As this article is being written from Europe, the events of just the first few days of this month provide a macabre endorsement of its theme. In Brussels itself, a group called the Fighting Communist Cells detonated its third bomb in less than a week. Over in Germany, the Red Army Faction blasted a French computer firm in Cologne; France’s Direct Action has expressed solidarity with both groups. Basque separatists set off a series of explosions at beaches along Spain’s southern coast, though another—under a school bus in France—was defused by police. In Portugal something called the “Anti-Capitalist and Anti-Militarist Group” struck a Radio Free Europe transmitter; not to be outdone, the Corsican National Liberation Front exploded 17 bombs on that French Mediterranean island.
All this in a week’s time, and not including the more or less incessant terror campaigns carried out by the IRA in Northern Ireland, the PLO in the Middle East, and like-minded comrades busy in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. When Hannah Arendt wrote that wars and revolutions have “determined the physiognomy of the twentieth century” she got it only half right: had she lived longer she would have seen not only how war would give way to revolution, but how that would in turn come to be synonymous with terror. In plain language, terrorism has become the accepted model for the modern use of force, with terrorists themselves often enjoying more moral credibility than the democratic states they are trying to bring down. This growing acceptance of what is by definition an outlaw activity poses a graver threat to the liberal democratic polis than nuclear weapons.
These last words are written in full consciousness of their sweep, in the hope that the Western world will begin to treat terrorism as seriously as it does nuclear weapons. The only way to do this is first to examine the new phenomenon of terrorism in the light of our long tradition on warfare, which, though it has guided Western thinking since at least the time of Augustine, is erroneously dismissed by some moderns as having no more relevance to our situation than the code of chivalry. Rather than defend this tradition itself (which has already been done by others), my focus here will be to demonstrate how its application eliminates most of the confusion surrounding terrorism by allowing us to distinguish between causes, claims, and means. Worth mentioning, too, is the progress this tradition is now having with regard to nuclear weapons: both the president’s “Star Wars” defense initiative and the move from targeting the enemy’s population (mutual assured destruction) to targeting his military forces (counterforce) are progressive steps along the just-war line. What makes terrorism a graver threat than nuclear weapons is its nature. Whereas nuclear weapons are means that can be shaped according to human will and strategies, terrorism rejects the foundation of all Western ethics: the conviction that even the noble cause has limits.
That terrorism has achieved success far out of proportion even to the extensive carnage left in its wake can be measured by the pronounced impotence in the face of this threat. In its most naked form, there is the lack of any coherent (much less coordinated) response to Col. Moammar Qadhafi’s remarkable public assertions that he reserves the right to hunt down those Libyan exiles who do not share his vision. Lest this be thought another instance of Third World braggadocio, the colonel’s record over the last year shows him true to his word: Libyan assassins have killed in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, not to mention last summer’s gunning down of a British policewoman by a sniper within Libya’s London embassy, and their much-publicized failed assassination in Egypt.
However bad this lack of response to Qadhafi is, worse still is how this impotence has filtered down into the discourse of ordinary Americans. Two good examples are the everywhere-repeated platitude that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” and the equally facile suggestion that “George Washington was a terrorist” because his troops fired at British soldiers from the woods. With statements like these, is it any wonder that Americans can call for us to “recognize the PLO” or are confused by the Reagan administration’s support for the Nicaraguan contras?
Paul Johnson recently observed in these pages that too often people look only at the cause being advocated while they ignore the means being used. “They condemn terrorism in general and on principle,” he wrote, “but there is often one particular group of terrorists which arouses their sympathy for historical, radical, ethnic or ideological reasons, and whom they are not prepared to describe as terrorists but rather as freedom-fighters and guerrillas.” He cites the support of some Irish-Americans for the IRA and there are countless other examples: referring to Yasser Arafat as a diplomat or statesman; France’s honoring of the Sandinistas at state occasions and the latter’s reluctance to extradite foreign terrorists; the American left’s long flirtation with such groups as the Weather Underground.
If Western governments are to triumph over bloodshed and chaos, they must meet the threat head-on. In this, they ought to take a cue from the terrorists themselves, who have no illusions about their incompatibility with the assumptions of the Western order. Having taken the-end-justifies-the-means to its logical conclusion, the terrorist has enshrined the monstrous twentieth-century notion of total warfare, the idea that anything goes. It is at once the root of their power and the source of their name, for terrorism is the practice of sowing terror into a population.
