Terrorism
cannot be defeated
by terrorism
By JONATHAN
POWER
September 26, 2001
LONDON - Menachem Begin, the rightist Israeli
politician, wrote in his account of the Jewish Irgun
movement, active in Palestine against the British
colonial power during the 1930s and 1940s: "Our enemies
called us terrorists. People who were neither friends nor
enemies, like the correspondents of the New York Herald
Tribune, also used this Latin name, either under the
influence of British propaganda or out of habit. Our
friends, like the Irishman O'Reilly, preferred, as he
wrote in a letter to "get ahead of history" and called us
by a simpler, though also Latin name:
"patriots"."
Yesterday's terrorists can become today's freedom
fighters - - and in the Israeli case- today's imperial
oppressors. The very word fills us with dread yet it is
replete with its own contradictions. The Russian czar
killers were the first to bring the word into common
political usage. But, ironically, although they claimed
that political murder "shakes the whole system to its
foundations", when they finally succeeded in killing Czar
Alexander 11 in 1881 nothing happened. There was no
revolution.
Carlos Marighella, a Brazilian revolutionary, killed
in a police ambush in 1969, was one of the then new breed
of hard above board urban guerrillas whose ideas have
influenced groups as diverse as Germany's Baader Meinhof
gang and Spain's ETA . In his "Mini-Manual of the Urban
Guerrilla", he spelt out uncompromisingly what his
strategy was: "Terrorism is an arm the revolutionary can
never relinquish. Bank assaults, ambushes, desertions,
diverting of arms, the rescue of prisoners, executions,
kidnappings, sabotage, terrorism and the war of nerves
are all cases in point…. the government has no
alternative but to intensify repression."
The aim, he said, is to escalate the situation so that
"people refuse to collaborate with the authorities and
the general sentiment is that the government is unjust".
In short: make the beast reveal its true nature;
demonstrate that when the chips are down the capitalist
state depends for its continued existence upon the use of
violence and its own terror. However, thirty years on, as
we can see all over Latin America, with perhaps the one
exception of Cuba, countless guerrilla/terrorist
movements have brought precious little positive change
out of the mayhem they sowed. Indeed, much of the
guerrilla leadership if not wiped out gave themselves up
either to the authorities or, by agreement, to the more
conventional political road.
Terrorism is often a long way round for achieving
objectives that could have been more effectively pursued
by more conventional political methods. Yet the
authorities make their own mistakes, as serious as those
of the terrorist. They walk into the terrorists' trap of
overreaction -- and, as they do, so unleash their own
equal or worse terror -- as with the military regimes in
Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, Peru, Chile and Nicaragua
(and today in Colombia). They all became a hornets' nest
of severe human rights abuses that have taken decades of
hard work by the sane "middle" to put right.
Osama bin Laden is getting what he wants - - a U.S.
overreaction. The bombing of the World Trade Centre is
probably just his first taunt. Once, as is likely,
American troops blast their way in to Afghanistan causing
the destruction of innocent life in an already
impoverished and broken-backed country with its half a
million war orphans, he will unleash his next
atrocity.
Already he sees the West is divided, many countries
fearing what may well happen. At the same time, on
America's right, the hard line Israeli prime minister
Ariel Sharon is bucking White House leadership and going
after Israel's local terrorists with a totally
unrestrained, undiplomatic, headfirst policy, more in the
mode of a Pinochet or a Videla.
The Western alliance has now as many fault lines as
the Rift Valley. And it is not difficult to foresee that
down the road the alliance will split with America and
Israel going their own way and the rest of Europe, Canada
and Japan pulling back. (Britain will perhaps stay with
America, at least until a massive terrorist atrocity on
its soil will turn a large slice of British public
opinion against Prime Minister Tony Blair).
America may well win through in the end, although the
bin Laden network is of a different order than previous
guerrilla movements. It is less centrally directed than
of old and more of a modern day franchise operation, with
every franchisee, from the Philippines to Paraguay, from
Aden to Argentina, from Germany to the U.S., working at
their own pace and in their own way but making use of a
loose supply chain, (and even then supplies more of ideas
than hardware).
Also what will winning through mean if, apart from the
sheer destructiveness of battle, there is also the fall
of the fragile regime in Saudi Arabia or militants
overthrow the military regime in Pakistan, getting their
hands on a nuclear arsenal?
What kind of compromises will be made along the way
with the forces of darkness, as the U.S. did before,
turning a blind eye to Pakistan's nuclear weapons program
under Carter and Reagan in return for support against the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and in its support of bin
Laden as an anti-Soviet guerrilla? Will new compromises
be made that America will come to rue in ten or twenty
years time?
We should have no time for the terrorist. But neither
should we have time for the counter-policy of massive
retaliation. A little cleverness at the least is called
for. And better still some humility and far-sightedness.
The dilemma we now face is not how best to kill the
hater, but how best to kill the hatred.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 By
JONATHAN POWER
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