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What is the value, if any, in considering terrorism separately from other categories of violence? How do questions of definition affect how societies respond to terrorism?

Terrorism, as we have come to understand it in the 21st Century, is rooted for most Westerners in their unfortunate familiarity with Al Qaida's astonishingly bold activities, ranging from their September 11, 2001 attack on the United States to their August 2005 bombing of the London subway system. Al Qaida happens to be both the most spectacular and most recent incarnation of a group who uses terror to further their goals, but they are hardly the first and will likely not be the last. But while Al Qaida may embody terrorism to the average Westerner, terrorism is in reality a multi-headed hydra that has a complex history beyond Osama Bin Laden's infamous organization. Furthermore, terrorism is also a matter or perspective - often, one culture's terrorist is another culture's heroes or martyrs.

Terrorism is most probably best summarized, as far as a strict definition is concerned, as violence with political and/or social goals which takes place out of the norms of legality, (such as the violence of conventional warfare within the rule of national or international laws). Terrorism is usually a tool of the archetypal underdog - minorities of political, religious, or ethnic persuasion that feel they have no conventional means of recourse to address their grievances with an oppressor, and therefore turn to violence to advance whatever their cause(s) may be. However, as noted terrorism expert Paul Wilkinson notes in his book Terrorism vs. Democracy: The Liberal State Response, the tools of terrorism can and have been used by the archetypal 'alpha dog,' if you will, against the underdog to perpetuate the former's hold on the apparatus of political or religious power. The most obvious examples that come to mind are Hitler and the terror tactics used by his Nazi party and, by extension, German army, as well as Stalin (under whose brutal rule tens of millions of Soviet citizens perished after World War II), and of most recent note, Saddam Hussein and his Baath party operatives in Iraq. In either case, underdog or alpha dog, terrorist campaigns inherently involved deliberate attacks on civilian targets and are therefore analogous to war crimes [as per the Geneva Convention]. (Wilkinson, 2001, p. 1) Interestingly, however, most terrorists of the past century and a half have used not been mass murderers; rather, then have utilized carefully calibrated acts of symbolic violence true mass murder could be counterproductive garden-variety terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead. (Rose, 1999) This model applied, for example, to anarchists and leftists of the late 1800s, who managed to assassinate the presidents of the United States and France, the king of Italy, the prime minister of Spain, and the empress of Austria.

As terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman discusses in his book Inside Terrorism, the model also applied to nationalist and separatists groups seeking to throw off the yokes of their masters during the colonial and post-colonial eras, as well as the state-sponsored international terrorism of the 1960s-1980s. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), for example, sought to liberate Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom; the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) sought to reclaim the biblical lands of Palestine from the Jews of Israel and their Western allies; the fundamentalist Muslim group Hamas sought, and some believe still seeks, the destruction of Israel; in Peru, the neo-Communist organization Shining Path sought to advance workers' and poor people's rights; finally, in an example of state-sponsored terrorism, nations such as Libya 'exported' terror as a means of advancing their political power and to raise awareness of the plight of Muslims. (None of these groups would necessarily agree with the Western label of 'terrorist' organizations or nations; in fact, the PLO and Hamas have historically held that Israel, in fact, is a terrorist state and they are merely responding in kind out of a lack of viable political choices, faced with a world community of nations mostly unsympathetic to their plight.) The same model also applies to quasi-religious/racist organizations existing within a nation, for example, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a white supremacist which flourished in the Southern portion of the United States during the first 70 or so years of the 20th century. The KKK were born of a disgruntled group of racists who were displeased, to say the least, about the outcome of the American Civil War and the resulting equal civil rights afford to former slaves and who refused to accept that people of white skin were not genetically superior to those with darker skin. The KKK, through a variety of ghoulish methods such as beatings, burning of black homes, lynchings (summary executions - usually by hanging - of a black person suspected of an outrage against a white citizen), sought to intimidate blacks and through fear, prevent them from exercising their legal and equal civil rights, such as equal access to education, public restaurants, voting booths, etc. Again, the KKK did not consider its methods terrorists; it believed its racially motivated crimes to be sanctioned by God himself, who naturally happened to be white.

It is really only within the past 15 years or so that non-traditional terrorism has risen to a place of primacy on the world stage, the sort of terror propagated by religious fanatics who consider violence a sacramental act or believe they are the direct instruments of divine retribution; eschatological cults with a penchant for violence; and disturbed or hate-filled activists who want to inflict pain on a grand scale. (Rose, 1999). This is an apt description for Al Qaida, which has risen to world prominence since the early 1990s with an escalating series of audacious attacks on Western civilian, diplomatic, and military targets. Al Qaida's brand of terror is unique, however, because it not only incorporates all of the non-traditional characteristics described above, but mixes them freely with a murky political agenda: 1) they not only want a lot of people watching, but they also want a lot of people dead. On September 11, 2001, over 3,000 souls perished in New York City, Washington D.C., and in a farm in the state of Pennsylvania (where one of four hijacked jets crashed); had Al Qaida's plan been fully realized, the fourth plane would have destroyed either the White House or the United States' Capitol Building, home to its Senate and House of Representatives. 2) Al Qaida is not affiliated with any particular country, i.e., it is not 'state-sponsored'; it is an international organization. Al Qaida's use of Afghanistan as a home base for much of the 1990s until late 2001 was a matter of expediency and convenience as it was an issue of a sovereign nation officially hosting the nerve center of a terrorist organization. 3) Al Qaida's political endgame is unclear. Osama Bin Laden has stated that his attacks on the West are designed to protest Western - particularly American - presence in the Muslim holy lands of Saudi Arabia, and to a lesser degree, the perceived Western favoritism towards Israel in the Palestinian sovereignty question; and of late, the American occupation of Iraq. It is unclear whether Al Qaida would renounce violence and/or end its terrorist practices if all three situations were resolved to its satisfaction, given its deep roots in a brand of Islamic fundamentalism that equates the United States with Satan and its citizens, and the citizens of its allies, as 'infidels.' Their goal may be as ambitious as the destruction of all that is Western and the establishment of a worldwide fundamentalist Muslim theocracy. If this is indeed true, then Al Qaida is unique among terrorist groups in human history in that its ambitions are staggering and, presumably, long-term. It is also worth mentioning here that in Al Qaida's own view of themselves, they are nothing less than holy warriors, so in other words, they are not really terrorists as the West would have the world believe. Their belief is that their causes are not only legitimate but divinely ordained, and presumably this is their justification for the wanton slaughter of civilians whom most would consider innocent or at most peripherally culpable in the sort of moral disgraces Al Qaida believes to be inherent in modern Western culture.

