Five questions about terrorism: Responses
Rule, James B.
THE TERRORIST ATTACK on September 11 evidently had two purposes. First, to inflict on ordinary Americans pain of the sort widely meted out to other civilian populations around the world by those...
...he then goes on to detail similarly horrific actions against civilians from the other side...
...The litany of this unholy tit for tat—from extermination of civilians on airliners and in refugee camps to attacks on the homes and lives of persons believed associated with activists from the other side—is too heart-breaking to detail here...
...No need to state the source of the Israeli firepower involved...
...It should disturb us because we American citizens are paying for it, via our tax dollars...
...I disagree...
...There are too many of them, and they come from too many ideological directions...
...At last count, the DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 13 TERROR AND THE RESPONSE "second Intifada" has reaped a harvest of at least 602 Palestinian and 169 Israeli deaths...
...Have we forgotten what American forces did in Vietnam—the killings and other violent intimidations aimed at "drying up the support" among the peasantry for an enemy that we could not defeat in the field...
...It's not...
...The United States could have pulled the plug on terrorism in these places...
...George W. Bush's announcement that the country was at war—without specifying the exact enemy, the form of the combat, or the nature of the victory being sought—was scary...
...BUT THE SALIENT case, in today's international context, is America's ally and protégé, Israel—a country whose very creation required violence and intimidation to cleanse its territories of people of the wrong ethnicity...
...First, to inflict on ordinary Americans pain of the sort widely meted out to other civilian populations around the world by those who oppose their governments...
...That is where Walzer's analysis fails us...
...Lamentably, the first of these aims succeeded fully and the second, substantially...
...We must never imagine that somehow cleaning up America's domestic or international stance will relieve us of any need to respond to terrorist acts...
...The reason should be that terror is an intolerable instrument for political action—wherever it occurs...
...Amos Elon, in a despairing commentary, describes the mode of Israel's attacks: "when missiles from the latest-model jet planes, tanks and helicopter gun ships hit Palestinians, indiscriminately, in frequent, grossly excessive punitive raids...
...As in Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia—and I fear, many other places—America has bankrolled and encouraged forces relying on violence and intimidation against civilians...
...It still can, where it continues...
...When he speaks of terrorism as the world's new scourge, he seems to be thinking only of terrorist activities emanating from one source...
...One of the many living participants in such actions against unarmed civilians, Bob Kerrey, now heads a major institution of higher learning in New York...
...The perpetrators of the attack deserve a commensurate response—coercive, deadly, and precisely targeted to those responsible...
...But the hope of such results should not be the reason for taking such a step...
...In fact, America itself has been and remains a prolific source of terrorist activities—that is, coercive acts against civilian populations as a political tool—all around the world...
...Michael Walzer is right about one thing: no conceivable changes in American foreign policy could ever satisfy all would-be authors of terrorist actions...
...Israeli reliance on terrorism ought to disturb us particularly, but not because it's worse than other terrorism...
...But it doesn't...
...When his actions surfaced in national debate last year, the consensus seemed to be that war is hell, and no one could properly attribute responsibility in such matters who had not experienced the situation first hand...
...This ghastly logic makes it inevitable that the costs of the activists' ambitions are paid by ordinary people whose only interest may be to keep their heads down...
...If America were seen decisively to cut off support to forces relying on terrorism throughout the world, one result might just be to make such actions less attractive to other players...
...This is not to say that any and all military action to follow from the United States is warranted...
...The initial broad support for American retaliation, both here and abroad, will evaporate— and with good reason—if the riposte ends up striking all sorts of innocent figures, while missing the perpetrators...
...Can any reasonable person maintain that even a majority of either group of victims represented a deadly threat...
...So let us by all means seek to eradicate terror wherever we find it—especially when we or those depending on us are the perpetrators...
...Since then, both the winners and losers in this territorial struggle have imposed suffering on noncombatant civilians, in hopes of altering the calculations of the other side's leaders...
...The theme never changes: make life intolerable for the civilians on whom your armed enemies depend, and you will succeed in undermining those at the top...
...But we should not be afraid to back a deadly response to those who murder Americans...
...We on the left should know better than to give blanket endorsement to such vague projects...
...Perpetrators include Americans themselves, their surrogates, and surrogates of their surrogates...
...Second, to polarize the situation between the elite United States interests and militant Islamicists, eliminating as much as possible any middle ground...
...The United States should convincingly and dramatically renounce terror as an instrument of national policy everywhere and anywhere...
...Nor should this need cause us to suspend our critical faculties—and our critical stance— regarding America's far-reaching role in the world...
...JAMES B. RULE has been a Dissent contributor for twenty years...
Vol. 49 • January 2002 • No. 1
