Terrorism - its cause and cure, by Curtis F Jones
American Diplomacy, Special report, September 2001
The author presents
a decidedly provocative viewpoint on a subject that he knows well as a result
of years of experience in dealing with the phenomenon as a career diplomat. His
take, we think, will prove to be controversial, but we will defend to the
bitter end the right to make available the pages of this journal to just that
kind of expression of opinion. Read it with an open mind—and then let us, and
the author, have .—Ed.
"In an imperfect world, terrorism,
like war, is a necessary evil."
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On July 20, 1944,
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a massive conspiracy against Adolf
Hitler culminated in the explosion of a bomb at his headquarters in Rastenburg.
Hitler escaped with superficial injuries. The man who placed the bomb, Colonel
Claus von Stauffenberg, was soon executed. Of the several thousand others
killed for complicity in the act, Protestant churchman Dietrich Bonhoeffer
stood out. An anti-Nazi activist since 1933, he rejected an opportunity to take
refuge in the United States, was jailed in 1943, and was executed in early 1945
after the German authorities discovered documents connecting him with the
conspiracy.
Bonhoeffer goes down in history in the
admirable company of persons like Erskine Childers (executed by the British for
membership in the IRA) and Steve Biko (beaten to death by South African police
for membership in the ANC), along with countless other protagonists of causes
now generally applauded as liberation movements. Many Germans defended their
participation in Nazi atrocities on the grounds that they were simply following
orders, taking the position that if any agency was guilty of crimes against
humanity, it was the German state. The Nuremberg tribunal rejected this
defense. In so doing, the tribunal implicitly concluded that the ultimate
arbiter of the legitimacy of a violent act must be the conscience of the
activist himself. Whether he is later hailed as a freedom fighter or vilified
as a terrorist should be irrelevant to his purpose.
The German law that condemned
Bonhoeffer was invalidated by international action in two arenas. First,
Germany lost the war. If the story ended there, it could be dismissed with the
cynical axiom that history is written by the winners. However, the Allies went
on to convene the Nuremberg trials, which held Naziism up against a broader
ethical standard and condemned it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, long acclaimed as a
patriot by the world at large, was belatedly vindicated by his own country,
which exonerated him in 1996.
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Individual conscience
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The primary importance of individual
conscience, as enunciated at Nuremberg, imposes on the government specific
obligations:
- First,
government must recognized the right of every individual to challenge its
authority;
- second,
it must assess, as objectively as possible, the legitimacy of any such
challenge;
- third,
it must provide its institutions and its citizens the best possible
security against irrational violence (a prime example of which is the
Japanese doomsday sect that in 1995 carried out a lethal gas attack in
Tokyo);
Fourth, and most difficult, it must meet legitimate
challenge with flexibility and understanding.
Terrorism has a
simple, comprehensive definition: It is illegal political violence. But no
practical or ethical purpose is served by characterizing all of its
practitioners as terrorists. Each case is unique. Each terrorist action
occupies only one point on the spectrum of political violence. History teaches
us that violence is the ultimate determinant; society depends on law, and law
depends on the apparatus to enforce it. Thus, government necessarily exercises
violence—controlled, legal violence.
Legality is the imponderable element in
the equation. Over the millennia, mankind has evolved an ethical consensus
based on equal treatment for all. The major religions of the world are grounded
in this maxim. When national law violates this consensus, its victims very
often have no pacific recourse. In recent centuries nations have built up an extensive
body of international law, but the means of enforcement remain to be
established.
The world of today is awash in persons
and entities whose actions meet this definition of terrorism. Most governments
have had to deal with violent challenges to their authority. Many have
responded in kind. Human rights organizations catalog those that routinely
torture and assassinate dissidents at home and abroad, in clear violation of
international convention and often their own national law. The governments of
Iran and Libya allegedly have been particularly zealous in the pursuit of
dissidents, "blasphemers" (such as Salman Rushdie), and targets as
incongruous as the wife of the captain of the U.S.S. Vincennes, a
warship that mistakenly shot down an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf.