As alluded to above, the way(s) in which a society responds to acts of terrorism is deeply rooted in how that particularly culture defines terrorism, as well as how the terrorism manifests itself and by whose hands. Historically, nations who subscribe to concepts of the rule of law within their own societies, and international rules governing warfare such as the Geneva Convention, find themselves flummoxed when faced with acts of terror. Historically, nations such as the United States have pursued modes of response through established channels of dispute resolution, as it were, such as diplomatic- or law enforcement-oriented responses and solutions to terrorism. During the 1980s, for example, the United States' response to the plainly obvious state sponsorship by Libya of a variety of terrorist acts was to impose stern economic sanctions on Libya. On the occasions in which American citizens perished as a result of Libyan terrorism, such as their 1985 bombing of a passenger jet over Lockerbie in the United Kingdom, the Reagan Administration would generally rattle the proverbial cage with outraged threats of severe consequences, but military action on a large scale was neither contemplated nor executed, no pun intended. In fact, despite U.S. president Ronald Reagan's (in)famous declaration, We do not negotiate with terrorists, the U.S. in fact engaged in a variety of unseemly transactions with several organizations, government agencies, and individuals who easily would have fallen under any reasonably objective American definition of 'terrorist.'

During the Clinton administration, 1993 to 2001, an equally polite and generally impotent pattern of response continued, despite mounting evidence that Al Qaida was specifically intending to focus on an increasing number of American targets, to say nothing of the fact that Al Qaida had a number of successes in hitting American targets (the World Trade Center garage bombing of 1993, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, to name but two). The Clinton administration's responses were legalistic for the most part, focusing on prosecution of terrorists through established structures of the American legal system. Eventually, the Clinton administration graduated to the targeted use of cruise missiles against Al Qaida targets in Sudan and Afghanistan in retaliation for violence against Americans, but these acts were generally anemic from both a military and public relations standpoint. It was not until Al Qaida struck spectacularly on September 11, 2001, eight months into the administration of George W. Bush, that the sleeping giant of the United States was rousted into anger. In a precise, unique, and effective use of air power and Central Intelligence Agency operatives in a partnership with the underdog tribes of the Northern Alliance, the U.S. destroyed within two months the interwoven symbiosis of Al Qaida and the Taliban within the anarchic patchwork tribal quilt of Afghanistan. In the midst of and in the aftermath of the September 11 attack, the Bush Administration decidedly seized for America a sanctimonious high moral ground, declaring Western - in particular, American - values to be supreme, with a thinly veiled subtext of a belief in the divinely ordination of such values. From this high ground, President Bush famously declared to the world that in the so-called 'war on terror,' other nations were either with the United States or against the United States. The nuanced gradations of moral and ethical relativism which had been a hallmark of U.S. foreign policy under such diplomatic icons as the shifty Henry Kissinger were replaced by a stark paradigm of binary opposition, in which there were evildoers, - Al Qaida - and those who did good - the United States. Ironically, in doing so, President Bush demonstrated that the moralistic and simplistic religious beliefs underlying his new ideology were alarmingly similar to those that underlie Al Qaida.

Undoubtedly, terrorism is not simply a subjective issue, as surely any innocent child who has been a victim of a suicide bomb would attest. The real question is whether any political or religious group is justified in using the mechanics of terror to effect their political goals - and, as importantly, whether those parties whom they attack are justified in using similar methods to defend themselves and retaliate.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rose, Gideon. It Could Happen Here: Facing the New Terrorism Foreign Affairs, March/April 1999.

Hoffman, Bruce. Inside Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998

Strong, Simon. Shining Path: A Case Study in Ideological Terrorism. London : RISCT, 1993.

Schmid, Alex and Crelinsten, Ronald. Western Responses to Terrorism. London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1993.

Patterson, Henry. The Politics of Illusion: A Political History of the IRA. Interlink Publishing, 1997.

Bushart, Howard L. et al. Soldiers of God: White Supremacists and Their Holy War for America. New York, Kensington Publishing Corp., 1998.

Wilkinson, Paul. Terrorism versus Democracy: The Liberal State Response. Routledge Publishers, 2001.

Cooley, John K. Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (rev. ed.). Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000.

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