E Pluribus Unum

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
--- Edmund Burke

No wonder stateless, and otherwise powerless antagonists use terror as a tactic: the leverage they gain is so enormous that it puts them on an equal footing with their enemies. And sometimes we help them unknowingly or otherwise...

Chris Matthews: I'll tell you one thing...I agree with what Fareed Zakaria wrote in Newsweek this week which is that terrorism isn't explosions and death. Terrorism is when you change your society because of those explosions. And you become fearful to the point that you shut out immigration, you shut out student exchanges, you shut people out of buildings, you begin to act in an almost fascist manner because you're afraid of what might happen to you. That's when terrorism becomes real...and frighteningly successful. That's what I believe.

And that's where I question the way Giuliani has raised this issue. He raises it as a specter and in a weird way, he helps the bad guys.

More troubling than any of Bush's rhetoric is that of the Republicans who wish to succeed him. "They hate you!" says Rudy Giuliani in his new role as fearmonger in chief, relentlessly reminding audiences of all the nasty people out there. "They don't want you to be in this college!" he recently warned an audience at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. "Or you, or you, or you," he said, reportedly jabbing his finger at students. In the first Republican debate he warned, "We are facing an enemy that is planning all over this world, and it turns out planning inside our country, to come here and kill us." On the campaign trail, Giuliani plays a man exasperated by the inability of Americans to see the danger staring them in the face. "This is reality, ma'am," he told a startled woman at Oglethorpe. "You've got to clear your head."

[...]

We are repeating one of the central errors of the early cold war—putting together all our potential adversaries rather than dividing them. Mao and Stalin were both nasty. But they were nasties who disliked one another, a fact that could be exploited to the great benefit of the free world. To miss this is not strength. It's stupidity.