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Inordinate Fear
 During
the Cold War, some of the greatest believers
in communism were anti-communists.  When
in 1957 the Soviet ruler, Nikita Khrushchev,
boasted, “We will bury you,” he was believed by many of the
same Americans who usually insisted that communism could never work.
That same year, the Soviets launched the first satellite into outer space,
Sputnik I, and Americans panicked: obviously Soviet education and science
were far superior to our own. We had a lot of catching up to do!
In due course we calmed down.
Communism was a shabby system, based on basic errors about human
nature, and all we really had to do was wait for it to collapse. Sometimes I
think it lasted as long as it did chiefly because the West believed in it. We
overestimated its efficiency, its military power, and its popular appeal
around the world.
President Jimmy Carter later
deprecated our “inordinate fear of communism.” I was one of
many conservative pundits who mocked him for this at the time, but he was
quite right. You could hardly hate communism too much, but we certainly
feared it too much.
John Kennedy played on our
inordinate fear when he warned of the nonexistent “missile gap”
in 1960; it was enough to give him the edge he needed to win the presidency.
His own inordinate fear led him into the Bay of Pigs fiasco and, worse, the
Vietnam war. He also said we must get to the moon before the Soviets did.
Our protracted overreaction to
the Soviet threat should caution us against a similar overreaction to Islamic
terrorism. The shock of September 11, often likened to Pearl Harbor, was
more like the shock of Sputnik I.
I heard the news of Sputnik at a
University of Michigan football game; I’ll never forget it. I was eating a
hot dog with mustard and onions that chilly autumn day in Ann Arbor, and
when the news came over the stadium’s loudspeakers, I could feel
terror sweeping through the huge crowd like the biting wind. We were
doomed! Our hatred of communism was now mingled with dread and awe of
its achievements.
![[Breaker quote for Inordinate Fear: Communism and terrorism]](2005breakers/050802.gif) When
we watched the World Trade Center turn to rubble
that brilliant morning in 2001, the feeling came back. Suddenly we began
toting up the terrorists’ assets: a huge and fervent Muslim population
around the world, possibly with secret cells of jihadists ready to strike in
every major Western city. They had brought off the 9/11 attacks with a few
simple box cutters, but could we be sure they wouldn’t have more-
formidable weapons — chemical, biological, even nuclear — in the
future? Might they not also have the support of evil regimes in Iraq and
elsewhere?
Today the enemy looks much less
invincible. He has struck again, notably in Madrid and London, but his
resources are clearly finite. He has enough explosives to wreak local havoc,
and thousands of Muslims in the West may sympathize with him, but
relatively few are actually prepared to offer themselves up as suicide
bombers; Islam too has its Walter Mittys.
President Bush reminds me more
and more of President Kennedy. Just as Kennedy spoke of a “twilight
struggle” to save our freedom, in which cause we would “pay
any price, bear any burden,” Bush speaks of our
“resolve” even as fewer young Americans are enlisting for
military service.
But what about the other side?
Osama bin Laden can match Khrushchev in bold bluster; but it’s highly
likely that he has his own frustrations. Only a small fraction of the
world’s Muslims are responding to his summons to sacrifice and
martyrdom. After a spectacular debut on the global stage — his
Sputnik I, you might say — his movement looks pretty feeble. Some of
his agents are being arrested and have started singing to the London police.
Not exactly an airtight operation of iron-willed fanatics.
We understandably began by
overestimating our enemies again, and Bush has tried hard to sustain the
apocalyptic note. But there comes a time when it sinks in, however gradually,
that most of us are in no danger —and never were.
We’ve spent billions on
everything from airport security to duct tape. We’re still wasting
other billions on the space program that originated in our previous inordinate
fear.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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