Comments on: Root causes of terrorism

By: Bill

Bill — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 18:09:47 +0000

I find it vaguely amusing that people have covered both Hamas and the Weathermen in the same discussion. The two are so fundamentally different as to make any connection nonsensical. The Weathermen were an extremist sect of perhaps dozens, Hamas is a mass movement with huge popular support. The Wahibbist radicals were fringe characters like the Weathermen until converging events (Soviet provocation, massive American support and Saudi money) turned them into a potent force complete with it’s own recruitment centers, fundraising operations, training camps and weapons suppliers. The concept of a War on Terrorism is rediculous, but of course it really is a war on Politically Relevant Terrorism, i.e. terrorism that has some popular support. Terrorism seems simply to be about power. As other people have pointed out, various US actions fit the bill of terrorism. The US general avoids it and tries to keep conflicts in a purely military realm. This is not from some high-mindedness, but rather because we have the strongest military. When the military isn’t enough, as in the recent case of Fallujah (the Marines could not go in and “clean out the terrorist” without taking unacceptable casualties), the US is perfectly willing to use artillery and air power, despite knowing these will cause hevy civilian casualties. The US claims the dead civilians here are accidents, but that is nonsense. They were knowlingly killed as part of an attempt to break the resistance in Fallujah. In this case, as in any terrorist act, the dead civilians are not the goal in themselves. They goal is the change in power, in policy. In each case the willingness to kill civilians to achieve that policy is comperable. So when terrorists are said to be hopeless, it is that they have no hope of achieving the change they want by other means (either by the ballot box or by slugging it out with the 1st Armored Division in the desert). Terrorism is always an attempt to magnify strength. It is only relevent, though, when it has brought popular support, and thus a certain sense of hopelessness (lots of people wanting change but not getting it) must in effect be their. Both the hopelessness and the terrorism are the result of wanting change, neither causes the other. But it’s not really coincidence that the War on Terrorism happens now. The US won the Cold War, and has been on top of the world for a decade. In a large sense, the Terrorism we are Warring against is the violence of the weak against the strong. In other words, the US, stronger than any nation, than any political force currently out there, is attempting to prevent the situation from changing. We like the structure of the world right now, and the War on Terrorism is at it’s heart a war to prevent the rule from being changed to something we’d find less favorable. It is a war to keep the channels of power as they are. I’m a little bit suspect of attempts like this to stop history. I frankly can’t see how the War on Terrorism can end in anything but disaster.

By: Pierre

Pierre — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 19:34:52 +0000

Jonathan, Via Harry’s Place (http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net), here’s what Abb1’s “mechanism to air grievances” entails on the ground. The Hamas’ military wing Izz al-din al-Qassam claimed responsibility for the attack. In a statement issued the group said, “Four Kassam rockets bombarded the settlement of Sderot this morning and with the help of Allah, two Zionists were killed and a number of Zionist settlers were injured”. The dead Zionists are a three-year-old boy and a 49-year-old man who had just taken his granddaughter to kindergarten. The reference to Zionist settlers, of course, means that Hamas draws no distinction between Israel and the occupied territories (Sderot is in the Negev, i.e. Israel proper). For those who indulge in moral equivalence after events like this, please note that the Israeli government has never issued a statement celebrating the death of a Palestinian child.

By: P. Hoolahan

P. Hoolahan — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 18:39:14 +0000

Jonathan Edelstein, Re. Abb1’s opinion that: The fact of existance of a large enough group of individuals (i.e. “terrorist organization”) who feel outraged by what they view as institutionalized injustice – this fact itself certainly is a manifestation and a proof of institutionalized injustice – by definition… When a large enough group of people can’t find a mechanism to air grievances and negotiate a compromise – that’s institutionalized injustice I thought I had squelched that nonsense with my earlier reply: Hmm. I suppose that would “explain” a lot of history — the Islamic conquests, the Crusades, the Nazis… And now the Islamists. But I guess his sarcasm detector (as usual) wasn’t working.

By: Fergal

Fergal — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 17:08:53 +0000

Tom Scudder, You quote me but seem to have trouble reading what I said. Let me repeat: The thing I don’t get is why, if suicide bombing is religiously sanctioned and is such a sure ticket to martyrdom, one never finds the leaders (or even deputy leaders) of Hamas or Al Qaeda or their ilk doing the holy deed themselves, or even encouraging their sons to do it in their stead. What part of the expression “suicide bombing” don’t you understand?

