Taking On Terrorism

...To have done so would have meant writing more complex—and better—books...

...The former is more journalistic, with detailed accounts of individual terrorists and a separate chapter devoted to the Achille Lauro incident...

...Laymen, rushing in where French politicians fear to tread, tend to think the issue is fairly straightforward...

...Their attention is focused on the terrorists' grievances...

...Readers may be forgiven if they find that comment's second sentence backing up into and denting the fender of the first...

...As one recent writer has put it: "To call an act of political violence terrorist is not merely to describe it but to judge it...

...Others from the preWorld War I era were to be found in Ireland, India and Turkish Armenia...

...Laqueur divides current terrorists into four basic categories: separatist-nationalist...

...Russian Socialists and liberals seeking to overthrow the Tsar were the most important early terrorists...

...Latin American...

...is not in terrorist aclsperse, but in triggering off a wider and more dangerous armed conflict...

...Laqueur also gets himself into trouble in his discussion of responses and solutions...

...In the end, Laqueur suggests that the best course the U.S...

...In 1984, a committee of the French Senate concluded that "any definition is practically guaranteed to fail...

...Governments and scholars regularly tie themselves up in knots attempting to clarify the term...

...Laqueur has his crotchets, most notably the media...

...And if coverage of those stories seems out of proportion to reporting on wars and the like, it is probably because the public has a disproportionate interest in them...

...urban...

...one student of the subject has counted 109 separate definitions offered in the years 1936-81...

...Out of their desire for sensationalism and an "in-built inclination toward exaggeration," he continues, journalists ignore other major stories—killings in Cambodia, for example, or wars in southern Sudan—to concentrate on the more spectacular activities of terrorists...

...Still, each author seeks to examine the phenomenon from the terrorists' point of view, and adopts an occasionally self-righteous tone in arguing for justice and compromise...

...Even if the "state terrorism" of Hitler, Stalin, IdiAmin, PolPot, and woefully many others is set aside, the problem remains of finding a single rubric for such disparate groups as Palestinian skyjackers and Latin American kidnappers, Basque separatists and Japanese revolutionaries, the Red Brigades and the Ku Klux Klan, 19th-century bomb-throwing Russian anti-Tsarists and 20thcentury bomb-planting American antiabortionists...

...Laqueur's contextual method, moreover, brings him to the sensible observation that the only way of judging a terrorist action is by considering both its end and its means in the light of one's previously established political and moral values...

...Segaller sounds moderate: "The question for those with any power to bring to bear on the problem is how to divert the terrorists from their terrorism...

...For this reason, it is important to prevent an escalation, to resist statesponsored terrorism from the beginning...

...Compounding the difficulty of arriving at a satisfactory definition is the fact that "terrorism" is a pejorative...

...Laqueur explains that attention to context and specific situations must take the place of generalization...

...Media coverage has supplied constant grist to the mills of terrorists, it has magnified the importance of terrorism out of all proportion, it has served their propaganda, it has been indirectly responsible for the murder of innocents, and sometimes prevented or complicated rescue missions...

...His reluctance to define "terrorism" does lead him rather far afield from time to time—he caste his net wide enough to land such strange fish as Eugene Debs and Jerry Rubin...

...Segaller writes: "There is no evidence of anything other than counterproductive results for the ideological revolutionary groups: the Tupamaros destroyed democracy in Uruguay...

...In The Age of Terrorism (Little, Brown, 385 pp., $19.95), a revised and expanded version of his volume Terrorism, Walter Laqueur shrewdly pre-empts the whole question...

...the Red Brigades and Red Army Faction caused substantial infringements of civil liberties and repressive new laws to be introduced in West Germany and Italy...

...Yet most people would surely stumble over how to characterize the French resistance during World War II or South Africa's African National Congress or Afghanistan's anti-Soviet rebels...

...Both identify two major categories of terrorists: nationalists like the Palestinians, and revolutionaries like the BaaderMeinhof Gang—the people who fall into Laqueur's "urban" classification...

...they believe they know terrorism when they see it, associating it with politically motivated violence committed by small bands of fanatics, usually Left-wing...

...Whatever its merits, though, this counsel is bound to disappoint...

...innocent civilians could be hurt by retaliation...

...No one could possibly defend everything every reporter has ever done during a hostage crisis...

