We need to recognize that although terrorism is real, there are many other dangers out there. And terrorism should not be the only driver or necessarily the leading driver of our foreign policy and especially of our domestic politics.
Terrorism is nothing new. Lots of terrorist attacks are nothing new, but we pay a lot more attention to them today.
We've seen a shift where people were often initially reluctant to call things terrorism until they knew for sure. And now they start out assuming it's terrorism and then work backwards and say it may or may not have been terrorism. And it does matter tremendously because of the resources involved. If it's a crime that's seen as a disturbed individual, then local police will handle it. If it's a crime that's seen as someone who might be linked to an international terrorist group, you get the vast federal U.S. national security bureaucracy as well as tremendous political attention.
