Five questions about terrorism
Walzer, Michael
THIS IS NOT going to be a straightforward and entirely coherent argument. I am still reeling from the attacks of September 11, and I don't have all my responses in order. I will try to answer...
...The combatant-noncombatant distinction is crucial to every kind of political and military TERROR AND THE RESPONSE activity...
...they exploit the globalist modernity that they so bitterly oppose...
...We have to work to transform the environment, so that wherever terrorists go, they will encounter hostility and rejection...
...In fact, terror is commonly the first resort of militants who believe from the beginning that the Enemy should be killed and who are neither interested in nor capable of organizing their own people for any other kind of politics: the FLN and the PLO resorted to terror from the beginning...
...If we can't make that case, then we have to be ready to consider modifying the constraints...
...So .. . there may be trials down the road, but we shouldn't focus on them now...
...I want to argue for a multilateral response, a "war" against terror that has to be fought on many fronts...
...The common element is the targeting of people who are, in both the military and political senses, noncombatants: not soldiers, not public officials, just ordinary people...
...I will try to answer five questions about terrorism...
...This means that we have to persuade other countries—our allies in many cases, who have closer ties than we do with terrorist states and whose leaders have not been heroes in these matters—to bring pressure of their own to bear and to support disinvestment, embargo, and other sanctions when they are appropriate...
...argument is very important...
...1) What is it...
...Hiroshima seems to me the classic case...
...There were a lot of fools back then, and back then—in the sixties and seventies—was when the culture of excuse and apology was born (but I want to deal with that later...
...but when they (we) do that, we have to accept a new burden of proof: we have to be able to make the case that the necessary police work can be done, and can be done effectively, within whatever constraints we think are required for the sake of American freedom...
...Think of what will happen to our civil liberties if there are more successful terrorist attacks...
...the two are hard to mark off, and we are not planning on negotiations...
...it must be seen being done...
...The first looks to the desperation of the "oppressed," as they are called (and as they may well be): terror, we are told, is the weapon of the weak, the last resort of subject nations...
...We have already been told by the secretary of defense that we are not going to get the conventional signs: formal surrender, signatures on a peace treaty...
...It may be the only part to which the frequently invoked doctrine of "just war" applies...
...We probably don't have the evidence to do that...
...We should imagine the "war" as including many possible engagements...
...There are American policies (not only in the Islamic world, but globally as well) that should be changed, but in politics one must not only do the right thing, one must do it for the right reasons, the attacks of September 11 are not a good reason for change...
...But there is also ideological work, which can't and shouldn't be directed or organized by the state, which will only be effective if it is carried on freely—and that means in the usual democratically haphazard and disorderly way...
...and now they see a chance to use Islamic terrorism as a kind of "enforcer" for their own political agenda...
...There are, of course, many different political and religious doctrines that inspire genocide and ethnic cleansing, and each intervention is distinct...
...The case is the same with terrorism...
...The killing of political leaders is ruled out in international law, even (or especially) in wartime—and ruled out for good reason—because it is the political leaders of the enemy state with whom we will one day have to negotiate the peace...
...One day we will be free of this kind of constraint, and that will be another way of knowing that we have won...
...And, finally, there is war terrorism: the effort to kill civilians in such large numbers that their government is forced to surrender...
...Generally, this argument comes from people who before September 11 wanted us to stop protecting the Kurds in northern Iraq, to stop supporting Israel, and to get out of Saudi Arabia...
...Even if American policies in the Middle East and in East Asia have been or are wrong in many ways, they don't excuse the terrorist attack...
...If that's the point, then there is a sense in which Afghanistan is a sideshow, however necessary it is, however much attention the media give it, however focused on it our diplomats and soldiers have to be...
...Osama bin Laden, in the speech he de6 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 livered on video shortly before (it was broadcast after) the September 11 attacks, spoke about eighty years of subjection, which takes the story back to the establishment of European protectorates and trusteeships in the Middle East after World War I; the effort to create a Christian state in Lebanon...
...And the same thing can be said for Latin America, especially Central America, where U.S...
...But the arguments that I want to consider are of a different sort: they don't justify the acts that we call terrorism...
...each one requires its own calculations of morality and prudence...
...but—a very big "but"—after all, we deserved it...
...MICHAEL WALZER is co-editor of Dissent and author, among many works, of Just and Unjust Wars...
...they produce a rush of recruits and probably a new willingness to fund the terrorist networks...
...3) How is terrorism defended...
...And, finally, because even if we do all these things, we will still be imposing serious risks on the civilian population, we must reduce those risks as far as possible—and take risks ourselves in order to do that...
...Terrorism, after all, doesn't require mass mobilization...
