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Within four years of the Wright brothers taking to the air in 1903, a Russian terrorist, Boris Savinkov, designed a plane that could be packed with explosives and crashed into the tsar’s palace. By then, Irish Fenians had already succeeded in exploding two bombs in the London Tube where, said The Times, “the new underground tunnels offered vast possibilities of destruction”. Alfred Nobel’s discovery that nitroglycerine could be stabilised in paste was a boon to revolutionaries, assassins, dissidents and nutcases everywhere. A bullet might kill just one person, but dynamite could spread mayhem. A century later, madmen are still using planes as bombs and train tunnels as slaughterhouses. Somehow we have survived. So has anything changed? Have Nobel’s ancestors finally penetrated the defences of western democracy? The answer, to be shouted from every rooftop and into every politician’s ear, is no.
Since the dawn of history, certainly since Guy Fawkes, those seeking to strike fear into the body politic have been pitted against the forces of established order. Their causes, like our responses to their actions, have wafted back and forth with the wind. The list discussed by Matthew Carr runs from the Irgun, Mau Mau, Eoka and ANC to the Angry Brigade, Provos, Abu Nidal and “armed existentialism”.
There are no constants and many ironies. The cliché has always applied, that today’s terrorist is tomorrow’s freedom fighter. Kosovo’s KLA were classified by America as terrorists beyond any pale, until they became “good friends of the West”. The Irgun’s leader, Begin, was later awarded a peace prize named after the inventor of his most lethal weapon. IRA leaders hobnobbed in the White House. Al-Qaeda was backed by the CIA against Russia but became “the embodiment of evil”. Nor has terrorism’s method changed. As Carr points out, stabilising and transporting chemical and biological agents, let alone radioactive ones, is near impossible and less effective than one almighty bang. High explosive is still the universal weapon of terror.
What has lately changed has been the West’s reaction. It is as if the end of the cold war left the huge defence industry desperate for a new enemy. (It was frantic to prove that terrorists had nuclear weapons.) The response to terrorist outrages had been to deny them “political status”. When the IRA tried to kill the British cabinet in 1984, Margaret Thatcher left the matter to the police and calmly asked Marks & Spencer to replace lost clothes so that her party conference could continue. There is evidence that the approach worked. The IRA bombing campaign won it only enemies in mainland Britain, while the 1990s ceasefire brought swift political gains.
Carr points out that today’s terrorist incidents are not as numerous as in the early 1980s, although suicide bombings have made them more lethal. Yet Al-Qaeda has been accorded near mystical status. When Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York, told its citizens after 9/11 to disregard “these murderers”, stay normal and go back to business, he was ignored. Washington went hysterical and has remained so. In May 2005, George Bush was evacuated from the White House in the face of a “dense incoming cloud”. It was composed of cloud, and initiated the weather forecast as a terrorist weapon. Britain is little better, with ricin, smallpox and dirty-bomb scares trumpeted from Downing Street and Scotland Yard. Politicians invited by Al-Qaeda to erode liberty, persecute minorities and subvert commerce seem happy to oblige.
Carr’s central point is that these responses go beyond all sensible assessment of risk and do half the terrorist’s job for him. Terrorism has always evoked colourful imagery. Fenians were “ape-like” and anarchists “monsters of evil”. Muslim fanaticism, more foreign than the European variety, has brought terrorism within the apocalyptic purview of Christian fundamentalism. Like Japanese kamikaze pilots, fedayeen are told that it is sweet to die for their cause. Counter- terrorism responds in kind. It cites the crusader spirit and calls itself Operation Freedom. The bombing of Baghdad was given the overtly terrorist title of “shock and awe”. Richard Perle, the American militant, claims that the West must choose between “victory or holocaust”. Jihadist killers are thus handed exactly what they crave, acknowledged status as Islam’s warriors against the infidel.
There is now a library of books on “terrorology”. My only quarrel with Carr is that he does not extend his thesis into the psychosis of counter-terror. He does not contrast, for instance, the studied bravery of Ronald Reagan and Thatcher (both survivors of assassination attempts) with the politics of fear exploited by Bush and Tony Blair since 9/11. The essence of terrorism is not death and destruction as such but the fear induced by their dissemination. Terrorism is not, as Blair maintains, an ideology but merely a weapon. Talk of defeating it makes no more sense than talk of defeating guns.
Yet as a weapon, terror is sophisticated. It is “1% bang and 99% publicity”. It depends on exploiting two responses prevalent in democracies, media exaggeration and political overreaction. Countering it involves inverting those responses: downplaying threats, minimising publicity and maintaining Giuliani’s “business as normal”. There is a world of difference between citing the perpetrator of an outrage and giving him weeks of publicity at full volume (and then celebrating his anniversaries). There is a difference between reporting a bomb and reporting every madcap headline-seeker. Nor are politicians any better. In 1997, an American defence secretary went on television with a bag of sugar and announced that, if it were anthrax, “it would destroy at least half the population” of Washington. Whose game was he playing?
I am with Carr in believing that the chief risk today is not of Muslim terrorists undermining western democracy but of the West doing so itself by absurdly overstating that risk. Editors who blazon every rumour on their front pages, politicians who hold weekly press conferences on “international threat levels” and policemen who boast their tally of menaces averted are the arms salesmen of terror. Obsessed by the chimera of “absolute security”, they seem comfortable only with a perpetual state of emergency. Such people are terrorism’s accomplices.
No known terrorist group merits the accolade of “threat to western civilisation”. Such talk is born of James Bond out of clinical paranoia and shows how debased is modern political analysis. But as long as politicians and journalists invite the world’s madmen to such a feast, they will come.
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