The US Response to Middle East Terrorism

Stephen Zunes is an associate professor of politics and chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco.

Recent US presidents have claimed that international terrorism is one of the greatest threats to the country’s national security and that the war against terrorism should be a major focus of American foreign policy. President Bill Clinton, in his September 1998 speech before the UN General Assembly, identified international terrorism as a worldwide priority.

 

The random violent acts against civilians that are inflicted by international terrorists are truly horrific. Yet acts of terrorism worldwide have actually declined since the 1970s and the numbers of Americans killed by terrorists are quite small compared to those killed by violent crime, automobile accidents, preventable diseases or poverty. That the fixation on terrorism is so grossly out of proportion to its impact on individual Americans raises serious questions as to whether the priority currently given to this problem may not be based more on ideological than strategic concerns.

 

Indeed, the fight against terrorism has been the justification for a series of controversial policies, ranging from tougher immigration laws to high military budgets, from restrictions on civil liberties to arms shipments and training programmes for repressive governments abroad.

 

Despite the great deal of attention from the highest levels of government, there appears to be little coherency in actual policy. According to Richard Davis of the General Accounting Office, “There does not seem to be any overall strategy to guide how we’re spending money on counter-terrorism.” And despite Congress’s eagerness to fund such efforts, there seems to be “no oversight, no priorities, no strategy and much duplication”.¹

 

The noted linguistic theorist and social critic Noam Chomsky likes to quote the famous story told by St Augustine regarding a notorious pirate who was brought before the emperor following his capture. When the emperor asked him why he engaged in such theft and pillage, the pirate replied that his actions were no different from the crimes committed by the empire; they only went by another name. The clear analogy, Chomsky observes, concerns US policy towards terrorism in the Middle East and elsewhere.

 

Successive US administrations have been criticised for their use of an overly narrow definition of terrorism which refers only to the killings of non-combatants by individuals or small groups of irregulars while ignoring the usually greater killings by sanctioned organs of the state of equally innocent people. Indeed, the United States has supported and continues to support governments which have engaged in widespread terrorism against their own populations. Furthermore, the United States has refused or limited its co-operation in efforts to prosecute state terrorists, such as General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, when attempts are made to bring them to justice.

 

The United States has also demonstrated a propensity to ignore its own role in encouraging terrorism, both as a reaction to its foreign policies and even, at times, as a direct tool in the implementation of its policies. Related to this is US support for the governments of Indonesia, Turkey and various Middle Eastern allies guilty of state terrorism on a large scale. Indeed, as the biggest supplier of arms to the Third World, and to the Middle East in particular, the United States allows potential terrorists easy access to weapons.

Targeting ‘Rogue’ States

One of the most important functions of Middle Eastern terrorism for US policy makers concerns the use of so-called rogue states. America’s well-justified criticisms of oppressive Middle Eastern regimes such as Syria, Iran, Iraq and Libya usually fail to rally public opinion in support of US efforts to isolate these governments, given that such stalwart US allies as Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Turkey have similarly atrocious human rights records. However, labelling these regimes as supporters of terrorism does create a sense of urgency and a national security pretext for isolating these countries, whose major crime may actually be their opposition to US hegemony in the region.

 

For example, US officials have repeatedly claimed that Syria’s links to terrorist groups are a major obstacle to the improving of relations. However, the United States admits that it has no proof of direct ties by the Syrian government to terrorism since 1986, that Syria has pressed radical Palestinian groups to refrain from terrorism, and that Syria was instrumental in securing the release of American hostages held by Muslim extremists in Lebanon. Officially, the United States claims that the major factor remaining is that known terrorists are still being granted sanctuary in Syria. This alone, it is claimed, is grounds for keeping Syria on the State Department’s list of state supporters of terrorism, even though this is a stricter criterion than is applied to any other government.

 

Most noteworthy, however, has been the repeated US offer to drop Syria from the list of terrorist states—a move that would offer Syria a variety of benefits, including access to technology—if it co-operated more with US strategic and economic interests in the region. In short, the terrorism label affixed to Syria has remained in place not on its own merit, but as a means of applying US diplomatic pressure.