...We have as much right to shell the enemy army's central headquarters as to shell its frontline positions...
...the moment is hard to reconstruct, but I am sure that it is an actual moment, even if, once the choice is made, the people who opposed terror are commonly killed, and so we never hear their version of how the argument went...
...But make no mistake: neither the transnational networks, nor most of the more provincial ones, could survive without the physical shelter, the ideological patronage, and the funding provided by such states as Iran, Syria, Libya, and others...
...Still, the role of the West is fairly large...
...There is a lot of local involvement too, many African governments are complicitous or directly responsible for the misery of their own people...
...5) What will be the signs of a successful response...
...This article is adapted from a talk given at the Dissent editorial board meeting in November 2001...
...I don't accept the notion that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter...
...4) How should we respond...
...they ought to be condemned...
...How will we know when we have won this "war...
...The use of military courts would avoid these difficulties, because the rules of evidence could be relaxed and the trials held in secret...
...Terrorism is the deliberate killing of innocent people, at random, in order to spread fear through a whole population and force the hand of its political leaders...
...we will have to look for other, though not unrelated, kinds of ethical guidance on the other fronts...
...In any case, do we really want trials now, while the terrorists networks are still active...
...We should oppose them all, but the different engagements will have to be considered one by one...
...the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state after the Second World War...
...Once the Enemy has been created, any of "them" can be killed, men, women, or children, combatants and noncombatants, ordinary folk...
...The hostility is generalized and indiscriminate...
...None of this is going to come quickly or easily...
...The question about justice in the real war is a familiar one, and so is the answer—though the answer is easier in principle than in practice...
...Perhaps I can say a word about assassination, which has been much discussed in recent months...
...Earlier terrorist campaigns are also explicable, in part, by the internal authoritarianism and weakness of the "liberation movement," in this case, its refusal or inability to mobilize its own people for other kinds of political action...
...That can't be right...
...there is no causus belli, nor should we look for one...
...You have to imagine a group of people sitting around a table and arguing about what to do...
...But who is the enemy here...
...But this is a definition that best fits the terrorism of a national liberation or revolutionary movement (the Irish Republican Army, the Algerian National Liberation Front [FLN], the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Basque Separatist Movement, and so on...
...I suggest that we think in terms of an analogy with humanitarian intervention...
...At any rate, it would seem odd to say that it is legitimate to attack a group of terrorists-in-training in a camp in Afghanistan, say, but not legitimate to go after the man who is planning the operation for which the others are training...
...they have a different mission: to restore the dominance of Islam in the lands of Islam...
...Technological hubris isn't, I suppose, a crime, but it can lead to very bad outcomes, so it is better to leave a wide margin for error...
...But I won't talk about that now...
...2) How should we go about explaining terrorism— and particularly the form of terrorism that we face today...
...The most important battle against terror is being waged right here, and in Britain and Germany and Spain, and other countries of the Arab and Islamic diaspora...
...companies have played a significant part in exploiting and sustaining poverty: and yet the Latin diaspora is not a friendly sea...
...we had it coming...
...We shouldn't, in my view, think of the war as a "police action," aimed at bringing criminals to justice...
...4) How should we respond...
...beyond that it is hard to know...
...Islamic terrorists don't call themselves freedom fighters...
...It isn't a betrayal of liberal or American values to do that...
...2) How should we go about explaining it...
...we must avoid overestimating the smartness of our smart bombs...
...That is a policy, it seems to me, that would begin with dishonor and end in disaster...
...Of course, the September 11 attacks were wrong...
...the silence of those who once made exDISSENT / Winter 2002 n 9 TERROR AND THE RESPONSE cuses for terror...
...This last is the hardest thing I have to say, because I'm not the one who will have to take those risks...
...And they aren't killed incidentally in the course of actions aimed elsewhere...
...And it is very, very important, because "successes" like September 11 have energizing effects...
...Secular and religious intellectuals, scholars, preachers, and publicists, not necessarily in any organized way, but with some sense of shared commitment, have to set about delegitimizing the culture of excuse and apology, probing the religious and nationalist sources of terror, calling upon the best in Islamic civilization against the worst, defending the separation of religion and politics in all civilizations...
...and it may well be the case that evidence collected by clandestine means or by armed force in distant countries, evidence that doesn't come from official archives, such as the German records that figured in the Nuremberg trials, but from e-mail intercepts and similar unofficial sources, would not be admissible in an American court—and probably not in international courts either, though I don't know what rules of evidence apply in The Hague...
...Right now, we have to worry: we cannot do things that would lead someone like bin Laden to claim a victory, to boast that he had forced our hand...
...it is a political strategy selected from among a range of options...
