Libertarian Blog Reports: John Kerry Was Right

Liberating Our Heritage reports that John Kerry Was Right, quoting him from 2004:

We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.

They follow this up with similar views from Steve Chapman at Reason:

Instead of being the opening blitz of a “long, global war,” 9/11 was a freak event that may never be replicated. In a real war, such as the ones we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, many people die, week in and week out. But John Mueller, a national security professor at Ohio State University, notes that in a typical year, no more than a few hundred people are killed worldwide in attacks by al Qaeda and similar groups outside of war zones.

That’s too many, but it’s not a danger on the order of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union or even Saddam Hussein. It’s more like organized crime—an ongoing problem demanding unceasing vigilance, a malady that can be contained but never eliminated. . . .

Crime is a serious national problem that used to be even worse. At the height of the mayhem, more than 24,000 Americans were murdered annually—a Sept. 11, 2001, attack every six weeks. Yet even when the toll was at its worst, we insisted that police respect the constitutional rights of suspected criminals. We maintained the limits on the power of the president and other law enforcement officials to investigate and imprison people. For the most part, we kept our perspective. . . .

The 9/11 attack was a crisis that has largely passed, but no one in Washington wants to admit it. It’s politically safer to depict the danger as undiminished no matter how long we go without an attack. But someday, we will look back and ask if we were acting out of sensible caution or unfounded panic.

I wouldn’t say that the threat from al Qaeda has passed or dismiss the tragedy of the 9/11 attack, but do agree with the general sentiments regarding the manner in which the threat has been turned into a perpetual state of war. The goal of terrorism is, obviously, to create a sence of terror in the populace, and the propaganda of the Bush administration only adds to this. If they believe the terrorists hate us for our freedoms, we should respond by defending those freedoms, not surrendering them as part of the “war on terror.”  Besides, if the goal is to reduce our risk of terrorist attacks, the actions of the Bush administration such as invading Iraq do the opposite.

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