 

Similarly, the Clinton administration produced no evidence to suggest an upsurge in Iranian-backed terrorism to justify its strengthening of the US embargo against Iran. Only one month prior to the 1995 diplomatic offensive that led to Washington’s imposing a wide-ranging series of unilateral sanctions on Iran, the Israelis—who have the best intelligence on Iran in the region—reported that the Iranians had actually cut back on their export of terrorism. Even Hizbollah in Lebanon was receiving only a fraction of its once-generous Iranian support. In addition, Hizbollah’s targets in the immediately preceding years had primarily been Israeli troops occupying the southern part of Lebanon; attacking uniformed foreign occupation forces is considered legitimate under international law and hardly falls under the rubric of terrorism.

 

Libya has long been the primary Middle Eastern target of the United States regarding international terrorism, leading to the bombings of two Libyan cities in 1986. More recently, in 1992 and 1993, the United States successfully obtained a series of UN Security Council sanctions against the government of Libya for its failure to extradite two of its citizens to Great Britain or the United States, where they faced criminal charges in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people. The Libyans, noting the absence of extradition treaties with either government and the unlikelihood of a fair trial in these traditionally hostile countries, offered instead to try them in Libya (as required by the 1970 anti-hijacking Montreal Convention), to send them to trial in Malta, Switzerland or some other neutral country, or to have them tried before Scottish judges in a third country.

 

Instead, the United States went to the Security Council to push for sanctions, even while the extradition question was under review by the International Court of Justice in The Hague. This ended up working well for the United States: although the World Court did acknowledge that Libya’s right to refuse extradition was indeed safeguarded by international law, the court would not challenge the already implemented decision of the Security Council on the matter. Eventually, the United States agreed to have the alleged terrorists put on trial in the Netherlands before a panel of Scottish judges. UN sanctions against Libya have been lifted, but unilateral US sanctions remain in place.

 

What apparently provoked the terrorists who destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 was the 1986 US bombings of Libya. The United States justified the air strikes on the grounds that it would prevent future Libyan-sponsored terrorism, an ironic justification given the subsequent event. International law does not recognise the legitimacy of the use of force for retaliation, but only for self-defence. As a result, the United States tried to argue that the bombing of these Libyan cities—which resulted in over sixty deaths, primarily of civilians—was “self-defence against future attack”, an unusually creative twist of international law which even the United States’ strongest allies were unable to defend on legal grounds. Ironically, even as the Reagan administration was claiming “irrefutable proof” of Libyan involvement in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque which killed an American serviceman and prompted the US attack, German police investigators were implicating Syrian agents, not Libyans.

US-Sponsored Terrorism

What is most striking about the Libya case is not the legal questions regarding extradition or the guilt or innocence of the men accused: it is the double standards inherent in the issue itself. In 1976, a Cuban airliner on a regularly scheduled international flight was blown up by a bomb planted by right-wing terrorists, killing all seventy-three passengers and crew, including the country’s Olympic fencing team. Four men were indicted in Venezuela for the crime, all Cuban exiles who had been trained by the Central Intelligence Agency and had ongoing associations with CIA covert activities. The mastermind of the bombing, Luis Posada Carriles, had worked for the CIA in the 1960s as a saboteur against a variety of Cuban targets. After his escape from custody in Venezuela, the CIA hired him again to help direct arms shipments for the Nicaraguan Contras from an El Salvador air base. Like Libya, the United States showed itself willing to keep terrorists on the government payroll. Indeed, Libya’s refusal to extradite those charged in the Pan Am bombing bears striking similarity to the continuing US refusal to extradite John Hull, an American CIA operative indicted in Costa Rica for a 1984 bombing of a press conference in a Nicaraguan border town which killed five journalists.

 

Costa Rica and Venezuela are longstanding pro-US democracies. They have two of the freest and most credible judicial systems in Latin America. The evidence against these men is public and very damaging; there is little doubt about the validity of their indictments. As a result, the consensus in the international legal community is that the US government, like Gaddafi’s regime in Libya, is complicit in the harbouring of terrorists.

 

There was similar irony in the appearance of the United States before the International Court of Justice to argue against Libya. When the United Nations’ judicial body ruled in 1986 that the United States had to cease its attacks against Nicaragua and to pay compensation for damages, the Reagan administration ignored the near-unanimous verdict. The United States continues to refuse even to recognise the World Court’s jurisdiction in the matter.

 

Indeed, during the 1980s, the Contras—armed, trained and effectively created by the US government—were responsible for far more civilian deaths than all terrorist groups supported by Syria, Libya, Iraq and Iran combined. Just as Gaddafi referred to those who gunned down passengers in the Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985 as “freedom fighters”, so did President Ronald Reagan use the same term for the Contras shortly after the US-backed insurgents massacred members of a wedding party in Nicaragua that same year. If Libya’s support for Abu Nidal could justify the US bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi, US support for the Contras could have justified the bombing of Washington and Miami.