...Misery and inequality just don't work as explanations for any of the nationalist terrorist movements and certainly not for Islamic terror...
...Is it the people who planned or sponsored or supported the September 11 attacks or is it any and all other groups that practice a terrorist politics...
...Assuming that we correctly identified the terrorist network responsible for the September 11 attacks and that the Taliban government was in fact its patron and protector, the war as a whole is certainly a just one (whether it is a prudent one was a much harder question last fall...
...The first thing to understand is that terrorism is a choice...
...Also about the terrible suffering, as someone wrote in one of our weeklies, endured by "people all over the world who have been the DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 5 TERROR AND THE RESPONSE victims of American military action—in Vietnam, in Latin America, in Iraq...
...Moral argument requires its cases, and here the cases are, deliberately and presumably rightly, concealed from view...
...There are basically two kinds of excuses...
...we can safely avoid postmodernist arguments about knowledge and truth...
...pOLICE WORK is the first priority, and that raises questions, not about justice, but about civil liberties...
...Think of the hostage-takings and bomb threats that would almost cer8 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 tainly accompany them...
...There is one more measure: our ability to shape our foreign policies, particularly toward the Islamic world, without worrying about the terrorist response...
...The proportionality rule is commonly invoked here: civilian deaths and injuries, euphemistically called "collateral damage," should not be disproportionate to the value of the military victory that is being sought...
...In fighting against terrorists, we must not aim at innocent people (that's what the terrorists do...
...it is the work of a tiny elite of militants, TERROR AND THE RESPONSE who claim to represent the people" but who act in the absence of the people (that's why classical Marxism was always hostile to terrorism— the reason, alas, was strategic, not moral...
...The fundamentalist religious response to modernity, which is common across all the major world religions, comes up here against governments that are very far from admirable representatives of modernity: secular governments often, or governments that are ready for accommodation with the West and eager to absorb the latest technologies, but at the same time brutal, repressive, corrupt, authoritarian, unjust . . . and unsuccessful in providing either the symbols or the substance of a decent common life...
...But there are many forms of legitimate political and economic pressure short of war, and it seems to me that we have to work hard to bring that kind of pressure to bear...
...Again, prevention is crucial...
...What are the political roots of terror...
...The second kind of excuse looks to the guilt of the victims of terrorism...
...the collapse of morale among the terrorists, the appearance of informers and defectors from their ranks...
...Liberals and libertarians leap to the defense of liberty, and they are right to leap...
...Here is how it works for Americans: we fought the Gulf War, we station troops on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, we blockade and bomb Iraq, we support Israel— what do we expect...
...I don't think that a simple materialist explanation works, though there has been a lot of talk in the last couple of months about the human misery, the terrible poverty, the vast global inequalities in which terrorism is "ultimately rooted...
...This sort of thing is very important...
...Instead, they are expressions of what I have already described as a culture of excuse and apology...
...WE NEED A combined cultural-religiouspolitical explanation that has to focus, I think, on the creation of an Enemy, a whole people who are ideologically or theologically degraded so that they are available for murder: that's what the IRA did to Irish Protestants, the FLN to French Algerians, the PLO to Israeli Jews...
...5) What will be the signs of a successful response...
...The point of the war is prevention above all: to destroy the network and stop the preparation of future attacks...
...In the case of Islamic terrorism, the Enemy is the infidel, whose world leader is the United States and whose local representative is Israel...
...Jihad is a response not only to modernity but also to the radical failure of the Islamic world to modernize itself...
...But because I don't know how to measure the relevant values or how to specify the proportionality, and because I don't think that anyone else knows, I prefer to focus instead on the seriousness of the intention to avoid harming civilians, and that is best measured by the acceptance of risk...
...There are obvious exceptions to this rule—no one, no moral person, would have objected to an allied effort to assassinate Hitler...
...And some of these governments, in order to maintain their own power, sponsor a kind of ideological and theological scapegoating, directed against external enemies: Israel, America, the West generally, who are blamed for the internal failures...
...it is in fact the right thing to do, because the first obligation of the state is to protect the lives of its citizens (that's what states are for), and American lives are now visibly and certainly at risk...
...We are not going to go to war with those states...
...the effort to set up Westernstyle constitutional monarchies and parliamentary republics in the Arab world...
...The case is the same with terror: there are many terrorist ideologies and many terrorist organizations...
...there was no long series of attempts to find alternatives...
...In certain extremist Islamic groups today there is a straightforward defense, which is also a denial: there are no innocent Americans, hence attacks like those of September 11 are not terrorist in character...
...the first object of the "war" against terrorism is not backward looking and retributive, but forward looking and preventive...
