|
|
Guest
Contributor
Henry Nau
Dr.
J. Peter Pham is at James Madison University, Harrisonburg,
Virginia. He is the author, most recently, of Liberia:
Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press, 2004). [go to Guest index]
 Taking Terrorists
at Their Word
Review: Voices of Terror, edited by Walter Laqueur
[J. Peter Pham] 9/2/04
In her now classic study on The Origins of Totalitarianism,
Hannah Arendt confronted the question of why it was that much
of the
West was for so long so reluctant to grasp the criminal nature
of the Nazi and Soviet regimes. Furthermore, why did so many
fellow travelers and other apologists crop up to cover up and
explain away the extraordinary atrocities committed under Hitler
and Stalin? In the end, Arendt found the answers to her queries
in the very nature of quotidian life in liberal democracies:
because the democratic body politic is dependent upon certain
assumptions about individuals, self-interest, rationality,
and the rule of law, it has great difficulty in imagining the
violence
and terror that are part and parcel of life under totalitarian
domination. Consequently, she lamented that “the normality
of the normal world is the most efficient protection against
disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes.”
As the third
anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington
approaches, it
is difficult not to observe that history
has once more confirmed the veracity of the dictum that plus ça
change, plus c’est la même chose. Arendt’s
analysis of the West’s failure to appreciate the totalitarian
terror that threatened it half a century ago is eerily paradigmatic
of its ongoing failure to grasp the nature of the phenomenon
of transnational terrorism and political violence that challenges
it today. The same historical forces are at work, not only
trivializing accounts of the extraordinarily pernicious nature
of very real
threat, but also attempting to legitimize terrorists into political
actors with rational grievances with whom one can treat on
the basis of some elusive common ground. While sweeping generalizations
are usually unhelpful in statecraft, as one surveys everything
from the strategy—if it can be called that—of endlessly
pursuing compromises with the firebrand Shia cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr in Iraq to the almost shameless excuse-making for Islamist
violence
that goes on in American academia, one cannot help but wonder
if the old cycle of wishful thinking, denial and appeasement
is putting on an encore performance—or, as Yogi Berra,
put it once, “it’s dejà vu all over again.”
What
is tragic about this state of affairs is that whereas the
totalitarians of former days went out of their way to create
elaborate façades to hide their true colors—one
recalls, for example, the Soviet Union’s longtime denial
of its responsibility for the massacre of the Polish officer
corps at Katyn or Stalin’s broken promises to Roosevelt
and Churchill at Yalta—today’s terrorists, especially
those of Islamist provenance, have been rather open about
their motivations, aims, tactics and strategy. Part of the
shift
has been technological: the geometric expansion of mass communications
coupled with almost unlimited access to the internet both
encourage and facilitate this glasnost. Much, however, is
attributable
to the fanatical logic of terrorism. Unburdened by the realpolitik demands of government that was the ultimate, if limited,
check on the Hitlers and Stalins of totalitarian regimes,
some contemporary
terrorists are indifferent to the normal give-and-take of
politics and, hence, have no need to indulge conventional
pieties. Others,
certain of the sanction of divine mandate, make no secret
of their goals, no matter how apparently irrational these
might
be to the rest of the world. After all, would not dissembling
the command of the Almighty be itself an act of blasphemy?
The
architect of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, for one, has been a
man of many words and, in a perverse sense, a man of his
word.
On
February 23, 1998, Al-Quds al-‘Arabi, an
Arabic newspaper published in London, carried the rambling “Declaration
of the World Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders” signed
by bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and three other jihadi leaders.
Citing America’s “crimes”—principally,
the presence of American military personnel on the sacred
soil of Arabia, the ongoing sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq and “the petty state of the Jews”—the
signatories issued a fatwa laying down that “to kill
the Americans and their allies, civilian and military,
is an individual duty
for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which
it is possible to do it.” As the anonymous author
of the bestseller Imperial Hubris: Why the West is
Losing the War on Terror acknowledged
in his book, “bin Laden publicly has [subsequently]
described each action he intended to take against America.”
To
be fair, the United States government maintains a little-known
intelligence agency within the much-maligned Central
Intelligence Agency, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service
(FBIS),
which constantly collects, translates and publishes foreign
media
reports and other open-source material. This information
is made available
to policymakers and, by subscription, to the general
public. However, despite the recent furor over the lack of
intelligence,
there has been surprisingly little attention focused
on how little regard was given, in both intelligence and political
circles,
to the information that was available. It is as if the
same
psychosis that blinded the West to the true nature of
Nazi
Germany and
Soviet Russia yesterday characterizes it estimation of
transnational terrorists today: they can’t really
mean that, can they? So many policymakers continue to
ignore the obvious (see, inter
alia, my commentary “Religion: The Missing Link,” In
The National Interest, May 5, 2004) and search for more “imaginative”—one
ought to say “imaginary”—explanations:
if only the Israeli democrats would compromise with Yasir
Arafat’s
Palestinian thugs, if only the Turkish elites were not
so defensive about the secular character of their state,
if only the French
would put up with the de facto Islamicization of their
treasured constitutional laïcité, etc.
