This distant war has no clear ending and no clear purpose

PUBLIC RESPONSE: Despite the beheadings of two Japanese hostages, Japan has vowed not to give in to terrorism.PHOTO/AP

PANIC in the face of danger is often more harmful than curative.

An immediate example is in the recent study of the Ebola epidemic in Africa by economists Glennerster and Suri. The study found the initial over-estimation by the World Health Organisation, which projected that up to 1.4 million people in Liberia and Sierra Leone could be infected by January 2015, amplified by the media's headlines, actually impeded a functional response, eroding public confidence and generating harsh and unnecessary governmental reactions.

As of January 27, 19,140 cases have been reported across the two countries.

This past week, after frustrating negotiations over a prisoner swap, Isis beheaded two Japanese men, Haruna Yakawa, described as an adventurer, and Kenji Goto, a respected journalist who sought to free Yakawa. In response, the Japanese are understandably angry and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is said to vow "revenge".

Abe has for some time been trying to gather support to overhaul the Japanese constitution, especially article 9 which states: "The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes."

That constitution was ratified by both houses of parliament (the Diet) and the emperor in 1947 but it had been written at General Douglas McArthur's direction and its pacifism has been debated since Japan regained sovereignty in 1952. However, no serious challenge has arisen until now.

The question for the Japanese is whether the horrific murder of two citizens by a guerrilla army located over 8500km away, armed only with land-based weapons, poses a sufficient threat as to cause the overturning of its 68-year-old pacifist constitution, itself imposed in response to a militaristic history that resulted in the deaths of 2.8 million Japanese military and civilians in World War II.

Japan is not alone in an apparent rush to a military response which reflects on domestic politics.

In his State of the Union address, United States President Barack Obama ad-libbed "we need that authority" as he asked lawmakers to provide legal cover for the military intervention in Iraq and Syria. This curious nod to congressional power comes 13 years after the start of the present series of wars.

No president has asked for Congress' declaration of war - a constitutional requirement - since December 8, 1941. Yet the US has been involved in almost unremitting warfare since 1950.

While Obama pledges, so far, that no US boots will be on the ground, the highest-ranking general and war hawks in Congress would like authorisation for unlimited time and scope of war. More "moderate" voices would like to authorise war for three years and limit war to "only" Iraq and Syria.

This renewed war fervour in a war-weary nation has been stirred by the beheadings of the Japanese and, before them, of five Westerners, three Americans and two British citizens in 2014.

Seemingly forgotten are the hundreds of executed and mutilated foreigners and Iraqis by Shiite death squads, and by Sunni members of al-Qaeda in Iraq from 2004 to 2010. Since 2010, al-Qaeda in Iraq has morphed itself into Isis and formed a Sunni fundamentalist guerrilla army allegedly led by former officers of the American-disbanded Iraqi army. They seek territory. What is the level of threat? Neither government nor media has offered much more than the horror of those beheadings as evidence of the gravity of their threat. Instead, Isis is treated like an epidemic.

Prime Minister John Key seems to need no authorisation beyond his own to send New Zealanders to become involved in a conflict in a distant place, in a war that has no clear ending and no clear purpose. He needs to think long and hard, because even those who come back are forever changed. And let's not forget that it's their families who ultimately pay the price.

-Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.