and more laughter from terrorists.

Had the new security measures been in effect — no checking in at curbside or access to gates by nonpassengers, no knives for dining — they would not have prevented the last disaster. Nor can they prevent future ones. But security measures can and will destroy the peace essential to American life. Frantic to escape blame, our “securitycrats” will cancel or delay flights and flood airports with armed men on warnings of terrorist attacks. Thus, terrorists will be able to trigger chaos with a phone call while ordinary citizens can look forward to being herded around as potential criminals.

When terrorists tire of tormenting airlines, they can more easily coordinate attacks on school buses, or schools, just like they do in Israel. How easy would it be for a terrorist willing to commit suicide to buy a crop-duster aircraft, fill its tanks with anthrax spores and fly it over any of the stadiums in which Americans congregate each weekend? The “homeland-defense” measures that would follow such attacks would cripple education, agriculture and sports. The list of targets — malls, subways, etc. — is as long as the security measures are useless and counterproductive.

The U.S. government began going down the path of “security measures” in 1972 when President Richard Nixon decided to deal with airplane hijackings to Cuba not by destroying the Castro regime but by banning weapons from airplanes. Since then the United States has retreated behind metal detectors, bulletproof glass, concrete barriers, automatic roadblocks and security forces that look menacingly un-American. Yet the United States fought Nazi Germany, imperial Japan and most of the Cold War in greater safety and freedom without such measures. The difference is that American leaders today are so convinced that they have no right to put an end to the likes of Saddam Hussein’s, Fidel Castro’s or Yasser Arafat’s regimes, and so eager not to displease such “allies” as the Saudi royal family, that they do not mind changing the way America itself lives.

They also are made of different stuff. Today’s officials, who call “cowardly” the suicide bombers who give their lives to kill us but who themselves hide behind security measures even greater than the ones available to the rest of society, discredit themselves. They deserve pink slips, not greater power.

Israel suffers from an advanced case of “homeland defense.” In Israel, men with automatic weapons guard everything, the police can wiretap anyone at any time for any reason, and anyone can be stopped, frisked and taken into custody without “probable cause.” You can be held up at countless checkpoints at your questioner’s discretion. There are profiles for every possible offender. (I fit a profile because my passport had a stamp from Argentina.) Despite reassurances that this police power would not be used for harassing domestic political enemies, it is so used every day. People quickly get used to “security forces” bursting in to seize persons or evidence and to prosecutors who make dark inferences about intercepted conversations or informants’ reports. The Israeli left has learned to blame terrorist outrages on the right’s preferences for settlements and even Orthodox Jews’ high birthrates, while the right blames the left’s sponsorship of the “peace process” for the same thing. And everyone resents leaders for being less exposed to violence than the general population. So while Israelis gnaw at each other they let Arafat turn violence on and off like a faucet.

The uselessness of security measures is not news. Niccolò Machiavelli, hardly a civil libertarian or a devotee of weak government, explained in 1521 that security measures give enemies initiative and fixed targets against which to plan, but most of all they lead the government to treat everyone as a potential enemy. By thus demonstrating impotence, fear and lack of trust, the government magnifies resentment and isolates itself. True security, Machiavelli wrote, lies in a citizenry both armed and loyal. No government should be afraid of arming loyal citizens. Above all, it should kill as many enemies as possible while generating more fear than hate.

Alexis de Tocqueville noted more than 160 years ago that America was the world’s safest country and the least policed because ordinary citizens took responsibility for public safety. That is why George Washington, who had made countless enemies as the commander of an army in a partly civil war, refused an escort, trusting rather in the affection of his countrymen. As recently as World War II, American leaders carried the fight to the enemy so vigorously that the mutual trust between citizens and government rendered superfluous the kinds of security measures now in force, never mind the ones being readied.

Make no mistake. America’s new anti-homeland defense laws, bureaucracies and procedures will be abused as surely as are Israel’s. One provision of the proposed antiterrorist bill defines terrorism as destruction of government property or threatening a public official. It will be child’s play to accuse virtually anyone of terrorism or conspiracy or just to damn and disrupt through investigations. The temptation to use such tools against people who get in one’s way is too strong for most to resist. Even without special laws, President Bill Clinton effectively painted his political opponents as somehow responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing of 1994. As our “war on terrorism” drags on and piles up new laws, regulations and bureaucracies, there will be countless occasions for this sort of thing to happen routinely. Anyone who doubts this should consider the RICO statute, which criminalizes individuals not because they commit specific acts but because they are associated with organizations said to exist for illegal purposes. Proponents of this innovation in U.S. law assured the American people that it would be used only against the mafia. But soon it became a mainstay of prosecution of abortion opponents. Creative lawyers further have expanded its reach.

The worst thing about homeland-defense measures is that they are planned to be permanent. This belies impassioned rhetoric about winning the war against terrorism. If we really intended to wipe out terrorists, police measures would be temporary. Their permanence reassures our enemies that this is a phony war, because they can enjoy themselves while doing us harm indefinitely. It tells the American people that never again will we be able to live in the free, open, trusting, confident manner that had set the United States apart from the world.

The terrorist regimes of Iraq, Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization can only rejoice that the Bush administration has publicly rejected suggestions that we make war on them and, indeed, have found it prudent not even to speak their names. The rest of the world’s governments cannot help but notice that the Bush administration’s willingness to live with terrorist regimes means that they, too, will have to live with them.

We Americans face a disheartening future. All countries live and die by confidence in the future or lack thereof. The depression of the stock market since Sept. 11 — there is no more accurate word to describe it — is a barometer of a “malaise” bigger and more justified than that of the Carter years. It is a lot like the stock-market drop and the mood that swept the country in June 1940 when the collapse of the French army signaled a nasty future for fortress America. America’s spirit stayed crushed until it became clear that the United States was annihilating its enemies.

Americans who place their bets on “homeland defense” are making a big mistake.
       
Codevilla, professor of international relations at Boston University, directs strategic studies at the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, and is a former Foreign Service officer

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