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Critical Studies on Terrorism

ISSN: 1753-9153 (Print) 1753-9161 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rter20

Old myths, new fantasies and the enduring realities of terrorism Michael Stohl To cite this article: Michael Stohl (2008) Old myths, new fantasies and the enduring realities of terrorism, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1:1, 5-16, DOI: 10.1080/17539150701846443 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17539150701846443

Published online: 06 Mar 2008.

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Critical Studies on Terrorism Vol. 1, No. 1, April 2008, 5–16

SYMPOSIUM 1753-9161 1753-9153 RTER Critical Studies on Terrorism, Terrorism Vol. 1, No. 1, Jan 2008: pp. 0–0

Old myths, new fantasies and the enduring realities of terrorism Michael Stohl* Critical M. StohlStudies on Terrorism

Department of Communication, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA Keywords: knowledge claims; myths; fantasies; media; networks; September 11; al-Qaeda; counter-terrorism; communication

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Old myths In the introductory chapters to the three editions of my The Politics of Terrorism (Stohl, 1979, pp. 1–19; 1983, pp. 1–22; 1988a, pp. 1–30), I explored what I first identified as eight and eventually ten myths of terrorism as a tool for confronting existing knowledge claims about terrorism. The functional device of investigating the myths was very much congruent with the core commitments of critical terrorism studies identified by Richard Jackson, namely, adopting a skeptical attitude toward state-centric understandings of terrorism and approaching the study of terrorism through the examination of existing knowledge claims and subjecting them to appropriate ‘tests’ (Jackson 2007). The discussion of the myths was also intended to introduce the reader to the complexities of terrorism and to elucidate the intersection of terrorist acts and counter-terrorism strategies. In this paper, I want to revisit briefly the myths and some extensions of them, conterminously look at some new fantasies, and then conclude with the enduring realities of terrorism and the continuing research questions that need to be addressed. The ten myths are as follows:

• • • • • • • • • •

Political terrorism is exclusively the activity of non-governmental actors.

All terrorists are madmen.

All terrorists are criminals.

One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.

All insurgent violence is political terrorism.

The purpose of terrorism is the production of chaos.

Governments always oppose non-governmental terrorism.

Political terrorism is exclusively a problem relating to internal political conditions.

The source of contemporary political terrorism may be found in the evil of one or two major actors.

Political terrorism is a strategy of futility.

Three of these myths – the first (political terrorism is exclusively the activity of nongovernmental actors), the sixth (the purpose of terrorism is the production of chaos), and the seventh (governments always oppose terrorism) – directly confronted the state-centric, security focus of the terrorist specialist. As then, the vast majority of scholars who study terrorism today continue to ignore the etymological roots and historical employment of terrorism by the state and rarely consider the violence perpetrated by the state against its *Email: mstohl@comm.ucsb.edu ISSN 1753-9153 print/ISSN 1753-9161 online © 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17539150701846443 http://www.informaworld.com

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own population or those of states beyond its borders. This means that the databases for terrorism research, in addition to their many other problems (Stohl 2007), do not include the state’s use of terror and operationalize ‘out’ its study.

More importantly for the contemporary study of terrorism, it means that insights from much of the finest analytic work on the use of terrorism by governments continues to be ignored. For example, Eugene Walter characterized the process of political terrorism as consisting of three component parts: the act or threat of violence; the emotional reaction to such an act or threat; and the social effects resultant from the acts and reaction (Walter 1969, p. 9). In addition, he argued that terrorism was a specific choice amongst numerous options (p. 292). Duvall and Stohl (1983) explored these choices for modern states within the domestic arena, while Stohl extended the discussion to state behaviour within the international arena (Stohl 1988b). As both Walter and Duvall and Stohl indicate, the initiation of terrorism arises for a number of quite different specific purposes – purposes which are dependent upon the position of both the agents and the targets of terror. While a primary purpose of terrorism, as practised by challengers to governmental authority, is the production of chaos to accelerate social disintegration to demonstrate the inability of the regime to govern or impose order, it remains the case that the most persistent and successful use of terror both in the past and in the modern era has been demonstrated by governments for the purpose of creating, maintaining, and imposing order. The number of victims produced by state terror is on a scale exponentially larger than that of insurgent terrorists.1 States also employ violence coercively and symbolically within their foreign policy repertoires. These behaviours, as Thomas Schelling observed, are concerned with the manipulation of violence and threat. Within the international arena, these behaviours are often obscured by the language employed to describe them, such as Alexander George’s notion of ‘coercive diplomacy’. The idea of the tactic is to make the possibility of noncapitulation ‘terrible beyond endurance’; few authors within the international relations literature are as honest about their meaning as Schelling, who wrote: These [the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki] were weapons of terror and shock.