The practice of regarding an entire population as potential and legitimate targets is terrorism’s defining principle and represents a clean break with all Western norms on the use of force. Whatever the past depravities of national or private armies, or resistance movements like the French Resistance or revolutionary forces like America’s Continental Army, never in principle did they repudiate the right noncombatants had to safety from direct attack. This is not to say that noncombatants were never harmed or killed by some groups. It is to say, however, that in the past (with the notable exception of the French revolutionaries) the Western world was united on the principle that warriors must operate within certain ethical confines. To search for a parallel threat to civilization, one must go back to Huns, Goths, Vandals, Turks and their attacks on Europe. The prayer “Deliver us from the barbarian invader” is remarkably apt for our time, when the grocer has as much to fear as the general.
At bottom, the present ambivalence about terrorism—the tendency to think of it in terms of whose ox is being gored—derives less from acceptance than from confusion, the fruit of our abandonment of just-war thinking at the moment it is needed most. Part of this is due to the false notion that just-war criteria represent a neat equation yielding a specific answer, when in reality they are simply the weighing together of various ethical principles, some of which may conflict. In contrast to circumstances, principles do not become outdated, and the just-war tradition centers on two: first, the propriety of going to war (jus ad bellum); second, the propriety of the belligerent’s subsequent conduct (jus in bello). In Paul Ramsey’s terse summation, the classic line boils down to this: permission, yet limitation.
Applied to terrorism, the first principle can be pretty much dropped, though it will become important when evaluating the claims of guerrillas, i.e., those who fight within accepted means. For the first part of our tradition tells us that it takes much more than a worthy cause to legitimate the call to arms; as even the best and most justified war inevitably imposes terrible human costs, the presumption is always against it. It therefore rests on the belligerent to prove that force is necessary, and this raises questions of authority, proper goals, prospects for victory, etc.—serious objections by no means met by terrorists.
But the guerrilla may legitimately answer all these questions in his favor, and by virtue of having a weaker force will have to rely on unorthodox strategies of fighting. Assassination is a favorite tool of guerrillas and is not ruled out by just-war criteria; the German resistance plots against Hitler’s life appear eminently just. So long as the guerrilla wages his war within the constraints of proportion (not using excessive force) and discriminations (not directly harming noncombatants), he is a guerrilla and not a terrorist. Since he aims only at legitimate military/political targets, the population at large does not feel terrorized by his presence.
The terrorist is, by contrast, defined by his means, and the ethical assumptions behind this difference is the key to understanding why terrorism is irredeemably evil. By rejecting limits observed by guerrillas or other revolutionaries, terrorists place themselves outside the area of legitimacy; they are outlaws.
Thus far no public official today has made this point with the clarity of Secretary of State George Shultz. In a speech last October, Mr. Shultz quoted the answer given by the late Senator Henry Jackson. “The idea that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter cannot be sanctioned,” he said. “Freedom fighters or revolutionaries don’t blow up buses containing noncombatants; terrorist murderers do. Freedom fighters don’t assassinate innocent businessmen, or hijack and hold hostage innocent men, women and children; terrorist murderers do. It is a disgrace that democracies would allow the treasured word ‘freedom’ to be associated with the act of terrorists.”
For a popular definition of the terrorist, Senator Jackson’s is hard to tsp. Most men understand that though peace is preferable there are times when force is not only necessary, it is an obligation. And as far back as ancient times men have similarly accepted that it was the army’s job to protect the public as well as its corollary, that noncombatants such as women, children, the aged, and the helpless are entitled to immunity. The shame that accompanies the breaking of warrior codes of ethics is illustrated time and again in Greek literature.
Despite this long tradition of limits, which still exerts a strong residual pull on individuals, the practice of World War II (when both the Axis and Allies bombed entire cities) coupled with the exponential growth in technology has led many to claim that the distinction between combatant and noncombatant no longer has any practical meaning. Back when knights sought out other knights, when armies clashed with other armies on designated battlefields, or when ships clashed with the enemy on open seas, it was relatively easy to tell the two apart. But, the argument runs, the complexities of modern warfare preclude such distinctions today.