...We have to walk a fine line: to sustain a defensible policy with regard, say, to the blockade of Iraq, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the Kashmir dispute, and not to do anything that can plausibly be construed as appeasement...
...Surely it is Africa that reveals the worst consequences of global inequality, and the involvement of the West in the production and reproduction of inequality is nowhere more evident...
...It's not hard to recognize...
...The murder of innocent people is not excusable...
...that's true of many political terms...
...If we can prevent further attacks, if we can begin to roll up the terrorist cells, that will be a major victory...
...3) How is it defended or excused...
...We need another explanation...
...And as we have seen, there is at least one alternative—nonviolent mass mobilization—that has proven itself a far more effective "weapon of the weak...
...War" is a metaphor here, but real war is a necessary part of the metaphorical "war...
...The use of "democracy" is contested, but we still have, I think, a pretty good idea of what democracy is (and isn't...
...I suppose that the state can get involved, with the Voice of America and other media...
...With terrorist organizations, this distinction between military and political leaders probably collapses...
...They attribute their agenda to the terrorists (what else could terrorists have in mind but what Western leftists have always advocated...
...When we fight from far away, with planes and missiles, we have to get people in, on the ground, to select the targets, or we have to have very good intelligence...
...Why do the terrorists so often win the argument...
...But the military defeats are part of a larger story of the failure of state building and economic development in most of the Islamic world...
...they have yet to commit themselves to an open struggle against the theological radicalism that inspires the terrorist networks...
...they are killed intentionally...
...But our commitment should be general...
...When someone like Gandhi was able to organize a nonviolent mass movement for national liberation, there was no terrorism...
...Diplomatic work comes next: right now it is focused on building support for military action in Afghanistan and for some kind of future nonTaliban regime...
...There is also state terrorism, commonly used by authoritarian and totalitarian governments against their own people, to spread fear and make political opposition impossible: the Argentine "disappearances" are a useful example...
...The measure of success will be relative: a decline in attacks and in the scope of attacks...
...But over the long run, the critically important task will be to isolate and punish states that support terrorism...
...we were in fact not prepared to negotiate with him—but ordinary political leaders are immune...
...Covert action is also necessary, and I confess that I don't know what moral rules apply to it...
...The networks look transnational...
...We (the United States, the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Organization of African Unity, and others) intervene, or ought to intervene, against genocide and "ethnic cleansing" wherever they occur...
...and then call for a policy of appeasement in order to avoid further attacks...
...For all their inner-directedness, their fanatical commitment and literalminded faith, terrorists do rely on, and the terrorist organizations rely even more on, a friendly environment—and this friendly environment is a cultural/intellectual/political creation...
...a growing sense of safety among ordinary people...
...Diplomats are immune for the same reason: they are potential peacemakers...
...But what I have in mind is different...
...But military leaders are not immune, however high they stand on the chain of command...
...In the 1960s, when someone from the FLN put a bomb in a café where French teenagers gathered to flirt and dance and called himself a freedom fighter, only fools were fooled...
...This kind of Enemy is the special creation of nationalist and religious movements, which often aim not only at the defeat but at the removal or elimination of the "others...
...The author of those words doesn't seem to have noticed that there are no terrorists coming from Vietnam and Latin America...
...But then there will be costs to pay in legitimacy: for justice, as the saying goes, must not only be done, it must be seen to be done...
...they don't even make it morally comprehensible...
...Some of these governments are our allies, Islamic moderates or Arab secularists, but they have yet to take on the extremists in their midst...
...Of course, the use of the term is contested...
...ideally we should get close enough to the enemy, or to his supporters, so that we are quite sure not only that we are aiming at them but also DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 7 TERROR AND THE RESPONSE that we are hitting them...
...1) What is terrorism...
...I want simply to deny the moral legitimacy of the excuse...
...A simple thought experiment in comparative politics helps explain why they don't work...
...the rallying of opportunists, who have the best nose for who's winning, to our side...
...Whether the answers add up to a "position"—theoretical or practical—I will leave to the reader...
...It may sound self-serving for someone who makes his living making arguments to say this, but it is true nonetheless...
...When communist Bulgaria called itself a "people's democracy," only fools were fooled...
...And yet the African diaspora is not a friendly sea in which terrorists swim...
...Wartime propaganda commonly has the same effect, demonizing the other side, even when both sides expect the war to end with a negotiated peace...
...and then the long series of military defeats from 1948 to 1991, not only in the Middle East but in East Asia, all of them experienced as terrible humiliations, at the hands of Jews, Hindus, and Americans, who are not supposed to be warrior peoples at all...
...wAR, POLICE WORK, covert action, and diplomacy: all these are tasks of the state...
Vol. 49 • January 2002 • No. 1