They hurt, and promised more hurt, and that was their purpose. [ . . . ] Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented violence against the country itself and not mainly an attack on Japan’s material strength. The effect of the bombs, and their purpose, were not mainly the military destruction they accomplished but the pain and the shock and the promise of more. (Schelling 1966, pp.

15–17; also George et al. 1977)

A further insight from this focus on state terrorism was what Sluka (1999) describes as the ‘dramaturgical model of the terror process’ (p. 15); or, the recognition that with terrorism, although each of the component parts of the process is important, the emotional impact of the terrorist act and the social effects are more important than the particular action itself.

In other words, the targets of the terror and their reactions are far more important to the process of terrorism and its effects than are the victims of the violent act.

Contemporary research on violence and politics has traditionally considered government as society’s neutral conflict manager and the guarantor of political order. However, for most of the world’s states, the state may more usefully be considered a party to conflict and not necessarily a neutral one. The myth that governments view all non-governmental terrorism as disruptive and are therefore against non-governmental terrorism within their own borders arises from this state-centric view of government. It is clear that vigilantes, whether from the right or the left, often employ terrorist tactics. When vigilantes seek to assist the government in the maintenance of order and governments perceive these actions

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as useful for their own purposes, vigilantes are not only tolerated, but also all too frequently encouraged by governments (Stohl 1988a, pp. 17–18).

The second myth, that all terrorists are madmen, continues to find a warm reception in the media and in government rhetoric. The main argument is that only madmen would resort to the actions that terrorists have undertaken. In the immediate aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, President George W. Bush modified the madman image; he referred instead to the ‘evil’ of terrorism. On the evening of the attacks, he proclaimed: ‘Today, our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature’; and on 15 September, he stated that: ‘evil folks still lurk out there . . . we will rid the world of evildoers’ (Bush 2001, CNN 2001).

That the terrorist would be understood only as a madmen or ‘evildoer’ would be the reasonable conclusion of citizens watching the evening news or reading their newspapers, especially when each event is treated as an isolated event, devoid of any political meaning except that which the audience can decipher from the presentation of the demands or messages that the media pundits and government spokesmen provide. Rarely are the actions of insurgent terrorists presented as part of an ongoing political struggle, related to any particular goals or presented as reasonable or even meaningful. This is consistent with the penchant of US and English media to psychologize, and to reduce structural and political problems to those of individual pathologies and personal problems (Iyengar and Kinder 1987). As Hacker (1983, p. 23) has argued: [T]his psychologizing of the problem produces an immunization strategy. By making the accusation of mental illness stick, everyone else is acquitted of guilt or participation. The social, legal, economic, and other bases of all these movements need no longer be considered.

Acts of terrorism are not only behaviours with devastating violent effects, but are also behaviours whose distinction from other acts of violence is that they are communicatively constituted. That is, the actions are intended to send an audience a message of fear and to indicate that if policy and behaviours towards the terrorist (or those they purport to represent) do not change, more such terrorist actions will follow. The modern media, by covering the actions of the terrorist and the reactions of the authorities and the public, transmit both terrorist and government messages to the audience. Thus, the media and their reporting are central to terrorism and counter-terrorism as political action.

Indeed, much of the early focus by policy-makers and scholars centred on the charge that the media, by covering acts of terrorism, provided a boost to the terrorist by spreading both their message of fear and their political demands (e.g. Miller 1982, Picard 1986).

Perhaps the best-known explication of this charge was that of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who argued that media reports provided terrorists with ‘the oxygen of terrorism’.

Similar charges that ‘journalists are the terrorist’s best friend’ have been levelled by scholars such as Laqueur (1999, p. 42). Cohen-Almagor (2000, p. 252) argued that: ‘The slant they give by deciding what to report and how to report it can create a climate of public support, apathy, or anger’. Such charges assume that the coverage, simply by providing terrorists the opportunity to ‘communicate’ with the public, favours the terrorist over the government.