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Policy Goal: Reducing Violence
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In an imperfect world, terrorism, like
war, is a necessary evil, but it should not be beyond human ingenuity to reduce
its incidence. The objective in this analysis is not to become mired in
the endless debate over the legitimacy of any specific act of violence, but to
concentrate on the identification of those policies best calculated to promote
a reduction.
Determining such policies has special
interest for Americans, who have become the prime target of terrorist activity.
From 1979 to 1995, there were 360 documented attacks on American diplomatic
and consular posts, ranging from sniping incidents to hostage taking to
assassination to truck bombing. Since 1970, U.S. airliners have been hijacked,
attacked on the ground, and blown up in midair. U.S. military facilities have
been bombed with heavy loss of life, notably at a Marine barracks in Beirut in
1983, an office in Saudi Arabia in 1995, and an apartment building in Saudi
Arabia in 1996. Terrorism has also appeared in the United States, as in the
bombing of New York's World Trade Center in 1993 and the Federal building in
Oklahoma City in 1995.
Thus far, foreign terrorists have not
taken full advantage of America's open society. The Islamist group headed by
Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, convicted in 1996 of conspiring to blow up various
prominent sites in New York City, was apprehended before they carried out any
of their plans. The leader of the Palestinian group convicted of setting the
destructive charges at the World Trade Center at the World Trade Center, Ahmad
Ramzi Yousef, proved to be amateurish in keeping a cover story and was soon
identified.
Perhaps there are grounds for hope that
the United States derives some measure of protection at home by virtue of that
very openness. A multicultural society provides foreign political movements
with invaluable opportunities for organizing, recruiting, propaganda, weapons
training, and importantly, the collection of funds from American sympathizers.
The freedom that foreign activists enjoy in the United States, then, may
paradoxically act as an insurance policy that will head off most terrorism on
U.S. soil.
Abroad it is another
story. The United States is seized with the immediate problem of
preventing the murder of its citizens overseas and with the long-range objective
of directing dissident energies into less destructive channels. Accurate
intelligence is not enough. The brilliance of the police work, for example,
that led to the presumed destroyers of a Pan Am airliner over Scotland came too
late to save the lives of its passengers.
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Strategy: Reducing Grievances That Fuel
Violence
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The fundamental strategy for reducing
the global level of violence must be reduction of the sense of grievance that
fuels it. The principle was incorporated in the Magna Carta in 1225:
"To no one shall we deny justice." Seven centuries later, the UN
Charter committed its signatories to justice as defined in international law,
and to the renunciation of armed force, "save in the common
interest." The Nazi practice of taking and killing civilian hostages led
to the adoption in 1949 of the four Geneva Conventions dealing with war crimes.
The Protocols of 1977 extended those Conventions to apply to civil wars and
wars of national liberation.
The decision, however, of the Reagan
Administration not to ratify the Protocols, on the grounds that they could be
cited to legitimate terrorism, suggests that a rise to the status of superpower
has converted the United States from a revolutionary nation in 1776 to a status
quo state two centuries later.
America's mainstream media have failed
to make clear that the United States itself figures prominently in the ranks
of international lawbreakers—this in aid of maintaining the status quo. Going
back at least to 1637, when English colonists massacred several hundred Pequot
Indians in Connecticut, American leaders have committed American lives and
resources to questionable military actions, clandestine operations against
foreign governments, attempts to assassinate foreign heads of state, and in at
least once instance (Operation Phoenix in Vietnam) conduct of an enterprise
that can only be characterized as a death squad.
Further, the United
States has incurred indirect culpability by lending financial, logistical, and
political support to the repressive actions of various right wing factions and
regimes around the world. In this way, Washington seems to have shared responsibility
for such operations as the 1985 attempt by Saudi operatives to kill Shiite
dignitary Fadlallah in Beirut with an attendant death toll of eighty persons
and the 1981 massacre of some 600 peasants by U.S.-trained Salvadoran soldiers
at El Mozote. Additionally, one can cite the extralegal operations of Israel's
counter terrorist agencies, including the systematic torture of Palestinian
suspects (as alleged by Amnesty International) and assassinations by undercover
units operating in the Occupied Territories (as proclaimed by the Likud Party
in the 1992 elections).
