A deeply disturbing development that has been buried under the debris of war talk is the fact that since 1998, in a major historical reversal, most of the deaths and injuries from terrorism have occurred in cities. Any blowback from bombing Iraq, such as an increase in terrorism, is likely to be targeted at cities rather than at military bases. When Bush seeks to persuade the American people to support the bombing of Iraq, he should acknowledge that this would raise the risk of terrorist attacks in US cities.

Cities all over the world have long been targets of such attacks. What is new is the sharp increase in the likelihood that they will be attacked. The State Department's 2001 report, Patterns of Global Terrorism, shows a rise in urban targets over the decade. Using the data from that report, Hank Savitch and Grigoriy Ardashev show in Urban Studies that from 1993 to 2000, cities accounted for 94 percent of the injuries resulting from all terrorist attacks, and for 61 percent of the deaths. Moreover, in the past decade the number of incidents doubled, rising especially sharply after 1998. By contrast, in the 1980s hijacked airplanes accounted for a larger share of terrorist deaths and destruction than they did in the 1990s.

There are several reasons that cities have become central sites for a range of terrorist activities: They are centers of power; they are a focus of media attention; they are sufficiently mixed and dense that terrorists can live and organize in them without attracting too much attention. A handful of cities have particular symbolic value because of a mix of historical, political and sometimes economic factors. New York, London and Paris--global cities strategic to the world economy that also have unique political histories--are among the target cities in the State Department data. Athens, Istanbul, Jerusalem and Rome are all key nodes in an international network of regional conflicts in which they are targets because they are highly visible sites for communicating a message to a specific audience. In New York and Washington, it was the economic and military power of the United States that was being hit; New York itself was a target because of its communicative capabilities rather than because it was seen as the enemy as such.

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