What Am I Scared About?

I keep reading articles like this one that say the world will be a less safe place for Americans if we leave Iraq—but which don’t really explain how the terrorists in Baghdad will get their car bombs and IEDs across the ocean to the streets of hometown USA. I was also confounded by today’s report of the foiling of a terrorist plot to blow up Kennedy Airport where the plotters had, according to the Times, no explosives, funding, or timetable. (If that counts as a “plot,” then a lot of conversations I’ve heard in bars qualify as business plans.)

I know the world’s a scary place and that there are lots of angry, deluded, and fanatic people all over who would kill, maim, rob, and rape me if they got the chance. But for some reason, that people involved in supposedly preventing potential killing are actually being killed is way more frightening to me than the allegedly terrifying prospects their efforts are intended to ward off.

Fourteen actually dead soldiers in Iraq this weekend scares me much more than some number of potentially dead civilians in America at some possible future date.

No doubt this attitude represents a failure of imagination on my part, but except when it comes to coming up with reasons not to grade papers, I guess I’m just not all that creative. It doesn’t make sense to me, for example, that so many people should have died just because some other people might have died. This seems to make potentially dying worse than actually dying, but maybe I’m missing something; as I said, I’m not all that imaginative.

War supporters say we can’t pull out troops from Iraq because of what might happen if we do, but many of these people are the same ones who predicted that the fall of Saddam would lead to a flourishing of democracy throughout the region.

That these people are still making policy really scares me.