Making War on Terrorists—Reflections on Harming the Innocent *

THE countries of the developed West are fighting a war on terror. More accurately: the governments of some of these countries are conducting a war against terrorists. This war effort was stepped up dramatically after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, which killed about 3,000 people in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The most notable attack until then was the car bomb attack on the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi of August 7, 1998, which killed about 257 people including 12 US citizens. Since the September 11 attack, 202 people, including 88 Australians, were killed in Kuta on the Indonesian island of Bali on October 12, 2002; some 191 people were killed in the Madrid bombing of March 11, 2004; and the terrorist attack of July 7, 2005, in London killed 52 people. Why wage war against these terrorists? Offhand, one might think that such a grand response to terrorism is undeserved. This thought is supported by comparisons with other threats to our life and well-being—cardiovascular disease and cancer, for instance, annually kill some 250,000 and 150,000 people, respectively, in theUKalone(940,000and560,000intheUS),while trafficaccidents kill over 3,000 each year (43,000 in the US). In the UK, only about one per 10,000 deaths in 2005 was due to terrorism. And even in the US in 2001, the corresponding ratio was about one in 750, that is, 0.13 percent. It would seem that even a small increase in the effort to combat cardiovascular disease, cancer, road accidents, or any of several other, similar threats would do much more to protect our survival and well-being, at lower cost, than revving up the war on terror. This point has been made repeatedly with dramatic facts and figures. Since 2001, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, funded by all