Perhaps some—or even all—of these
U.S.-supported actions were ethically or strategically defensible, but their
justification is not the issue here. The point is that the United States
must come to recognize that most anti-American terrorism is a direct
consequence of American foreign policy. Operating unilaterally or, when
convenient, through complaisant allies and a toothless UN, since World War II
the United States has intervened in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
The purpose of such policy initiatives has been to promote actively political
conditions said to be vital to the national interest or conducive to world
peace.
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Anti-American Backlash
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This assertive policy has provoked a
costly backlash. Examples follow:
In 1953, the CIA financed a coup that ousted
Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh, restored the Shah to the throne, and sowed
the seeds of anti-Americanism. In 1979, the monarchy was replaced by a
theocratic regime that adopted policies hostile to America and its Middle East
allies, and that held the Tehran Embassy staff hostage for over a year.
In 1983, over the protests of the Marine colonel on
the scene, Washington ordered units of the Sixth Fleet to shell Lebanese forces
in the hills above Beirut. Hundreds of civilians died in the American gunfire.
The most grisly consequence was the truck bombing of a barracks in October of
that year, resulting in the deaths of 241.
In 1986, a bomb in a Berlin discotheque caused many
American casualties; acting on intelligence that ascribed the bombing to Libya,
President Reagan ordered an air raid on Tripoli in April. Also that year, in a
tragic case of mistaken identity, the U.S.S.Vincennes downed an
Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf. According to one account, U.S.
intelligence has concluded that Iran subsequently contracted with a Palestinian
organization, the PFLP/General Command, to blow up an American airliner in
retaliation for the action by the Vincennes. General Command
operatives in Germany undertook the assignment, but finding their organization
under close German surveillance, subcontracted the task to Libyan intelligence.
The result, according to this report, was the midair explosion of Pan Am Flight
103 over Scotland at the end of the year and a death toll of 270 people.
In 1995, seven people—five of them Americans—died
in the bombing of an office used by an American military training unit at
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Some months later, the Saudi government beheaded four
Saudis convicted of complicity in the attack. In June 1996, in presumed
retaliation or continuation of the anti-American campaign, unknown persons
bombed a Dhahran apartment building, killing nineteen resident personnel of the
U.S. Air Force.
It is no coincidence that most costly
incidents of anti-American terrorism in recent years took place in the Middle
East. Perhaps the most extreme example of post-World War II American
paternalism is U.S. determination to deny hegemony over that oil-rich area to
any rival power. This commitment to a precarious status quo puts the United
States in opposition to the perceived interests of the regimes in Iran, Iraq,
and Syria, and to the currents of Islamism and Arab nationalism throughout the
region.
While professing to act as the
impartial protagonist of peace and justice in the Middle East, Washington has
aligned itself with only two of the several competitors in a chaotic regional
power struggle. Its first and foremost ally is Israel; its secondary ally is the
faltering clique of reactionary rulers in the Arabian Peninsula.
The United States treats the opponents
of these two sets of allies as automatically constituting opponents of America
itself, to the extent that every American intervention in the region, however
evenhanded in concept, ends up as an American engagement on the side of its
chosen allies. When President Clinton sent cruise missiles against Baghdad in
June 1993 as punishment for a putative Iraqi assassination attempt in Kuwait on
former President Bush, Arab commentators contrasted America's readiness to bomb
Muslims in Iraq with its reluctance to bomb Christians in Bosnia, even though
the nation had denounced the latter for practicing ethnic cleansing.
A number of Third World countries
continue their long and convulsive passage from colonialism to full
independence. Part of the cost in making this change evidently must be paid in
blood, mainly by the people of the Third World nations directly concerned, but
also as an adjunct to the process by the nationals of any country that seeks to
intervene. Here the United States's actions in the Middle East illustrate the
point. And this being the case, the question arises as to what policy options
are best calculated, above all, to reduce the toll in human lives.
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US Strategy Choice: Retaliate or
Negotiate?