...Two additional studies, Stephen Segaller's Invisible Armies: Terrorism into the 1990s (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 311 pp., $17.95) and Richard E. Rubenstein's Alchemists of Revolution: Terrorism in the Modern World (Basic, 266 pp., $17.95), take different approaches from one another, but are ultimately peas in a pod...

...There are, in short, good terrorists and bad terrorists...

...He fails or refuses to see the inevitable congruence of goals between the terrorists' hunger for headlines and the media's responsibility to keep the public informed...

...Yet in the next breath he lists the reasons why decisive resistance by a country like the U.S., where the social order is secure (as compared, say, with Turkey or Israel), is not such a great idea: There is normally no " smoking gun" identifying the sponsor...

...Nonetheless, his book is an invaluable compendium, demonstrating an abundance of learning and providing as much on the history of the subject as most readers are likely to desire...

...No definition of terrorism, " he declares, " can possibly cover all the varieties of terrorism that have appeared throughout history...

...It includes extensive analyses of Marxism, Leninism and anarchism, and tries to develop a broad theory of the conditions that give rise to terrorism...

...Neither author pauses to ask whether the demands of groups like the Red Brigades or the Basque separatists are reasonable and susceptible to compromise, or whether a "hearing" and an "end to American-sponsored oppression" would contribute much to intractable situations like Northern Ireland and the Middle East...

...He says that support by governments —Libya, Syria, Iran, the Soviet Union—is the primary cause for the current spate of anti-Western terrorism and, sounding very much the hard-liner, insists that the violence may increase in the future unless this foreign backing is "decisively resisted...

...Groups included in the first of these—Palestinians, Shiites, Basques —appear to be the most persistent and successful...

...Attacks on civilians and noncombatants are frequently viewed as the essential feature of terrorism, but few modern conflicts spare civilians and the line between combatants and noncombatants is hardly chiseled in stone...

...Others, striving for objectivity, have a harder time...

...It contains nothing new or insightful, and is a mouse of a conclusion from a scholar considered one of terrorism's leading authorities...

...None of us is apt tobe killed in the southern Sudan...

...This makes things easy for those wishing to score propaganda points...

...He finds that there is no such thing as a "terrorist personality," and even challenges the statistics on the phenomenon...

...Terrorism cannot be unconditionally rejected except on the basis of a total commitment to nonviolence and nonresistance to evil...

...any of us could become the victim of a bombing or hijacking...

...In his criticism, however, Laqueur is a man overboard...

...Their major argument with Laqueur involves government policy toward terrorism...

...While Laqueur discovers terrorism as far back as 66 CE, he traces its modern origins to the second halfofthel9th century, when democratic thought and nationalistic aspirations fostered a new spirit that was ready to help the course of history along with a few bombs and an assassination or two...

...The obvious answer is to give their cause the hearing which is their primary demand...

...He accuses journalists of aiding and abetting terrorists by providing them with easy publicity...

...Rubenstein tends to rant: "Our policy must be to uproot the causes of terrorism by putting an end to American-sponsored oppression of classes, nations and ethnic communities...

...Between the wars, the Rightwing was responsible for the majority of incidents, and the most recent wave started in the late 1960s, achild of the New Left...

...Not everything in The Age of Terrorism is history and description...

...the Weather Underground and its successor groups like the Red Guerrilla Resistance and the May 19th Communist Organization only discredited the liberal student political movement which swept the United States in the 1960s...

...Segaller and Rubenstein agree with Laqueur that the nationalists have greater success, indeed that the revolutionaries have little success at all...

...They are "softer" than he is, contending that repressive and retaliatory measures either fail or are too costly to Western values...

...On four nights of the 1985 Beirut hostage crisis, he observes, ABC spent less than two minutes out of 30 on all other news...

...Only one's enemies are terrorists...

...Nor does he acknowledge the difficulty even responsible journalists confront in trying to deal under heavy pressure with the kind of ethically ambiguous situations created by terrorist episodes...

...and extreme Right...

...Ina striking example of giving with one hand and taking with the other, Laqueur states: "The danger of international terrorism...

...can follow is a "no-concessions policy"—an unobjectionable position, to be sure, so long as one does not take Laqueur up on his earlier advice to avoid generalization and consider each case separately...

...The latter is more scholarly...

...Should Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the target of IRA plotters at Brighton in the early 1980s, be labeled a noncombatant, or Tsar Alexander II, who was assassinated by terrorists a century before...