By: Anthony

Anthony — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 16:51:21 +0000

Personally, I'm beginning to think Eric Hoffer had it right in The True Believer: "The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause." "A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business." "Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden...We join a mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, or, in the words of an ardent young Nazi, 'to be free from freedom.' It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?" A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves - and it does this by enfolding them and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.

By: Jonathan Edelstein

Jonathan Edelstein — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 16:16:12 +0000

The fact of existance of a large enough group of individuals (i.e. “terrorist organization”) who feel outraged by what they view as institutionalized injustice – this fact itself certainly is a manifestation and a proof of institutionalized injustice – by definition. Might it not also be proof that certain political groups have unreasonable demands? The fact that people – even large numbers of people – perceive an injustice doesn’t mean that their perception is correct; it could mean that their own position is unjust.

By: Tom Scudder

Tom Scudder — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 10:21:24 +0000

The thing I don’t get is why, if suicide bombing is religiously sanctioned and is such a sure ticket to martyrdom, one never finds the leaders (or even deputy leaders) of Hamas or Al Qaeda or their ilk doing the holy deed themselves, or even encouraging their sons to do it in their stead. From this, I take it that either (a) you don’t consider Hizbollah as one of Hamas’ “ilk”? (Of course, it’s possible that the pro-islamofascist Jerusalem Post is engaging in disinformation here in reporting the death of the Hizbollah leader’s son.) or (b) you have no idea what you’re talking about. (In point of fact, I think (a) is correct – I’m convinced based on the evidence I’ve seen (and could easily be convinced otherwise, since I do not much like them or their ideology or think their current influence is a good thing) that Hizbollah is not engaged in terrorist activity or offering terrorists anything beyond propaganda and “moral” support. However, I doubt that that is the point that Mr. Fergal is arguing).

By: Rob

Rob — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 22:27:46 +0000

Thank you to the three individuals above who actually tried to think about what it meant to be a ‘terrorist organization’. Once you hammer that question out, I wonder if the original question has meaning any longer.

By: Tom Doyle

Tom Doyle — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 09:41:55 +0000

In 1978, General J.M. Glover, a UK army intelligence expert, wrote a Top Secret report, Northern Ireland: Future Terrorist Trends, which assessed the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and what could be expected in the future. (Source: Tim Pat Coogan, “The Troubles,” (Roberts Rineheart 1996) pp. 210-211) The following exerpts from Glover’s report have some bearing on subjects discussed in this thread: “Our evidence of the calibre of rank and file terrorists does not support the view that they are merely mindless hooligans drawn from the unemployed and unemployable. PIRA now trains and uses members with some care. The active service units are for the most part manned by terrorists tempered by up to 10 years operational experience.” […] Trend and calibre: The mature terrorists, including…the leading bomb makers are usually sufficiently cunning to avoid arrest. They are constantly learning from their mistakes and developing their expertise… PIRA’s organization is now such that a small number of activists can maintain a disproportionate level of violence.” […] “[T]here is a substantial pool of young Fianna aspirants nurtured in a climate of violence, eagerly seeking promotion to full gun carrying terrorist status, and there is a steady release from prisons of embittered and dedicated terrorists . Thus though PIRA may be hard hit by … attrition from time to time, they will probably continue to have the manpower they need to maintain violence during the next Five years. “Leadership: PIRA is essentially a working class organization based in ghetto areas of the cities and the poorer rural areas. Thus if members of middle class and graduates become more deeply involved they have to forfeit their lifestyles Many are also deterred by the Provisional’s muddled political thinking. Nevertheless, there is a strata of intelligent, astute and experienced terrorists who provide the backbone of the organization.” Bears repeating “Nevertheless, there is a strata of intelligent, astute and experienced terrorists who provide the backbone of the organization.” As the report was passed from hand to hand amongst the UK and the NI elite, indignant sputterings started to emerge behind closed doors and from other dark recesses and skeletoned closets, in the UK, and voice of unknown sources began putting it about that Glover was way too effusive in his admiration for the IRA. The Top Secret study, according to Coogan, was “captured in the mails by the Provisionals and, after study by IRA intelligence, published in the Republican News, the IRA newspaper.” Ironically, one of the criticisms was that he made the IRA look like it knew what it was doing, when that wasn’t the case at all, as everybody with an ounce of sense knows.Right? The Top Secret study, according to Coogan, was “captured in the mails by the Provisionals and, after study by IRA intelligence, published in the Republican News, the IRA newspaper.”