Thatcher subsequently enacted restrictions on press coverage of terrorists and forbade the BBC from allowing the voice of IRA members to be aired; likewise, in the Israeli case, interviewing Palestinians was legally prohibited until the beginning of the Oslo process (Liebes and Kampf 2004).

The media are far more likely to focus on the destructive actions and future threat of insurgent terrorism, rather than on its grievances or the social conditions that breed it – to present episodic rather than thematic stories. This is consistent with the journalistic

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convention of the inverted pyramid and the definitional requirements of ‘news’ as distinct from reflective analysis. Further, Kern et al. (2003, p. 286) cite the results of Weimann and Winn who found that from 1968 to 1980, only 15–18% of terror attacks were reported by the three main American television networks. They contend that the importance of the local angle in news reporting on terrorism during the 1970s and the 1980s led the American media to pay little attention to terror attacks around the world, except when Americans were involved.

Significant previous research has demonstrated that news coverage of post-Second World War foreign policy crises in the USA consistently presents the agendas of the political elite. These patterns of coverage highlight journalistic gate-keeping practices in coverage of government policy, and support what Bennett (1990) identified as ‘indexing’ (Zaller and Chiu 1996). Bennett argues that American journalists ‘index’ the range of voices and viewpoints in both news and editorials according to the range of views expressed in mainstream government debate about a given topic. Bennett has also described the authoritydisorder bias in news gathering, which originates from the misplaced assumption that authority figures, experts, and well-placed informants offer a complete story so that reporters need not delve deeper nor be sceptical of their informants’ motives. News stories built in this way are thus likely to reflect the dominant frame of the political elites or authorities (Bennett 2006). The result is that ‘the press has grown too close to the sources of power in this nation, making it largely the communication mechanism of the government’ (Bennett et al. 2007, p. 1).

Danis and Stohl (forthcoming) find that when covering acts of terrorism, not only do the elite press provide significant voice for official positions, but also they present that voice within the particular frames that their respective governments provide for both the events as they occur and how the issue is considered within thematic coverage. They suggest that media coverage of terrorism presents frames supportive of the government position, as opposed to providing the terrorists with the ‘oxygen’ they seek to have their message prevail. And, as Richard Jackson has chronicled in the context of the Bush Administration in the aftermath of 9/11, the government frame might also serve to constitute the very definition of the problem as the media overwhelming adopted the language of the ‘global war on terror’ when reporting on terrorism (Jackson 2005).

Political terrorism as communicatively constituted violence may also be presented as theatre: the world is the stage for the dramatic ingredients of violence, death, intimidation, and fear. For many years the plot involved hostages, deadlines, and high-level bargaining.

Contemporary dramas are more likely to involve suicide bombings, mass casualty attacks and war. However, while the central ingredients are present in all forms of terrorism, as in the legitimate theatre, only certain plays are given prominent reviews and fewer still become hits. Likewise, only a few actors and directors achieve stardom. The ninth myth, that the source of contemporary political terrorism may be found in the evil of one or two satanic actors, addressed this issue in that over the past 30 years there have been very few major terrorist actors who have achieved stardom on the governmental and media stage, particularly when comparing the differences in press coverage of insurgent terrorists and state terrorists (Stohl 1987). This focus on terrorist ‘devils’ such as Carlos the Jackal, Yasir Arafat, Ayatollah Khomeini, Mohmmar Qadaffi, and, more recently, Osama bin Laden dovetails with the personalization of terrorism and terrorist motives and distorts the coverage of insurgent terrorism events. Along with ascribing attacks primarily to these actors in advance of the evidence of responsibility, the focus on these relatively few actors means most events around the world are simply ignored by the international media (Stohl 2006b).

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Another myth related to the psychological explanation of terrorism, and one that is subscribed to and promoted by virtually all governments, is that terrorism is the activity of criminals. The purpose of this myth is to deny insurgents ‘legitimacy’ by arguing that their actions are outside of the political process and for personal rather than political gain. It is also a charge that may be reversed – tying criminals to networks inflates their threat; thus, the creation of so-called ‘narco-terrorists’ and the need to have a ‘war on drugs’ long before the present war on terror commenced (Miller and Damask 1996).

