We've learned some very hard lessons about terrorists. The third-hardest is that almost anyone can become a terrorist. To be a successful terrorist, you need to be brave, clever, ruthless and cruel. But to be an unsuccessful terrorist you need only a willingness to kill innocent civilians for political ends; and in that sense the world is full of potential terrorists.
The second-hardest lesson is that, if the most effective terrorists of all are smart, ruthless, farsighted and brave as well as cruel, the second most effective terrorists are usually dead. Martyrdom works. The suicide of a suicide bomber does as much for his cause as the bomb does; possibly more. If there was one thing that made the IRA impossible to defeat, it was the long, slow, public suicide of the hunger strikers. Young men who see other young men dying for a cause don't always, or often, run away. Sometimes they find this bravery inspiring, and dedicate their own lives to the cause. You can't beat terrorism without killing terrorists. But just killing them won't do the job, and a terrorist who repents and surrenders represents a greater and more lasting victory. In the end, you reach the goal of "no more terrorists" not when they are all dead, but when some are dead, some have stopped terrorism and no new young men are coming along to take their places in the organization.
That leads to maybe the hardest lesson to swallow: "Terrorist" is not a lifetime badge. Just as almost anyone can become a terrorist, so can even hardened criminals stop what they do, and turn back into democratically elected politicians with whom we must negotiate. Menachem Begin was an Irgun terrorist operating against the British Army in Palestine, responsible, among other things, for the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, in which 91 people died. Decades later, he came to the United Kingdom on a state visit as prime minister of Israel. Gerry Adams ran the IRA in Belfast, and now he is a member of Parliament. Martin McGuinness ran the IRA in Londonderry, yet became minister of education in Northern Ireland. In the Middle East today, Arafat and Sharon have both been responsible for horrendous massacres of civilians. But we deal with them as politicians; and this is quite right.
Terrorists are not "mindless." They may be politically ignorant, but they have political aims and they are rational about achieving them. These aims do not become illegitimate just because terrible means are used to gain them. In Ireland, this is clearer than in most places. The Republican terrorists are fighting for a united Ireland; the Loyalist ones, for an Ireland that is part of the United Kingdom. Both of these aims are recognized as perfectly legitimate and democratic. In fact, you can't vote for any party in Northern Ireland without voting for one sort of Ireland or the other. So what makes terrorists unacceptable is not their political aims, but the means they use to gain them. Don't confuse the two or you will only fool yourselves. The terrorists need to learn this, too, but I doubt they read Salon.
Another thing we've learned about terrorism, and that you're learning in New York, is that terror doesn't frighten civilian populations. It makes them angry and determined to fight back. But there is an important sense in which enemy civilians are not the people a terrorist wants to frighten anyway. He needs to kill some of them at pretty regular intervals; and he needs to exasperate the rest, to make them stupid and angry, and finally fill them with war-weariness. These are achievable aims. They don't involve spreading terror among his enemies. The people a terrorist really needs to terrify are on his side: They are the ones who might give intelligence about him. The people who are really frightened of the IRA don't live in Protestant areas, or in England. They live in Catholic ghettos, where they might be tortured or murdered at any moment if they displease the local gangsters. The police are usually powerless to help. If they do eventually come to trust the police to protect them, then you've won, but that may never happen.
I know all this sounds frightfully gloomy. The papers are full of hairy-chested experts explaining how the war on terrorism must now be won. But I think that any one of your British allies who has lived through the war against the IRA will have a simple reaction when he hears these terrorism experts explain that the states that shelter terrorists or sympathize with their aims are just as guilty as the terrorists themselves, and that terrorism can only be defeated if these states are wiped out. Do Richard Perle or Ann Coulter believe that we Brits would have won our war if we'd bombed Dublin, Boston and New York?
About the writer
Andrew Brown is a writer and journalist in London. His book "The Darwin Wars" is about to be published in the US by Simon and Schuster.
Related Stories
Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)
Salon Directory (browse by topic)