 

Similarly, in the 1960s, right-wing Cuban exiles were organised by the CIA to conduct a series of attacks inside Cuba which resulted in widespread civilian casualties. Ironically, Cuba remains on the list of “terrorist states” published annually by the State Department despite the lack of any evidence that the Cuban government supports acts of international terrorism.

 

The most serious single bomb attack against a civilian target in the modern Middle East was the March 1985 blast in a suburban Beirut neighbourhood which killed eighty people and wounded two hundred others. The attack was ordered by CIA director William Casey and approved by President Reagan as part of an unsuccessful effort to assassinate an anti-American Lebanese cleric. The US role in the attack, which was widely reported, gave the American crusade against Middle East terrorism little credibility in much of the world. Though the initial report of US involvement made the leading front-page headline of the New York Times and was described in detail in Bob Woodward’s book Veil,² it is rarely mentioned by so-called experts on Middle Eastern terrorism in the United States.

 

The roots of terrorism by oppressed peoples usually lie in the injustice and violence used against them. The rise of Hizbollah and other anti-American Islamic terrorist groups in Lebanon during the 1980s occurred only after the US-backed 1982 Israeli invasion and the subsequent US intervention in support of the right-wing minority Phalangist government that was installed under Israeli guns. Indeed, the worst single terrorist attack in recent decades was committed by Phalangist militiamen against two Palestinian refugee camps just south of Beirut in September 1982, when as many as two thousand civilians were slaughtered as Israeli troops cordoned off the area and provided logistical support. The massacres at Sabra and Shatila took place immediately following the premature withdrawal of American peacekeeping troops who should have been protecting the camps. It was only at this time that Americans became the targets of Lebanese terrorists through kidnapping and assassination.

 

It is noteworthy that one of the two principal hijackers in the famous abduction of passengers on a TWA flight en route to Rome from Athens in June 1985 had lost members of his family when the US Navy shelled his village in Lebanon the previous year. Not coincidentally, the only fatality in the hijacking was a US Navy officer executed in Beirut by the hijacker.

Palestinian Flashpoint

Perhaps the most dangerous and destabilising arena for terrorism in the Middle East has been Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Rather than recognise the urgency of moving the peace process forward, however, both the United States and Israel have used the violence as an excuse for increasing their hardline anti-Palestinian policies, which only encourage extremist groups and provoke further bloodshed.

 

Historically, Israel’s security needs—like those of most countries—were defined in terms of protecting its borders from foreign invasion and/or bombing attacks by enemies. Now, however, the United States and Israel have redefined security to mean guaranteeing that every Israeli be protected from terrorist attack, a guarantee which no government—particularly a disempowered Palestinian authority—can reasonably be expected to provide.

 

The Israelis refuse to return much of the Palestinian land occupied since 1967 on the grounds that the Palestinian Authority cannot control terrorism from within the Palestinian population. This is despite the fact that most of the terrorist attacks since autonomy was granted to certain Palestinian areas in 1993 came from areas under Israeli security control. Holding on to adjacent Arab lands made some strategic sense when the threat was hostile armies massing on the border or cross-border raids by guerrilla groups. But it makes little sense against suicide bombers who operate in secret and do not need their own territory in which to plan or organise their attacks. In addition, the Palestinians correctly observe that they cannot control such radical elements as long as the autonomy granted to them by Israel denies them authority over large areas of the West Bank and is limited where they do have nominal administrative powers, even regarding control of their own borders.

 

In response to Israeli demands, however, the Palestinian Authority has attempted a crackdown against a wide range of dissident groups—even those without any direct connection with terrorist violence—and has engaged in serious human rights violations in the process. Just as Arab critics of the agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation predicted, Palestinians have become the jailers in their own prison. As a result, the Palestinians are now trapped by an ongoing repressive Israeli occupation, continued confiscation of their land by Jewish settlers and an increasingly autocratic Palestinian governing authority, with no say in their own future.

