Perhaps there are indeed dark-eyed, satanic, persons out there somewhere preparing, with dedicated ferocity, to rain death on us all in one cataclysmic gesture after another, annihilating, one at a time, the structures that support our economy and our way of life: our bridges, power plants, major buildings, our ports, stadiums filled with sports fans, historical monuments, crowded shopping centers, nuclear installations, water supplies. “It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country, to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known,” warned President Bush in his State of the Union address.

Perhaps we—meaning “we” Americans collectively—do have something to fear from what has come to be called, with breathless and ominous imprecision, international terrorism. Perhaps the threat is so great and so imminent that dozens of international flights should be terminated, our freedoms curtailed, our politics suspended. Perhaps we must keep an eye on each other, report our suspicions to the authorities, watch what we say, withhold our criticism of public officials, behave as though we’re at war with an invisible enemy, and hunker down. Perhaps.

Or perhaps the holiday season furor over terrorism is a gigantic political hustle, cooked up more or less formally in Karl Rove’s White House office, designed to keep us on edge, to divert our attention from the continuing chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan and, most important, to make us fearful of making a major political change next November.

Now the chances are that neither one of these scenarios fully explains what is going on today, but that neither is completely implausible. The cataclysm of September 11, 2001, and a number of more remote events since then—in Turkey, Saudi Arabia , and of course in Iraq—certainly have illustrated a startling and discomfiting degree of rage against the United States and its allies in the Arab world and thus the chance, if not the probability, of further terrorist action against the U.S., although none has occurred in the two years since 9/11 and all of the “orange alerts” since then have proved to be false alarms.

Beyond that, there have been the provocations to terrorism that have occurred since 9/11—the war in Iraq; George W. Bush’s division of the world into forces of good and evil; his announcement of the preemptive war principle; the administration’s unwillingness to explore or to address the types of grievances that might fuel the terrorists’ impulse to destroy or damage our way of life; the repetitious harping on the threat of terrorism, epitomized by Bush’s bombastic “bring ‘em on” challenge of a few months past.

All this blends seamlessly into the Bush administration’s unembarrassed political exploitation of the “War on Terrorism,” its overt effort to suppress domestic criticism and questioning of its policies, and its use of the “war” as cover for promoting and in some cases enacting an extreme right-wing domestic program. One way to think about it is that “terrorism” has been the making of the Bush presidency.

Thus, there is reason to suspect that there may be further terrorist events in the indeterminate future, and that suggests the need for appropriate preventive measures. But what kind? And at what cost to our traditional freedoms? And should we allow it to affect our politics?

A certain amount of quiet diligence is clearly called for. That’s why we have a new Department of Homeland Security, to assemble data, to search out the points of vulnerability and take steps to make them more secure. There is a fine line, however, between necessary diligence and stimulating and exploiting fear in the populace. There is very little that an ordinary citizen can do to prevent terrorist acts. To keep us constantly fearful and apprehensive serves political ends, perhaps, but does not make us more secure. As the columnist Peter Preston writes in The Guardian:

There’s a real problem with terrorism , to be sure. Never put that out of your mind. Always give it due weight. But never forget what becomes of those [such as the Department of Homeland Security] “who come to protect and help us.” If you’re running a department of homeland security and you always need more funds (because brother it’s a big, big department), then you have a problem. Success is preventing any more attacks—success also means nothing happening, which means you’ve got a lower profile that makes more budget-busting increases more difficult to come by. Thus there’s every reason to go about your business with manifest display. One thing, uncynically, goes with another. The more flights cancelled, the more you’re obviously doing your job.

So perhaps the most appropriate way to approach the problem of terrorism is to think of it as a kind of natural phenomenon, like earthquakes, hurricanes, forest fires, and floods, against which you take intelligent precautions, but don’t let it take over your life—or your politics. And expect of your politicians that they will pay some attention to where all this rage comes from, and avoid actions that provoke more of it. And be properly cynical about the motives of those who would use the threat of terrorism to justify limitations on our individual rights as citizens or to conceal a broader ideological agenda. And watch out for anti-terrorist tricks. Don’t be surprised, for example, if Osama Bin Laden should be captured or assassinated sometime this fall, just in time for the election. Remember, you read it here first.