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It seems fair to assume that the United
States is determined to continue its activist foreign policies in the post-Cold
War world. Washington, if faced with the threat or actuality of terrorism,
nonetheless has a strategic choice between retaliation and negotiation.
Under isolated circumstances, reprisal
can be morally justifiable and tactically effective. During the Civil War,
President Lincoln halted the Confederate practice of killing black Union troops
and their white officers by threatening retaliatory executions of Confederate
prisoners of war. In that situation, justice was on the side of the Union. But
today in the Third World, violence is most often the inevitable expression of
legitimate grievances against local oppression or foreign interference. The
violence can be attenuated only by political and economic reform, not by
counter violence.
President Reagan enunciated the
doctrine of counter violence when he ordered the raid on Tripoli: "There
should be no place on earth where terrorists… can practice their deadly
skills." This sentiment has a ring to it, but it usually ends badly.
America's so-called surgical strikes always manage to kill more innocent
civilians than terrorists. And they complicate relations with American allies.
Worst of all, such strikes raise the level of anti-Americanism around the
world.
If the United States steps back from
military reprisal in response to terrorist action, it still has the option of
economic sanctions. These measures seem to have contributed to resolution of the
racial conflict in South Africa, although only when combined with a monumental
change of heart by the white establishment. U.S.-sponsored sanctions against
Iraq and Iran have had no identifiable effect on the policies of their
government, while inflicting illness and death on thousands of Iraqi children
and opening the door to the charge (by Christopher Hitchens) that the American
definition of a terrorist is a "swarthy opponent of U.S. foreign
policy."
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US Policy Tests: Morality &
Consensus
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Taking whatever action is feasible, the
United States has an obligation to lead the campaign to reduce international
violence. That effort will succeed only insofar as it meets the tests of morality and consensus .
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Morality
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is all too often subordinated to the
politics of the double standard. An egregious example is a statement in 1991
attributed to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir: "Jewish terrorism is
acceptable because Jews are stateless and persecuted. Palestinian terrorism is
not because Palestine belongs to Israel."
The United States has not only
supported Israel in its application of the double standard to its Arab
adversaries, but it has committed the same mistake on its own account. In late
1985, the United States supported a Security Council resolution outlawing the
abduction of a country's citizens by another country. Yet in November 1989,
Assistant U.S. Attorney General Barr told a Congressional committee that the
national interest sometimes requires the United States to ignore international
law. He gave as an example the need to authorize the FBI to pursue non American
fugitives abroad. American authorities have, indeed, abducted Palestinian
hijackers from Cyprus and from Malta.
A strong argument can be made in some
cases for extralegal abductions. The case of Adolf Eichmann comes to mind. It
seems unlikely, however, that the United States would ever be understanding of
foreign action against its own legal residents, particularly if they were IRA
activists.
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Consensus
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is best expressed through international
organization, starting with the UN. That truism is often ridiculed by American
politicians and government officials. If the Security Council endorses an
American initiative, the United States is likely to operate under the UN aegis,
as in the military action against Iraq in 1991. If not, the United States may
go ahead on its own, as in the establishment of "no-fly zones" in
Iraq. When Nicaragua appealed to the International Court of Justice against the
CIA's mining of Nicaraguan waters, the United States rejected the court's jurisdiction
in the matter.
No nation, however
powerful, is qualified or entitled to be the policeman of the world. Fortunately, if U.S.
policy is not always democratic, the American political system is and it enjoys
the system's capacity to learn from experience. In the context of terrorism,
when South Africa's Nelson Mandela was honored at a Washington dinner in 1990,
his hosts included three U.S. Senators who had voted five years previously to
condemn his African National Congress as a terrorist organization.
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There are grounds for hope,
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therefore, that the United States will
learn to accord the UN more than lip service. It will learn to balance the
national interest against the broader dictates of morality and consensus. And
the nation, one hopes, will learn to recognize that the answer to violence
often is to be found in the area of political and economic reforms, not
necessarily through military means. However compelling some segments of society
find violence as a means to express their sense of injustice, it should not be
beyond our capabilities to reduce drastically the incidence of bloodshed by
addressing basic human needs—not by answering bombs with bombs.
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