 

Meanwhile, the Israelis have closed off Israel—as well as parts of the West Bank near Jerusalem—to most Palestinians, causing an economic catastrophe. Once a prosperous seaport and citrus-growing area, Gaza deteriorated in the nearly three decades of Israeli occupation into a vast slum of cheap labour for Israel. The West Bank, once the most economically advanced part of the Kingdom of Jordan, has likewise fallen victim to a systematic Israeli effort since 1967 to destroy the indigenous economy and incorporate it into Israel. The Israelis have essentially separated the two peoples without allowing the Palestinians any time to prepare for such a radical shift in their economy. In addition, the Israeli refusal to share Jerusalem has created a situation in which Arab East Jerusalem, the West Bank’s largest city, has been sealed off from the bulk of the Palestinian population and further integrated into Israel. Such grievances have fuelled the support for terrorists.

 

Most Palestinian Muslims, like the vast majority of their co-religionists elsewhere, oppose terrorism on principle and recognise that taking innocent human life is contrary to the most basic principles of the Islamic faith. Yet Palestinians have committed acts of terrorism for the same reasons as did Kenyans, Algerians and Zimbabweans: they feel that they are prevented from attaining their national freedom non-violently. Indeed, the Zionist movement produced its share of terrorist groups during the Israeli independence struggle in the 1940s, with two prominent terrorist leaders—Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir—later becoming prime ministers.

 

The threat from Palestinian Muslim terrorist groups will not be reduced by the Israeli and Palestinian authorities using traditional security measures, much less by the constitutionally questionable seizures of these groups’ financial assets in the United States, as has been ordered by President Clinton. It will be reduced only when the US and Israeli governments give their full support to Palestinian moderates, uphold international law and the principle of self-determination, and allow PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority to show their people that their rights can be won through non-violent means.

Jewish Terrorism

More Palestinians civilians have been killed by Israelis than Jews have been killed by Palestinian terrorists. Jewish extremists are much like the Islamic extremists in their zealotry, intolerance and propensity towards violence. The difference is that the extremist Jewish groups are legally sanctioned, issued arms by the Israeli government and are often directly supported by elements of the Israeli military. The late Israeli reserve general, Matti Peled, accused his government of conniving at the Jewish settlers’ “openly declared war against the peace process. Not only are they allowed to carry out with impunity pogroms against Palestinian cities and villages, they are also given free time on the state-owned media”. Dozens of Israeli soldiers from different units have written to the Israeli press, to Knesset members and to government ministers, complaining that they had been ordered to stand aside as rampaging settlers dragged Palestinian motorists out of their cars, beat them up and torched their vehicles.

 

The relationship between the Israeli military and these far-right extremists bears a striking resemblance to that between the established armed forces and paramilitary death squads which terrorised Central American countries during the 1980s. And again, the United States is footing the bill. This time, however, the most strident supporters of US policy are otherwise liberal Democrats, and the American peace movement appears to be letting Congress and the Clinton administration get away with it.

 

Much of the direct funding for Gush Emunim, Kach and other far-right movements has come from private contributions from the United States. Through an executive order, President Clinton ordered the seizure of the assets of two of these Jewish terrorist groups, but they were apparently tipped off beforehand and withdrew most of their investments in American banks.

 

Despite a long criminal record in both the United States and Israel and his links to terrorists, Kach founder Meir Kahane was routinely granted visas by the US government to visit the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. During this period he recruited people such as Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 massacred twenty-nine Muslims in a Hebron mosque, to come and colonise Palestinian territory. (Kahane was assassinated on a visit to New York in 1990.) At the same time, the United States was consistently denying visas to PLO officials, including leading moderates who advocated peace with Israel, in the name of fighting terrorism. The United States even violated its obligations under the UN Charter in 1988 by denying Arafat—again in the name of fighting terrorism—permission to speak before the United Nations in his bid to advance the peace process. The entire UN General Assembly had to relocate to Geneva in order to hear the speech.

 

In the aftermath of the Hebron massacre, the United States, believing that the Israeli military and the settlers should maintain their monopoly of force, successfully blocked an effort by the UN Security Council to send a multinational peacekeeping force to the occupied territories to help prevent such acts of terrorism. Opposing such a peacekeeping force was not enough for most US senators, however. Seventy-six members of the Senate, including leading liberal Democrats, signed a letter to President Clinton urging the United States to veto the Security Council resolution which simply condemned the massacre.

Misuse of the Terrorist Label

During the 1990s, Congress passed laws criminalising financial support for any activities by any organisation which the US government defines as “terrorist”, including most forms of assistance to organisations which engage primarily in humanitarian efforts. Such a label is effectively non-reviewable by the courts. Thus, it is possible for an American citizen to be jailed not for what he or she has done, but for what some individuals in a recipient organisation might do: in effect, guilt by association. Had this law been in existence during the 1970s and 1980s, aid to South African refugees administered by the African National Congress would have been illegal.

