Terror and Peanut Butter

"'Terrorists threaten our way of life,' said President Bush. 'Terrorists put the U.S. Constitution at risk,' added the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The U.S. State Department didn't begin counting terrorist deaths before the late '60s. Since then, even including the deaths from the... attack on the World Trade towers of September 11, 2001, the number of homicides resulting from terrorism has been about the same as the number of people who died from severe allergic reactions to peanut butter. Yet, since 2001, the U.S. government spent billions in efforts to protect Americans from terrorism. As far as we know, it spent none to protect us from peanut butter. For your editor, who is allergic to peanut butter, Skippy, Jiffy and Peter Pan represent a far bigger threat than Oussama or Moktar.

And all the terror incidents of the last 1,000 years have probably killed fewer people than the war George Bush launched against it three years ago.

The aim of terrorists is to terrorize. What they want to do is to create a mood of instability and hysteria-- luring their targets to overreact. In the language of Marxist terrorists of the '60s, their real aim is to radicalize the workers, moving them to join the cause.

That is just what the Bush administration seems to have done. Rather than calmly and quietly track down the perps, it blundered right into Iraq and stirred up terrorist ambitions all over the Middle East. Where previously there had been only a handful of fanatics to worry about, now there are thousands of them, radicalized, armed and motivated."

From: A FALSE SENSE OF INSECURITY
By Bill Bonner http://www.dailyreckoning.com/