Terrorist Activity Over Time 1980-2006

I read a news story today about how a school teacher at the University of Washington was almost fired for teaching that 9/11 was potentially a government conspiracy. This sparked a few questions in my mind.

First, would this teacher have been threatened if they taught that the war in Iraq has helped to keep us safe from terrorism? Probably not. But that lead to another question. Is the world really safer as a result of the Iraq war? I honestly had no idea, so I decided to do some research to try to see what I could find.

The data I'm about to present is obviously fairly loose. The facts are there, but I cannot be certain that it is the whole picture. If anything, the data seems sparse to me. But, its the best I could do given that I would only spend a limited amount of time on the project. If anybody out there has better data, PLEASE, share it.

Before diving into the data, allow me to site my source. Since I have found WikiPedia to be a fairly reputable repository of unbiased information in the past, I decided to use this listing of major terrorist incidents throughout history starting in the Pre-11th century and ending in the present.

To get some numbers all I had to do was, year by year, count up the number of incidents listed. This is what I found:

Year	Incidents	President
1980	6	Carter
1981	2	Carter
1982	7	Reagan
1983	8	Reagan
1984	2	Reagan
1985	13	Reagan
1986	18	Reagan
1987	6	Reagan
1988	1	Reagan
1989	5	Reagan
1990	3	Bush Sr.
1991	2	Bush Sr.
1992	2	Bush Sr.
1993	10	Clinton
1994	9	Clinton
1995	11	Clinton
1996	10	Clinton
1997	5	Clinton
1998	6	Clinton
1999	7	Clinton
2000	7	Clinton
2001	16	GWB
2002	23	GWB
2003	21	GWB
2004	21	GWB
2005	25	GWB
2006	24	GWB

The 2006 number is projected. The current count at the middle of this year is 17. Being linear makes life easy. I've included a chart here for your trend spotting convenience:

I'm not going to spend too much time looking for dubious causal relationships between this data and the government. It is useful, however, to point out the highlights in the data:

• The two terrorist high points occurred during the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.

• The two low points occurred during the Carter and Clinton administrations.

• The current frequency of terrorism is the highest it has been in the last 20 years.

• The Iraq war was considered "Combat Complete" in April 2003.

• In the years preceding April 2003, terrorism was on the rise, starting in 2001, the year GWB entered office.

• In the years following April 2003, terrorism has held steady.

It is NOT my intent in writing this to make anyone believe anything in particular. There can be MANY reasons for the ups and downs in terroist activities. Trying to blame it on a Presdient is hardly fair. All I'm doing is trying to find real data and lay it out in front of people so they can make their own decisions about what it means.

Also, you should note that the counts here seem a little low. That in itself could mean one of two things. Either terrorism isn't really all that common and its probably not worth worrying about as much as we do (earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are about as frequent, and cause comparable damage), or the numbers from WikiPedia aren't painting the full picture, and the trends listed above are meaningless. As I said before, if someone has some better data, PLEASE feel free to share it. I'd love to really understand what is going on here.

So what about those questions? Are we any safer as a result of the Iraq war? Well, the best I can say from this data is that we're not any worse off. For a war that is costing billions of dollars and thousands of lives, I have to ask the question, is it really worth it? Maybe it is. Maybe if we were looking at an upward trend perhaps the war staved off further destruction.

But that leads me to another question: if billions of dollars and thousands of lives can only prevent things from getting worse, what will it take to make the frequency of terrorist attacks go down? More money? More bodies?

I said before that I like to think linearly because it is easy. But sometimes linear thinking can get you nowhere. Sometimes it is like beating your head against a wall...