By: Tom Doyle

Tom Doyle — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 09:41:52 +0000

By: Joshua W. Burton

Joshua W. Burton — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 06:09:13 +0000

Do you agree with the proposition that people join terrorist organizations because there’s no hope? Well, no one else has, so I’ll put forward the diametrically opposed hypothesis: the root cause of terrorist upswings, at least in the last few decades in the West Bank, Beirut, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and now in occupied Iraq, is just exactly hope. The perpetrators are playing to win. With the long view (Saladin, etc.) and a tale of historical inevitability to counter present tactical weakness, “hopelessness” means “hunker down and quietly rearm,” while “hope” (new hospitals, bin Laden tapes, handshakes on the White House lawn) is a call to prompt direct action. Time series graphs showing the Oslo (Israeli/Palestinian peace process) terror spikes are available on the net; the equivalent graph of, say, MWh of electricity delivered to Iraqi civilians over the last 52 weeks, against US soldiers and Iraqi civilians blown up, would be extremely interesting. My intuition is that it would support my hypothesis: if you want to set the Sunni triangle ablaze, just keep building schools and plumbing.

By: Jake McGuire

Jake McGuire — Sat, 26 Jun 2004 22:50:26 +0000

Sure, the North Vietnamese and the USSR had different agendas, as do a lot of the various Islamic terrorist groups. But without the USSR bankrolling them, the North Vietnamese lose the Vietnam war, and in a big way. Similarly, I think (admittedly without much evidence) that without the hard-core true believers, a lot of the day-to-day violence in Iraq goes away, even though it’s not the hard-core types directly setting off IEDs or what have you. Without the organizational and inspirational abilities of the few, the many decide that getting blown up, rotting in jail, shot, or attacked by your neighbors who are angry at being blown up is a bad deal. You mentioned the Palestinians. It seems like Hamas has been awfully quiet recently, no?

By: fyreflye

fyreflye — Sat, 26 Jun 2004 22:17:04 +0000

People become terrorists because it’s more fun than being a married, job-holding consumer with a 50-yr mortgage. I’d become one myself if I could think of anything in today’s world worth hating.

By: Maynard Handley

Maynard Handley — Sat, 26 Jun 2004 21:36:41 +0000

Look, one of the problems here is that people subsume a large number of different types of organization under the label “terrorist”. In medicine, although non-professionals label a collection of symptoms with a single term, eg diabetes or melanoma, professionals understand that the symptoms of, say, diabetes can have multiple different causes, and that effective treatment depends on understanding the causes specific to this individual. So it is with terrorism. Clearly the members of say the Red Army Faction in Germany have a different set of motivations and attract a different type of member, to the ANC in South Africa in the 1970’s, who differ again from the Zionist terrorists like Irgun. This is not to say that every terrorist organization is sui generis; obviously there are substantial similarities between the situation of the ANC and the situation of the PLO. The point is that it is not useful to lump all such organizations together and then start throwing out or tearing down hypotheses based on this. (For example “terrorism is caused by poverty”. “No it’s not, look at the Red Army Faction.”) Now Al Qaeda is a specifically interesting example. Originally this was probably more like the Red Army Faction than the ANC, by which I mean that it was a small number of ideological zealots, middle class people with little personal experience of suffering, far more extreme than the bulk of the population in almost any Islamic country. However thanks to the incompetence of the Bush team, it has morphed into something like the Comintern; an umbrella group for angry Muslims around the world, all with very different agendas, different recruits, and different ways of operation. As such, while it is interesting to talk about what motivates the Al Qaeda leadership, this has little relevance to most struggles on the ground, much like understanding what happened in the Kremlin had little relevance to the day-to-day fighting of the North Vietnames. Yes the USSR bankrolled the North Vietnamese, and yes the North Vietnamese were kinda sorta interested in running their state in the same way as the USSR, but they were two different political groups with, ultimately, different agendas that only coincided in some places. Likewise to imagine that bombers in Indonesia, kidnappers in the Philipines, and the liberation struggle in Iraq are all part of a single-minded battle with Al Qaeda pulling all the puppet strings is simply to delude oneself. Each of these is ultimately different groups with different motivations, and each will be handled by understanding the particular motivations of that group.

By: Jake McGuire

Jake McGuire — Sat, 26 Jun 2004 19:59:51 +0000

Someone thought that sinking the Rainbow Warrior would be effective. They were wrong – I haven’t heard anyone say that it was effective after the fact. The more I think about it, the less inclined I am to subscribe to the hopelessness = terrorism theory. No one is setting off bombs in the US or Western Europe to try to bring about sharia law here (yet, thankfully), and that’s a cause that motivates terrorists elsewhere and is hopeless here. It’s only when you think that if you kill enough people that you’ll get what you want, and you value the life of the people you’re going to kill little enough that it’s worth it, that you go out and blow up a hospital. Or a police station.