 

Furthermore, this legislation made it possible for foreign nationals to be jailed and deported without themselves or their attorneys even having access to the evidence against them, an unprecedented attack on civil liberties in a society which normally prides itself on its protection of a defendant’s rights.

 

The Clinton administration’s current list of “terrorists” lumps together groups such as Abu Nidal’s, the PFLP-GC and Islamic Jihad, which indeed engage in terrorism, with organisations such as Hamas, which have terrorist cells but which also have large-scale social service components, and with legitimate political organisations. For example, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) did commit acts of terrorism during the early 1970s, but have long since abandoned such tactics. Professing a secular Marxist ideology, they have played the role of loyal opposition to Arafat’s dominant Fatah movement and have run badly needed and successful social services in the Israeli-occupied territories. Armed actions by both groups in recent years have been restricted to attacks against Israeli police and soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza. Just like Hizbollah, these groups are not targeting civilians, but foreign occupation forces on their land, and this cannot be classified as terrorism.

 

The DFLP has been considered relatively moderate for at least twenty years, rejecting calls for Israel’s destruction and becoming the first major Palestinian group to call formally for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The Clinton administration apparently punished it for opposing the current US-led peace process, which the DFLP fears will preclude full national sovereignty for Palestine. In other words, these groups and their leaders are being punished for their political beliefs, not for any illegal actions.

 

An additional irony of the administration’s list was the inclusion of some radical Islamic groups that were once actively supported by the CIA in fighting the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. Indeed, it was not lax immigration procedures that allowed Sheikh Abdul Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric indicted for a series of planned terrorist attacks in the New York City area, to enter the United States, as has often been claimed. Rather, as both ABC News and the New York Times have reported, the CIA pressured the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service to allow him into the country, even though he was on a terrorist watch list, because of his assistance in recruiting American Muslims to join the Afghan mujahidin. The alleged terrorist bases in Afghanistan bombed by the United States in 1998 in the wake of the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania were actually built by the CIA in the 1980s.

A Political Problem

There is nothing inherent in Islamic or Middle Eastern traditions that spawns terrorism. Terrorism is primarily the weapon of the politically weak or frustrated, those who are or believe themselves to be unable to resolve their grievances through conventional political or military means. However illegitimate terrorism itself is, the political concerns which spawn such violence often have a reasonable basis. Effective intelligence, interdiction and some other conventional counter-terrorism efforts certainly have their place. But terrorism’s roots are political, so ending it is at least as much a political problem as it is a security one.

 

US foreign policy towards international terrorism is far too focused on military solutions, such as bombing raids by cruise missiles and fighter aircraft against targets in foreign nations. While such air strikes have played well with the American public because they give the impression that the United States is taking “decisive” action to “strike back” at terrorists, in reality its war against terrorism has often taken the form of foreign policy by catharsis.

 

Surgical air strikes may make sense in wartime when the targets are heavy equipment, lethal weaponry, communications centres and large concentrations of armed forces. Yet because of the nature of attacks organised by small groups using clandestine methods, “terrorist bases” generally contain none of these. As a result, such air raids make little sense strategically. One serious problem is that they frequently inflict civilian casualties and, as a result, become acts of terrorism themselves. In addition, such air strikes are often based on faulty intelligence, such as the April 1993 bombing of a Baghdad neighbourhood in response to an unsubstantiated allegation of an Iraqi assassination attempt against former US president George Bush. Similarly, in August 1998, the United States bombed a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant, falsely claiming it was a chemical weapons plant controlled by Osama bin Laden, the US-designated terrorist leader. The Clinton administration subsequently refused to release the supposed “evidence” prompting these strikes, or to allow independent investigations by the United Nations. More fundamentally, rather than curbing terrorism, such strikes often escalate the cycle of violence as terrorists seek further retaliation.

 

There are also serious legal questions. International law prohibits the use of armed force except when a nation is under direct attack. The United States claims that Article 51 of the UN Charter allows such military actions, but Article 51 deals only with self-defence: it covers neither retaliatory strikes nor pre-emptive strikes. The United States has refused to seek prior Security Council approval for pre-emptive military action against alleged terrorists because it knows it has no legal basis to do so.