Consequently,
it is most opportune that Walter Laqueur, the noted
historian and geopolitical scholar who holds
the Kissinger
Chair
at the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
has just edited a new volume entitled Voices of
Terror: Manifestos,
Writings
and Manuals of al-Qaeda, Hamas, and other Terrorists
from around the World and throughout the Ages. In this
book,
Laqueur, whose
dozens of books include Terrorism, The Age of Terrorism,
The History of Terrorism, The New Terrorism, and No
End to War:
Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (all but the
latter preceding by
years, if not decades, the plethora of post-9/11 books
on the subject), brings together primary source material
from
his
two previously published anthologies, The Guerilla
Reader (1977) and The Terrorism Reader (1978), with over 150
pages of new
material,
some of it translated into English for the first time,
and introductory notes. Among the documents collected
in the
new anthology, in
addition to the previously cited fatwa by bin Laden,
one finds key terrorist texts such as Sayed Qutb’s
seminal essay “Jihad
in the Cause of God” (“this struggle is not
a temporary phase but an eternal state”), excerpts
from the al-Qaeda manual (e.g., “Eleventh Lesson:
Espionage,” “Guidelines
for Beating and Killing Hostages”), and the Hamas “Covenant” that
declares: “Renouncing any part of Palestine means
renouncing part of the religion…There is no solution
of the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. The initiatives,
proposals and International
Conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility.
The Palestinian people are too noble to have their future,
their right and their destiny submitted to a vain game” (article
13). Those who, in its time, read al-Zawahiri’s
rambling treatise Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner,
selections from which are included in Laqueur’s
anthology, would have been forewarned about the tactical
use of many Islamic “charities” (“The
jihad movement must dedicate one of its wings to working
with the masses, preach, provide services for the Muslim
people, and
share their concerns through all available avenues for
charity and educational work”) as well as realized
their insight into the weakness of will in the West (“Killing
them with a single bullet, a stab or a device made up
of a popular mix
of explosives or hitting them with an iron rod is not
impossible. Burning down their property with Molotov
cocktails is not difficult.
With the available means, small groups could prove to
be a frightening horror for the Americans and the Jews”).
The scope of the work is immense: in addition to documents
from Islamist terrorists
in the Middle East, those of other groups representing
ongoing or emerging security challenges, including the
Basque ETA, Colombian
combatants and the Filipino Abu Sayyaf.
Of course,
many Western leaders are dismissive of the import of these
texts just as Neville
Chamberlain was once dismissive
of the contents of Mein Kampf and Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg
discounted the import of Lenin’s writings before dispatching
the revolutionary back to St. Petersburg. Likewise many, perhaps
even most, pious Muslims will find the Koranic interpretations
of marginal jurists like Sayed Qutb and Abdullah Yusuf Azzam—to
say nothing of those of Osama bin Laden, who has no scholarly
credentials of speak of—to be religiously problematic,
to say the least. However, the logic of terrorism only requires
a fanatical few to unleash violence on the many. And while
Laqueur, citing both the considerable technical difficulties
and political
considerations, notes that it may take longer than popularly
believed before weapons of mass destruction are used by terrorists,
it also seems but a question of time before this apocalyptic
scenario comes to pass, as the posting on one terrorist website
quoted in the last entry of Voices of Terror openly discusses
with glee:
Rawalpindi
25/12/03: Pakistan’s U.S. led Dictator
Musharraf has narrowly survived a second assassination bid
this month. “The
Cretin and all his companions are safe and sound” said
Major General Shaukat Sultan. An aide said Musharraf, who had
been heading home, was in good spirits. The Pakistani nukes
will soon get a new erratically and lethal owner and the American
apes down with Mad Cow disease don’t catch on nothing,
awaiting a dirty bomb on nice homeland in a mass hysteria after
orange fake alert. [spelling and grammar in the original]
At the end of his earlier study, No
End to War, Laqueur concluded
rather somberly that there is little likelihood that
the terrorist threat will diminish significantly in the foreseeable
future:
Even in
the unlikely case that all global conflicts will
be resolved—that
all political, social and economic tensions of
this world will vanish—this will not necessarily
be the end of terrorism. The combination of paranoia,
fanaticism
and extremist political
(or religious) doctrine will find new outlets.
It is the reservoir from which the terrorism
of today and tomorrow
attracts is followers.
Perhaps it is not part of the human condition,
but it certainly is part of the condition of
certain sections
and individuals.
There are bound to be ups and downs as far as
the frequency and the political impact of terrorism
is concerned. But
there is
a huge reservoir of aggression, and for this
reason terrorism will be with us as far as one
can look ahead.
But if it
is the fate of the West to be tested in the forge
of this unrelenting and asymmetrical warfare,
then in confronting their foes, free societies would do well
to
be armed with
a knowledge
and understanding of the forces—no matter
how seemingly irrational or alien—that
motivate the terrorists. CRO
This
piece first appeared
at In
The National Interest
§
|
|
