Fundamental Dilemmas
PILLAR, PAUL R.
Fundamental Dilemmas Why Terrorism Works By Alan M. Dershowitz Yale. 261 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Paul R. Pillar Author, "Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy" IN HIS NEW BOOK Alan Dershowitz,...
...This prescription fancifully presumes that those who would commit the next attack care enough about the named village to change their minds, or that the villagers somehow have the means and inclination to dissuade them...
...The other confronts the inherent tensions between fighting it and preserving a free society's legal, moral, and humanitarian principles...
...Dershowitz' recommendation for fine-tuning Israeli policy (to make the punishment for terrorism even more direct and explicit) is to declare that every terrorist act will be followed by not only the bulldozing of a designated village but a permanent decrease in the land to be granted to an eventual Palestinian state...
...He explores, among other considerations, the danger of a "slippery slope," the relative advantages of judicial sanction versus "off the books" activity, and how the "esthetics" of torture affect the way we think about it...
...He is right, and he fulfills that part of his duty in the latter portion of his book...
...Dershowitz sidesteps the matter by habitually referring to "the Palestinians" as if they were an indivisible group...
...Dershowitz seems to have missed some of these...
...Dershowitz disavows being an expert on terrorism...
...And while no controversial technique for fighting terrorism (e.g., torture or assassination) works all the time, many work some of the time...
...His rationale for nonetheless writing the book is that "everything we thought we knew about terrorism changed on September 11, 2001," that there are no "real experts" on the subject, and that many of the supposed experts are "scrambling" to update their views...
...As for U.S...
...One concerns the incentives that lead groups to commit or eschew terrorism...
...Even if government officials do not discuss these things, Dershowitz says, academics have a duty to submit them to the marketplace of ideas...
...The Palestinian case provides the most salient and agonizing example...
...Dershowitz' emphasis on the connection between rewards for past attacks and the likelihood of future attacks is a salutary reminder of the role that incentives play in terrorism, and that their manipulation must play in counterterrorism...
...Indeed, in this conflict as in others, cutting off negotiations for a political settlement tends to "reward" the most extreme groups, who use terrorism to undermine peace processes they oppose...
...The author need make no disavowals of expertise here...
...Disregard the cursory, scattershot, largely unsupported criticisms that appear elsewhere in Why Terrorism Works...
...counterterrorist policy and do not make the sort of demands that can be the occasion for "rewarding" them...
...On all matters related to liberties and human rights, he underscores some uncomfortable but relevant truths...
...And as other scholars have shown (Dershowitz draws most heavily on the work of Bruce Hoffman), the Palestinians' success inspired insurgent groups of other nationalities to employ the tactic...
...The limits of such an approach to counterterrorism have been demonstrated almost weekly over the past several months, as the Israeli government's retaliatory use of force in the West Bank has been answered by further suicide bombings...
...The fedayeen leaders of that era did find terrorism an effective way to attract international attention to their cause...
...He comes disturbingly close to equating all of them—followers as well as leaders—with terrorists by citing polls showing their widespread approval of anti-Israeli violence as justification for making ordinary Palestinians suffer in reprisal for terrorist attacks...
...His most intriguing analysis, though, concerns torture...
...Therein lies the rub...
...His basic point, though not original, is valid...
...Pay attention instead to what the author has to say about the fundamental dilemmas inherent to securing a free people against terrorism...
...His analysis reflects years of wrestling with the moral and legal questions involved...
...September 11 marked not so much a sea change in international terrorism as aparticularly traumatic manifestation of trends that had been quite apparent for the last several years to those studying the phenomenon...
...The pusillanimity that Dershowitz says characterizes the response of European governments to terrorism obtained a quarter century ago, but started changing not long afterward...
...Anyone inclined to reject the use of torture out of hand ought first to read Dershowitz' chapter on it and come to terms with his analysis...
...in the post-9/11 environment it seems totally out of date...
...Pages are devoted to Palestinian-bashing digressions...
...There will always be compromises between security and other values dear to a liberal democracy like the United States...
...He mistakenly accuses Libya, for instance, of still supporting Palestinian terrorism...
...Dershowitz does acknowledge the need for a different approach toward "apocalyptic" terrorists, but this seems like an afterthought compared to the energy he devotes to heading off any favors for the Palestinians...
...How does one observe Dershowitz'dictum that terrorism should never be rewarded and simultaneously encourage the hopes of those who are trying to pursue the same causes peacefully...
...Amid rapid-fire opinions on a host of related issues, he essentially analyzes two topics...
...What should the government do if there is reason to believe an arrested suspect is withholding information that could prevent a terrorist attack and save hundreds of lives...
...But terrorism and the peaceful pursuit of causes both require leaders as well as followers...
...He refers several times to "state-sponsored" terrorism as the problem he evidently is discussing, even though one of the clearest tendencies over the last 15 years has been a reduction in state-sponsorship...
...Foreign Policy" IN HIS NEW BOOK Alan Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard and a prolific author, makes an uneven contribution to the current policy debate on terrorism...
...policy, it is difficult to see how Dershowitz' statement that the United States "is tolerating Palestinian terrorism toward Israel" to curry favor with the Arab and Muslim worlds is at all descriptive of the Bush Administration's posture, even before the President's most recent speech on the Middle East...
...Dershowitz admits the possibility of harsh reprisals breeding additional terrorists...
...Dershowitz answers with a controversial proposal he made earlier for judicially approved "torture warrants.' These, he maintains, would both reduce the use of torture (defined as nonlethal infliction of pain) to a minimum and create public accountability for its rare use...
...A policy conundrum has been how to avoid "rewarding terrorism" without leading all Palestinians to despair of ever establishing their own state, a despair that fuels still more terrorism...
...For the most part he arrives at positions that are cogent and well-defended, but he examines all sides of these issues and provides material reasonable people could disagree on...
...Well, many of them are not scrambling...
...Missing, too, is a sense of what actually was changed by September 11 —of the dramatic increase in the U.S...
...emphasis on counterterrorism, and of this spurring corresponding commitments worldwide...
...Dershowitz applies this method to such topics as press censorship, interception of private communications, criminalizing advocacy of radical causes, restricting movement, and targeted assassinations...
...His argument revolves around the single case of its Palestinian practitioners, especially the world's response during the first decade or so after the Palestinians inaugurated the modern era of international terrorism in the late 1960s...
...A more likely result is increased hatred of Israel and the wrecking of any future peace negotiations...
...By far the most useful part of Dershowitz' book is his searching discussion of the challenges of fighting terrorism while preserving cherished values of civil liberties and human rights...
...The preoccupation with the Palestinian issue blurs the focus of a book that is ostensibly about counterterrorism in general...
...The decision calculus of resistance groups, however, involves not only the rewards or punishment resulting from terrorism but also the prospects of achieving objectives through nonviolent means...
...it is deep, clear and fair...
...At one point Dershowitz suggests (by attributing the view to unnamed "Argentine authorities") that it was Palestinians who bombed the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, even though the attack was almost certainly the work of Hezbollah in apparent retaliation for a devastating Israeli air strike on one of its facilities in Lebanon a month earlier...
...Meanwhile, he gives scant attention to the emergence of Al Qaeda-like groups, which have become the main challenge to U.S...
...Terrorism works, Dershowitz contends, because the international community has rewarded it...
...He quickly downplays the problem, though, on the grounds that this is a reaction of "followers," who, because terrorism is "more authoritarian than democratic," do not have as much influence as leaders...
Vol. 85 • July 2002 • No. 4