Policy Recommendations

While there is no foolproof set of policies that will protect the United States and its interests from terrorists, there are a number of policy shifts that would probably reduce the frequency and severity of terrorist strikes. These shifts must be based in part on the understanding that terrorist attacks are generally rooted in social, political or economic desperation that must be addressed if anti-terrorism efforts are to have any chance of success.

 

Conventional security policies at airports, government buildings and other possible targets should continue, provided they do not become unnecessarily obstructive and civil liberties are respected. So should intelligence-gathering efforts. Yet that is not enough.

 

The tactics of terrorists can never be justified. However, the most effective weapon in the war against terrorism would be to take measures which would reduce the likelihood of the United States and its citizens becoming targets. This does not mean a retreat from international leadership or the compromising of fundamental American values or interests. What it does mean is changing policies which victimise vulnerable populations in ways that cause them to hold the United States responsible for their suffering and thus to become easy recruits for anti-American terrorists.

 

This includes an end to unconditional US military, economic and diplomatic support for governments which invade and occupy neighbouring countries, attack civilian targets in their villages and refugee camps and deny them their right of self-determination. Many anti-American terrorists in recent years have come from Palestinian and Lebanese families who have been directly harmed by actions of the US-backed Israeli government. American calls for the rule of law and respect for human life ring hollow as long as the United States supports governments which violate international law and perpetrate violence against innocent civilians.

 

Related to this is the need to distinguish between fringe groups whose primary function is inflicting violence against innocent people, where more aggressive measures may be appropriate, and popular, multifaceted organisations which also contain a terrorist component. Dealing with the latter requires a broader and more nuanced strategy.

 

Another shift must be away from supporting irregular groups which may be prone to terrorism. Many of today’s most notorious terrorists received their training from the CIA as part of US efforts to undermine leftist governments in Cuba, Nicaragua and Afghanistan. There must also be an end to any direct involvement in acts of terrorism by branches of the military, intelligence agencies or any other part of the US government. And the United States must co-operate in handing over to responsible governments any such terrorists currently within US jurisdiction when extradition is requested.

 

Only rarely do terrorists come from genuinely democratic societies. While an unstable individual or a small group of individuals can engage in such violence in virtually any political system, the large and sophisticated networks which are most dangerous tend to come from countries where their ability to affect the political process by other means has been limited. Often these countries display small pockets of ostentatious wealth in the midst of enormous poverty. Therefore, encouraging the development of democratic institutions in autocratic countries, national freedom in countries under foreign control and sustainable development in impoverished societies would be a major positive step in limiting potential recruits to terrorist groups. Too often the United States has supported dictatorships, occupying armies and inappropriate economic policies, making enemies out of the oppressed populations.

Reclaiming Cherished Values

Such changes in policies would not constitute “giving into terrorists”. Supporting democracy, justice and the rule of law is supposed to be the cornerstone of the American system. It is perhaps not surprising that we become targets of terrorists primarily when we stray so far from such values. Only a reclaiming of these values will make us truly safer.

 

Simply addressing the security aspects of terrorism, as US policy currently does, is to address the symptoms rather than the cause. The war against terrorism cannot be won until the United States also ceases its pursuit of policies which alienate such large segments of the international community, particularly in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Third World.

 

International terrorism is a global problem. Unilateral action merely isolates the United States from the allies needed in the fight against terrorism. The United States must learn to co-operate more with other nations and international agencies to be truly effective against what is an international problem.

 

The most effective short-term strategy against terrorism lies in intelligence and interdiction, which work best when part of a transnational effort. The United States should work closely with appropriate agencies in the United Nations and other international organisations to develop a unified strategy covering not just law enforcement, but sustainable development, democratisation, demilitarisation and human rights.

 

The United States has become a major target of terrorists in large part because of its perceived arrogance, hypocrisy and greed. Becoming a more responsible member of the international community will go a long way towards making the United States safer and ultimately stronger.

 

Like the emperor in St Augustine’s story, the American public appears oblivious to its role in international terrorism, and the government finds it politically more expedient to feed racism and xenophobia than allow a critical examination of its policies. Perhaps only when concerned activists and scholars can put forward a more balanced perspective than these self-serving notions of terrorism and how to deal with the threat, will the problem ever be effectively challenged.

Endnotes

1. Richard Davis, testimony before the House Subcommittee on National Security, International Affairs and Criminal Justice, 2 October 1998.

 

2. Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–1987 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), pp. 395–7.