Articles, Etc.

US Policy Toward Terrorism

I. Police Action

          To protect our country from terrorist attacks, we should undertake a sustained policy of two programs: 1) Police action against present and prospective terrorists; and 2) Measures to reduce the world-wide animosity against us that creates and animates terrorists. 

          Let us aim our police action at each individual who has committed crimes against our country and at others who plan to do so: To find and seek conviction of those who did much to enable 9/11 and to protect against further terrorist acts. For what we do abroad, our diplomacy may obtain help from some foreign governments, but much we will have to do ourselves: Information gathered and analyzed, bribes and rewards offered and paid, criminal informants used, agents employed and “so forth” (referred to as “cloak and dagger” work, which, regrettably, includes daggers). Where sometimes we cannot cause arrests to be made, if, for our protection, our agents abroad use tactics that our principles of fairness would not tolerate in conditions short of this crisis, we nonetheless would be committing less injustice than we do with war. How many people might be assassinated, scores? And how many may be killed by our making war with our modern weapons? The latter, with less discrimination, kill more and are more unjust.  

          Those we find to be terrorist criminals we should try in an international criminal court if we cannot extradite them. In our own country, of course, we must stick to our principles of fair trials. Public demands for safety and revenge tempt leaders to restrict public liberties, recalling the British judge in colonial India, who rebuked police practices, “To sit in the shade, rubbing red pepper into some poor beggar’s eyes, is easier than to go out in the hot sun collecting evidence.” To try suspects in secret special courts without procedures that guide and control the conduct of our own long-established courts that give us pride in our country’s institutions (and in which we habitually try traitors and serial killers), would be an abomination for which we would be ashamed. Aside from the level of our own morality, if foreign governments fear unfair trials by us, they may refuse to hand over suspects.  

          To bar terrorists’ access to weapons of mass destruction is essential. What we do to bar access to big airplanes for use as missiles is needed and correct, but we must bar access to nuclear weapons. Last January, the Baker/Cutler task force reported to the incoming national Administration its finding that “the most urgent unmet national security threat to the United States today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-useable material in Russia could be stolen, sold to terrorists or hostile nation states, and used against American troops abroad or citizens at home.” The Economist has declared (11/3/01): “Earlier this year, the Administration tried to cut the money America spends helping to protect and dismantle Russia’s surplus nuclear [pronounced “nucular” by the President] weapons, to reduce its stocks of weapons-usable material, and to find employment for its scientists.” 

          Some terrorist attacks cannot be prevented by the most skilled police work. If we no more than do our best to reduce smuggling, we await the craft that enters one of our populated ports bearing an atom bomb. In the thought of our city made a smoking gravel pit, had we not better make loose nukes scarce? 

          Of course, at the start, some Presidential woofing was necessary to dampen public howls for blood. But this war is counter-productive. Our police action must aim at those who have committed crimes or prepare others. Not a nation, not a territory, not military forces in the field, they are a loose and scattered network of fanatics bent on a program of crimes to punish us. Although some operations against us have been organized there, our terrorist enemies are not confined to that country or to Islamic fanatics. In Oklahoma six years ago, an American terrorist bomber in Oklahoma murdered over 600 Americans. 

          Military action has its place, but a conventional war on most of another country and its population, most of whom have not committed crimes against us, does not work against our set of enemies, When we bombed Libya the discernible results were two: We killed Qaddhafi’s 4-year-old daughter, and a couple of years later, Libyan agents exploded Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie.    

          Bin Laden is an important criminal fugitive, and we should catch and try him, but will nabbing him and other al-Qaeda leaders reduce terrorism against us to the degree that justifies the war? Although we need no allies to hammer Afghans with high explosives, we do need them to help us catch prospective terrorists and to deter them. 

          Mirroring the economic shift over the past century from manufacturing with heavy metal to office acres of brains at terminals, this problem calls more for brains and less for hardware. Terrorism we can minimize but not eliminate. The President’s declaration: “We’re going to uproot the evil doers of the world.” is a prayer, not a policy. This is not a war winning which will permanently remove the threat that provoked it. We no more can wipe out terrorism than we can wipe out crime. Remember, we are faced with a form of crime.         

II. To Reduce Terrorist Support  

          More complex than police action are measures to reduce support for terrorism. How do we address attitudes abroad that, in their extremes of expression, lead to attacks on us? These attitudes range from lack of sympathy for our severe losses all the way to active sponsorship of terrorist acts against us. To many abroad, more so among preponderantly Islamic populations, from Casablanca to Manila, past waypoints of Izmir and Jakarta, America’s name is mud. These people are subject to stale regimes, backward, undemocratic, which encourage their discontents, and we must deal with this problem. But we cannot believe we are hated just because of editors’ and mullahs’ inflammatory rhetoric. Rabble rousers increase the passion, but we delude ourselves if we think that they create it. 