An interesting augmentation of the myth arose from the effort of Alex Schmid to construct a meaningful way out of the definitional morass by arguing that one should treat acts of terror as war crimes and use existing Geneva conventions and international law as guidelines (Schmid 1993). Schmid, who continued to advocate this position while working in the office of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, argued that by treating acts of terror as war crimes, the criminal nature of such acts would be highlighted while recognizing their political context. The unintended consequence of such an approach would be to highlight the ‘criminal’ behaviours of states who engaged in such behaviours; thus, member states of the United Nations did not in fact adopt this approach but they did make some movement in that direction in September 2005 at the World Summit in New York when world leaders unequivocally condemned terrorism: in all its forms and manifestations, committed by whomever, wherever and for whatever purposes’ as ‘one of the most serious threats to international peace and security. (UN Action against Terrorism n.d.)

It is remarkable how firmly entrenched the myth that one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter remains, particularly in the USA. The primary root of the myth is the confusion of what terrorism is with the terrorist actor and the political cause of that actor. An actor is a terrorist when the actor employs terrorist methods; although one might argue that particular ends justify particular means, they do not alter what those means are. US officials have been fond of quoting former Senator Henry Jackson’s statement: The idea that one person’s ‘terrorist’ is another’s ‘freedom fighter’ cannot be sanctioned.

Freedom fighters or revolutionaries don’t blow up buses containing non-combatants; terrorist murderers do. Freedom fighters don’t set out to capture and slaughter schoolchildren; 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 acts of terrorists. (Henry Jackson, cited by Shultz 1986, pp. 18–19)

However, two paragraphs after this citation, Secretary of State George Shultz argues: Once we understand terrorism’s goals and methods, it is not hard to tell, as we look around the world, who are the terrorists and who are the freedom fighters . . . The Contras in Nicaragua do not blow up school buses or hold mass executions of civilians. (Shultz, 1986, p. 19)

Similarly, at present, the US Department of Justice is ‘dancing around’ the case of Luis Posada Carriles, a man charged with the 1976 terrorist bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455 that killed 73 passengers. One of his co-conspirators, Orlando Bosch, was pardoned

by George H. W. Bush in 1990 for his crimes. In addition to their CIA-sponsored activities against Cuba, they also assisted the Nicaraguan Contras defended by George Shultz (Ryan 2007).

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The fifth myth is the converse of the previous myth: all actions by groups that have performed terrorist action in the past are ipso facto terrorism. It is a commonplace for commentators as well as governments to portray regime opponents as terrorists and all their actions as terrorism, because, as Fromkin (1975, p. 695) has argued, ‘terrorism is so much more evil than other strategies of violence that public opinion sometimes can be rallied against it’. The problem affects understanding by preventing actually considering the role of such groups within their societies. Thus, thinking of Hamas or Hezbollah simply as terrorists eliminates the analyst’s ability to understand the social and political movements they have embedded within their societies and therefore the multivariate nature of their support amongst particular populations who are not simply approving their terrorism but their larger political objectives and support programs. Confronting Hamas and Hezbollah by calling for their elimination rather than their cessation of terrorist actions is unlikely to find support either within the organization or the society that supports it.

There is also the attempt to tie all actions of a group that has been labelled as a terrorist as terrorism. Thus, when al-Qaeda uses the internet to post videos, many characterize the act as ‘cyber terrorism’. A recent study suggests that much current writing on cyber terrorism appears to spring from the titles of Tom Clancy’s fiction, such as Clear and Present Danger (1989), The Sum of All Fears (1991) or somewhat more cynically Patriot Games (1987) (Stohl 2006a). The fear of cyber terrorism was employed in the run up to the Iraq war. In the fall of 2001, when the Bush administration began to make a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, Joshua Dean reported the assertions of terrorism analyst Yonah Alexander connecting Iraq and cyber terrorism: Iraq has quietly been developing a cyber arsenal called Iraq Net since the mid-1990s. Alexander said it consists of a series of more than 100 Web sites located in domains throughout the world. Iraq Net, he said, is designed to overwhelm cyber-based infrastructures by distributed denial of service and other cyber attacks. ‘Saddam Hussein would not hesitate to use the cyber tool he has’, Alexander said. ‘It is not a question of if but when’. (Dean 2001)

Like the assertions of Iraq’s cache of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the existence of Iraq Net has yet to be proven. Six months later, it was argued that al-Qaeda would employ the web as a ‘Tool of Bloodshed’ (Gellman 2002).

