John Mueller's "Overblown"

John Mueller was one of my professors when I was a graduate student at the University of Rochester and he always put me on my toes by questioning things that seemed to be self-evidently true. In Retreat From Doomsday, he questioned whether nuclear weapons were responsible for the peace (or lack of major war) between the US and Soviet Union. While they may have helped in this, he questioned whether the US and USSR actually would have gotten into a major war if nukes had not been invented and argued fairly convincingly that it was unlikely.

In a paper he wrote in 1991, he examined claims that the attack on Pearl Harbor was a military disaster. He argued that,if  by disaster one means something that significantly undercuts the nations ability to fight the war,  the attack on Pearl Harbor was more of a temporary setback than a military disaster. By looking closely at the data, he showed that the losses from the attack were quickly made up by the rapid mobilization in the US. Indeed, he argued the primary effect of the attack was to spur such a backlash against Japan that it ended up being more of a military disaster for them than for the US. He also dared to question whether the all out war on Japan was a good thing for the US. Could the Japanese have been handled with less force and loss of life on the US side? Would the US have been better off focusing more of its effort the larger threat of Nazi Germany while simply containing Japan?

Questions like these always put me in mind of Socrates, who angered the citizens of Athens by questioning things they "knew" to be true. In the words of Plato, they complained that Socrates was always making "the weaker argument the stronger", and this is one reason they sentenced him to death for corrupting the youth of Athens.

Mueller's 2006 book Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them followed in this tradition. John dared to question whether we might be overreacting to the events of 9-11.  He noted that, even with the numbers from 9-11 included, the number of Americans who had died in terrorist attacks since 1960 was about the same as the number that had died in lightning strikes, accidents involving deer, or from peanut allergies. As for the prospect of terrorists using weapons of mass destruction, he noted that the 9-11 hijackers had used nothing more complex than box cutters and that the attacks would suggest that the real threat was from people use craft to turn ordinary objects into deadly weapons.

Moreover, there was nothing particularly new in this. Aircraft and skyscrapers had been around for a long a time and Mueller argued that a determined and lucky band of terrorists might have been able to sink a passenger ship like the Titanic and kill thousands of people. One might add that Timothy McVeigh was able to combine fertilizer, diesel fuel, and a rental truck to make a massive bomb. So why the sudden concern and dire predictions of  a new age of terrorism?

Of course, the answer partly lies in the public shock created by the events.  However, what interests John is the reaction to the shock. Mueller argues that, when surprised, governments are sometimes prone to overestimating the new threat and  overreacting to it. In 2006, Mueller previewed his argument in a Cato Unbound post. He wrote:

Unpleasant surprises very frequently, though not always, lead to two responses that are serially connected and often prove to be unwise. First, the surprise is treated not as an aberration, but rather as a harbinger indicating that things have suddenly become much more dangerous and threatening, will remain so, and will become worse, an exercise that might be called “massive extrapolation.” And second, there is a tendency to lash out at the threat without a great deal of thought about alternative policies including and especially ones that might advocate simply letting it be.

In his book, John looks at several examples of massive extrapolation and overreaction by the US. Given the comparisons to 9-11 and Pearl Harbor that were being made at the time, and his previous research on the Pearl Harbor attacks, it was perhaps inevitable that John would start there. Unfortunately, this led to a lot of push back, as occurred in a Fox News interview with Hannity and Colmes. Mueller is making a very nuanced argument that the US vastly overestimated Japanese capabilities after Pearl Harbor, not that the US should not have fought Hitler. Also, Muller argues that not every threat is another Hitler and that most of the current threats in the international system are windbags compared to the likes of Hitler and Stalin.

Indeed, the stronger parts of Mueller's book are those in which he looks at threats that never amounted to much but were touted as dire by analysts, such as the US-Soviet missile gap. John also traces a long lineage of "devils du jour", such as Libya's Khaddafi and Indonesia's Sukarno, who were portrayed as threats to the US. Mueller notes that there is a tendency among intelligence experts to identify threats 5-10 years in the future, a timeline which seems near enough to be threatening but is far enough in the future to make comparison  of predictions and outcomes difficult. John digs up many of these 5-10 year predictions and finds that they tend to be woefully inaccurate.

Getting back to the question of whether post-9/11 assesments of the threat were accurate, Muller and Mark Stewart wrote an article for International Security entitled "The Terrorism Delusion." They note that, despite all the intelligence gathered  on Al-Qaida, there is no evidence that they had an active WMD program or anything like the 5,000 sleeper agents in the US that so many analysts were worried about. Looking at the historical data, they calculate that US citizens have a 1 in 3.5 million chance of dying in a terrorist attack.

They also identify all the 50 known cases of terrorist plots in the US. They find a sharp divergence between the terrorists the government describes as a threat and the ones that actually try to carry out an attack.

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a lengthy
report on protecting the homeland. Key to achieving such an objective should
be a careful assessment of the character, capacities, and desires of potential terrorists
targeting that homeland. Although the report contains a section dealing
with what its authors call “the nature of the terrorist adversary,” the section
devotes only two sentences to assessing that nature: “The number and high
profile of international and domestic terrorist attacks and disrupted plots during the last two decades underscore the determination and persistence of
terrorist organizations. Terrorists have proven to be relentless, patient, opportunistic,
and flexible, learning from experience and modifying tactics and targets
to exploit perceived vulnerabilities and avoid observed strengths.”

This description may apply to some terrorists somewhere, including at least
a few of those involved in the September 11 attacks. Yet, it scarcely describes
the vast majority of those individuals picked up on terrorism charges in the
United States since those attacks. The inability of the DHS to consider this fact
even parenthetically in its fleeting discussion is not only amazing but perhaps
delusional in its single-minded preoccupation with the extreme.

In sharp contrast, the authors of the case studies, with remarkably few exceptions,
describe their subjects with such words as incompetent, ineffective, unintelligent,
idiotic, ignorant, inadequate, unorganized, misguided, muddled,
amateurish, dopey, unrealistic, moronic, irrational, and foolish. And in nearly
all of the cases where an operative from the police or from the Federal Bureau of
Investigation was at work (almost half of the total), the most appropriate
descriptor would be “gullible.”