In a modern conflict, for example, a central communications center staffed by civilians, a munitions factory employing women, or a key port in an enemy supply line are all integral parts of the war effort. Given the right circumstances each might make a reasonable target, even if an unavoidable side effect was the taking of many innocent lives. But to extend this to include the targeting of the businessman who sells the enemy phone lines, the farmer who supplies the food, or indeed the mother who supplies them soldiers is a mockery of reason. The line admittedly is often fuzzy—but a fuzzy line is a line nonetheless.
Perhaps a current and sticky example will help: the recent bombing of U.S. abortion clinics. So there is no question about my bias, let me say that I speak as someone who regards abortion as a horror that ought not be legal. But in this case, since the bombers seem to have limited their attacks to the clinics they regard as death camps, in my mind they are not terrorists but guerrillas; in a wartime situation their means would probably fall within the conduct of a just cause. But in a democracy such as ours—where there are many other channels for change—there is an almost insurmountable case against resorting to war, and the bombers here have not met (and cannot meet) the criteria justifying force. Bombers of abortion clinics, then, are guerrillas using a means not justified by their cause. They are not terrorists (yet) because their means are not indiscriminate.
If that sounds suspiciously dry and academic, I would hasten to say that on the contrary it is merely the application of elementary distinctions. If we are to defeat terrorism we must understand exactly what it is. With supreme faith in an abstract cause invoked to justify any action, terrorists cross that fuzzy line. Guerrillas, on the other hand, who may or may not be justified, have more or less traditional targets, and so the population is not directly threatened. Indeed, part of the criteria for a just guerrilla struggle is that the guerrillas in some way represent the community—because it is from the community that they derive the authority to use force in the first place.
Terrorist claims to represent “the people” are therefore completely discredited, for if the people themselves may be objects of attack then any claim to represent them is merely a rhetorical convenience. Nor may the terrorist acquit himself of this guilt by invoking a worthy cause, since as we have seen it is imperative not only that there be a good reason to resort to force but that the force be used within certain constraints. And the first of these constraints is the exercise of discrimination.
Here I should emphasize that the tradition I have used to examine terrorism, though its roots are religious, is today embodied in the conventions of international and military law. The claims of this tradition are the property of no exclusive creed, and the irony today is that the one creed that has long been associated with it—Roman Catholicism—has an American hierarchy who virtually jettisoned its tough demands in their recent pastoral letter on nuclear arms. What life there is left in this tradition is, sadly, due more to the labors of secularist philosophers and international lawyers.
This is not too surprising, because the idea of limits on behavior—even on the righteous—is the basis of all law, international, civil, moral. So too it is not surprising to find that terrorism in practice reveals a horrible consistency; its targets have all been areas of vital importance to the West, and for the most part these targets are democracies. Theoretically, at least, terrorists could attack totalitarian regimes (though this is harder to do); in practice it is otherwise. Bombs do not explode in Moscow or Warsaw cafes; they go off in Paris, New York, Belfast, Jerusalem and Rome. I make no claims to the extent of Soviet and Soviet-bloc support for terrorism. My purpose is merely to note the marriage; how convenient the union between the war without limits and the state without limits.
In his book Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer struck much the same chord. “In its modern manifestations,” wrote Walzer, “terrorism is the totalitarian form of war and politics. It shatters the war convention and the political code. It breaks across moral limits beyond which no further limitation seems possible, for within the categories of civilian and citizen, there isn’t any smaller group for which immunity might be claimed… Terrorists anyway make no such claim; they kill anybody.”
Over the past few years, Western observers have begun to comment on the affinity between right-wing and left-wing terrorists, which parallels the affinity between Fascists and Communists. During John Paul II’s recent trip to Holland, for example, numerous groups popped up offering to assassinate him, and no one was sure whether these threats were coming from the left or the right. But Western policy makers must not allow themselves to be distracted by this, because it really doesn’t matter. Whatever the goals dividing the various terrorists, they are far less important than the premises that unite them. Left-wing and right-wing terrorists, in other words, are not merely similar—they are the same.
Little over a year ago, the New York Times ran on its front page an Associated Press news photo of an elderly Israeli woman who had been killed when a Palestinian bomb hit her bus. Pointing to the heavy parcels of food underneath her legs and her generally cramped position, my father noted it would have made a dramatic anti-terrorist poster: An innocent woman murdered as she brought home food for her family. It could have been my grandmother, he noted, or anyone’s grandmother. But in the mind of the person who planted the bomb, this old woman was an enemy equal to Ariel Sharon. That is what is meant by terror.