Joe Foss died early this year, but he lived long enough to see things get really foolish. Travelling through Phoenix airport last year, he was stopped by security guards who made a great fuss about a five-pointed metal star he was carrying, which they feared was some sort of weapon. ("Last week the terrorists were trying to smuggle nose tweezers onto to the planes, and this week it's these ninja stars.") Foss was 86 at the time, and the star in question was the Congressional Medal of Honor that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave him sixty years ago, but they wouldn't believe him.

You couldn't be more all-American than Joe Foss, a farm boy who put himself through university by waiting tables, became a Marine Corps fighter pilot, and shot down 26 Japanese planes in a few hectic months on Guadalcanal in 1943 to become one of America's leading aces. In later life he was twice elected governor of South Dakota, and ended up as president of the National Rifle Association. We don't know the details of what passed between him and the fools at security, but he was upset enough that the story got out.

You can imagine what he must have thought. His war had been a real war in which an average of 25,000 people were killed every day for years on end. His own friends died in burning airplanes with awful regularity. The 'war on terror', on the other hand, is a vastly overblown media event that bears no relation to the real size of the threat. It gives bumptious officials and cynical politicians a license to inflate their own importance and hide their mistakes, and ignorant journalists an excuse to pontificate about how the world has changed forever. It is mostly lies and distortion, and the ignorance is not innocent.

Global casualties each year in all the conflicts where the weaker side uses terrorist methods are running at around ten thousand a year, roughly the same as annual traffic deaths in France or Spain, but at least half of the deaths from terrorism involve Nepalese, Colombian and African peasants that nobody except their families cares much about. The other half are mostly Muslims killed by the 'counter-terrorist' forces: three Palestinians die for every Israeli killed in the local struggle there, and ten Chechens for every Russian. But every year, a few hundred of the victims are from (self)-important places like the United States, Western Europe and Japan.

Those are the people -- Australian tourists in Bali, American families in Saudi Arabia, the British consul in Istanbul -- whose deaths really matter. Only they wouldn't matter at all if they died in a less politically sensitive way, like falling off a ladder. More Americans die each year from falling off ladders than from terrorism, and you could halve the death rate from falling-off-ladderism at about one-thousandth of the annual cost of fighting terrorism. But since their deaths don't matter politically, nobody bothers.

Terrorism is a form of political judo in which weak groups kill relatively small numbers of people in spectacular ways. The al-Qaeda attacks in September, 2001 killed three thousand Americans, but they attracted a thousand times as much attention as the similar number of Americans who died in firearms incidents that month and every month.

But here's the thing: everybody in the military and law enforcement has known this for at least a generation now -- they even teach it in the staff colleges -- and most journalists and politicians understand it too.

So when they over-react and use the attacks to launch foreign wars and whip up hysteria about security issues, it is reasonable to assume that they are doing so for cynical and reasons. Unless they are truly stupid, but it is generally reasonable to assume that they are not.

So keep your head down and your mouth shut at airport security, because if they can treat Joe Foss like that, imagine what they can do to you. When you are not vulnerable in a security queue, treat the 'war on terror' and those who claim to fight it with the contempt they deserve. Unless you live in Nepal, Colombia, Kashmir, Israel or Chechnya, you are likelier to drown in the bath than you are to die in a terrorist attack.