Psychological reactions to terrorism are a central ingredient in any terrorist act (Crenshaw, 1986). One of terrorists' major goals is typically to instill anxiety in a target population in order to pressure political elites to negotiate (Friedland and Merari, 1985; Long, 1990). As noted by Long (1990), terrorists often “use the unreasonable fear and the resulting political disaffection it has generated among the public to intimidate governments into making political concessions in line with [their] political goals” (p. 5). In research on reactions to the September 11 terrorist attacks, we find that anxiety undermines support for an aggressive foreign policy, reinforcing the political importance of anxious reactions to terrorism (Huddy et al., 2005, 2007). In light of these findings, it appears that terrorists have a good grasp of psychological reality.

Anxiety is thus a critical component of public reactions to terrorism. Its documented ability to undercut support for aggressive overseas anti-terrorism policies is at odds, however, with the conventional notion that governments arouse anxiety precisely to increase support for overseas military action (Mueller, 2007; see also Pyszczynski et al., this volume). Indeed, the Bush administration in the United States and the Howard government in Australia have both been consistently accused of engineering support for the war in Iraq through the use of fear-mongering tactics such as terror emergency alert systems and high-profile arrests and deportations of Muslim immigrants.