'Emboldening the Enemy'

Lots of talk in recent years from the Administration about "emboldening the enemy" and other treasonous acts: Criticizing the president's disastrous handling of Iraq, the overreaching of the Patriot Act, or the failure of U.S. foreign policy in general with respect to its counter terrorism efforts would guarantee you such a label.

You know what I think emboldens the enemy? Paranoid, fear-driven over-reactions to stupid marketing pranks like this:

A furious Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino vowed yesterday to throw the book at the masterminds behind a guerrilla marketing campaign gone amok that plunged the city into bomb-scare pandemonium and blew nearly $1 million in police overtime and other costs.

As city and state attorneys laid groundwork for restitution requests, cops seized 27-year-old Arlington multimedia artist Peter Berdovsky, who posted film on his Web site boasting that he and and Sean Stevens, 28, of Charlestown, planted the battery-wired devices.

Don't get me wrong - I get it. You "can't be too careful" these days. It's a "post 9/11-world," and all that.

But over-reacting doesn't help. Many other communities reacted calmly to the same stunt. In fact, many didn't react at all. Why? Probably because:

Michael Rich, lawyer for both of the men, said the description of a bomb-like device could be used for any electronic device.

"If somebody had left a VCR on the ground it would have been a device with wires, electronic components and a power source," he said.

This kind of over-reaction is exactly why terrorism is so effective. The more we remain scared, the more our own fear can be exploited by terror groups (or governments).

Those who defend the actions of Boston's Mayor Menino and his paranoid minions sound strikingly like one of the most successful figures to base policy on paranoia and use fear as a political tool:

The title of Ron Suskind's riveting new book, "The One Percent Doctrine," refers to an operating principle that he says Vice President Dick Cheney articulated shortly after 9/11: in Mr. Suskind's words, "if there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction — and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time — the United States must now act as if it were a certainty." He quotes Mr. Cheney saying that it's not about "our analysis," it's about "our response," and argues that this conviction effectively sidelines the traditional policymaking process of analysis and debate, making suspicion, not evidence, the new threshold for action.

Again: "suspicion, not evidence, [is] the new threshold for action." (Emphasis mine)

"In this day and age, whenever anything remotely suspicious shows up, people get concerned — and that's good," King County sheriff's Sgt. John Urquhart said. "However, people don't need to be concerned about this. These are cartoon characters giving the finger."

A big, well-deserved middle finger to foreign policy based on paranoid delusion, in fact, for truly helping to embolden the enemy.