          To examine this question with moral realism, we need to avoid the time-dishonored approach of attributing our good deeds to moral choice, our evil deeds to necessity, and attribute the reverse to our enemies. 

          With our high-powered weapons, directed from afar, what proportion of Afghans whom we kill will be al-Qaeda leaders? Our armed forces are the world’s best, and their margins of error are minimal. But because war is such a blunt instrument, harm to many men, women and children cannot be avoided so long as this instrument is employed.         

          Churchill commented that “We need not make the rubble bounce.” Our Air Force has not turned Afghanistan into rubble, but that poor benighted land has not a lot in it to destroy, other than human lives. Around the world, scenes on TV and in newspapers of children’s corpses, impoverished families in flight over cold stones, provoke indignation, horror and rage. And among those provoked, a few become terrorists. As we smash lots of things and people in that one country, we not only neglect most of the terrorists, but we create new ones.          

          We know that war is not, and is not expected to be, a balanced process, with teams equalized by salary caps and rules that forbid blind-siding other players. War is a crude means to subdue an enemy at the least cost to one’s own side. Its playing field is not level; it is not a sport. And we know that our soldiers and sailors are not cowards. But we must recognize that around the world a substantial number of people feel that it is cowardly cruelty for a bunch of hardscrabble farmers and herdsmen, whose country has no air force, no navy and not much of an army, to be blown to bits by men miles above them in the sky, who then return to their ships and air fields where they eat dinner and sleep in a warm bed. People abroad think of this, then they think of the bombing destruction in Kosovo; some remember bombing Viet Nam, which had no air force. They recall our withdrawal from Lebanon and Somalia after we lost some soldiers there. So some think us cowards who want risk-free war, who shoot from ambush. 

          Afghans face exile or starvation at our hands. Which will more powerfully affect world opinion:  pictures of these victims displayed around the world, or the work of high-powered public relations experts employed by our national leadership? Yet we stay at risk until others’ passion to punish us is reduced, as it eventually was for the Red Brigades in Germany and Italy. 

          Among the causes of hostility to us, radical religious beliefs are significant but far from the whole. Another is the sense in parts of the world that their deep poverty so contrasts with what they see as our wealth and luxury. They measure the way we live by what they see on the screen and in magazine ads: verandas, upholstered furniture, elevators, delicious, golden-haired girls beside a swimming pool, casual young gods who climb out of a Ferrari with the contemporary equivalent of “Tennis anyone?”  

          What many thoughtful folk believe to be the largest single generator of hatred is the sense of crushing humiliation, impotence in the face of what is seen as American arrogance. We have supported and helped to maintain in power the leadership of countries that do not tolerate democracy. We place our military units wherever we choose – as with our bases in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere in the Middle East. And we not only place them, we use them as we choose – Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan. And we supply our military might to others who use it to kill and subject Muslims.                         

          We neither should nor can do anything to change some aspects of our national life that inflame terrorist passions: our wealth, power, luxury, what some regard as our immoral hedonism, and our attitudes toward women’s behavior, education and dress. Nor should we forego in any way methods that minimize risk to our own soldiers, if we do continue actions of conventional war.             

          What can we do? For one, as proposed above, to switch from big time destruction to diplomacy, police work and courts. To be desired from the standpoints of both our own principles of justice and the useful reduction of foreign hostility, would be to take to trial all criminals we catch, bin Laden as prime choice. In our own US courts, if we can, otherwise at The Hague, as has been done with Milosovic. The first step for that would be to reverse the Administration’s opposition to our country’s approval of the proposed international criminal court. 

          With our leverage we should induce Israel to adopt the proposals of the Mitchell Commission’s report: 1) Both tribes stop shooting and proceed to negotiate a peace that may enable them to live in security and to enable Palestinians to form a nation on the land not yet taken from them. 2) As negotiations drag on, cease to require Palestinians to submit to the bulldozing of their homes and orchards, making way for more settlers – who, in Ernst Pavel’s phrase, “read the Bible as a real estate contract.” If necessary (probable) seek an international force to safeguard the boundaries between the two states. While making Israel’s citizens safer, these measures would reduce the hostility toward our country.[1]          

          As a third measure, we should withdraw some of our bases that so provoke. Their purpose, quite rational, has been to protect the single largest source of the oil we use. If we undertake this, we would have to expect less available oil and therefore should reduce our dependence by reducing our consumption, by taxes on vehicles and gas that would put our oil costs to the level of Europe.