New Year’s Resolutions on Terrorism: Panic, Politics, and the Prospects for Honesty in 2016
New Year’s Resolutions on Terrorism: Panic, Politics, and the Prospects for Honesty in 2016 by Anthony H. Cordesman, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Broken resolutions are one of the key features of every American New Year’s celebration, and calling for integrity in an election year may be a particularly good way to ensure that any resolutions that follow will be broken early and often. Ever since the ISIS attacks in Paris, however, politics, the struggle for media visibility, and the business side of “selling” counterterrorism have all combined to turn a real but limited threat from terrorism into a form of panic.
Worse, they have combined to turn some aspects of counterterrorism into prejudice and bigotry against Muslims and Arabs. The end result has been calls for new measures that will actually serve the key objectives that movements like ISIS and Al Qaeda have in launching such attacks on the West. They will divide the West from the Muslim world and key Arab and Muslim partners in the fight against terrorism, and alienate the Muslim minorities in the United States and other Western and secular states.
This kind of opportunism not only mischaracterizes and exaggerates the threat, it aids terrorists and extremists, and this is one case where the United States and other Western states need to take the following four New Year’s resolutions seriously…