The homeland security dilemma

Any discrepancy between, on the one hand, the security the public or business community expects in return for its investments (or feels it deserves in return for its sacrifices) and, on the other, the actual level of security the government appears to be delivering will increase public threat perceptions and, by extension, the political pressures to spend even more to fix the problem (Harvey 2004: [...] Everything from abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, to the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samara, to fears of a civil war in Iraq, to images of angry Muslims involved in violent protests around the world following the publication of caricatures of the prophet Mohammad, to images of kidnap victims (most of whom have been released in return for ransoms) and suicide bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan, to [...] Even if we combine the effects of 9/11, the anthrax attacks, the Bali, Madrid and London bombings, and throw in every other terrorist attack in the world (Iraq and Afghanistan included) over the last two decades, the probability of being a target of a terrorist attack would be infinitesimally tiny. [...] The real problem today, then, is not the ‘failure of imagination’, it is the ‘imagination of failure’ that continues to entrench into American domestic politics the main elements of the homeland security dilemma. [...] In fact, the more compelling the logic, arguments and evidence offered to support the existence of a homeland security dilemma, the more obvious the challenges for identifying a coherent set of policy alternatives, because the most rational options are part of the problem.