The media, reporting these fears, are not usually vigilant and rarely discriminate between those threats which are possible and those which are not. These articles persistently remind the public of the continued danger of, and the lack of preparations to defend against, cyber attacks, even as year after year cyber terrorism fails to materialize. In a sense terrorist groups are simply exploiting modern tools to accomplish the same goals they sought in the past. Terrorists thus might employ digital technologies to enhance ease of operations, for information acquisition and distribution, and to increase the ease of anonymous communication. These activities are simply not usefully designated as ‘terrorist’.

The final myth is that political terrorism is a strategy of futility. More than 30 years ago, in the context of the first decade of the Palestinian terrorist campaigns against Israel, Laqueur (1976) wrote: ‘Terrorism creates tremendous noise. It will continue to cause destruction and the loss of human life. It will always attract more publicity, but politically it tends to be ineffective’ (p. 105). More recently, Abrams (2006) has argued that ‘terrorism does not work’ because terrorists do not obtain their maximalist, or as in the cases he presents, many of their more limited objectives through particular acts. Neither Laqueur nor Abrams takes notice of the state’s use of terror in their assessments.

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It is true that terrorism by itself has not been militarily responsible for regime change, but is this the single proper measure to judge success or failure of terrorist actions? If one considers this charge in terms of Palestinian terrorism, it is clear that the various terrorist groups have not accomplished their major purpose of dislodging Israel from occupied territory, nor have they achieved any significant military victories. However, following the terrorist spectaculars at Dawson Field, and the audience of 800 million for the attack on the Olympic Village in Munich in 1972, the question of Palestinian demands was forced onto the public agenda regardless of the success or failure of the operation in tactical or strategic terms. Many such failures followed. Despite the human cost, over the next two decades the terrible price in lives and fear was in large part responsible for the political change which described the ‘Palestinian situation’ and then the ‘Palestinian question’ and the ‘Palestinian problem’. Western leaders, the Israelis, and the Arab states developed a much greater interest in providing a solution to the Palestinian question in the Middle East because the Palestinians made it ever more costly for all parties to continue to ignore them. At the same time, the transformations of Hamas and Hezbollah into organizations with a much wider political and community presence provide possibilities for political transformations and choices that move beyond narrow terrorist tactical considerations.

New fantasies Since President Bush declared war on the network of terrorism on 11 September 2001, there has been great attention to unpacking the war metaphor. In contrast, much less has been written in scholarly or popular venues on the conceptualization and utilization of the term ‘network’ to describe terrorist organizing. Stohl and Stohl (2007) identify critical disjunctures between what communication scholars suggest about organizational network dynamics, and the appropriation of network concepts and terminology by the US Administration to devise strategies and tactics for addressing terrorism. Within the terrorism literature, the metaphor ‘organization as network’ had appeared as early as Ovid Demaris’s Brothers in Blood: The International Terrorist Network (1977) and Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network (1981). These authors argued that terrorist groups had established worldwide liaisons and networks, securing cooperation among national and international terrorist organizations in the form of common financial and technical support.

What is most interesting about the early use of the term ‘terror network’ is that it reflects two central problems still apparent today. First, in spite of the inherent dynamism and emergent flexibility embedded in the term, public policy-makers viewed terrorist networks as hierarchically organized and centralized bureaucracies. Second, the clandestine nature of terrorist networks enabled political opportunism to compromise the reliability and validity of boundary specifications, reports of linkages, and subsequent conclusions. This is further confounded by the divergence in analyses of al-Qaeda by international terrorism scholars and regional security scholars, as against country specialists. Thayer argues that international terrorism experts and regional security scholars generally argue that al-Qaeda has deliberately targeted political organizations in Southeast Asia and that regional leaders have willingly permitted their organizations to become co-opted by al-Qaeda and that some have even sworn an oath of loyalty to Osama bin Laden. On the other hand, country specialists recognize linkages to al-Qaeda, but they believe that local groups maintain

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‘agency’ and act independently of al-Qaeda in pursuing their own agendas and goals (Thayer 2005).

The result has been widely divergent estimates of the size, structure, capacity, reach and capabilities of al-Qaeda and the other members of its ‘network’, and therefore, an inability to determine if the strategies and tactics employed in the war on terror have had any success in confronting the network, not only in Southeast Asia but other parts of the world as well.

The networked terrorist also forms part of the fantasy of the argument for socalled ‘new terrorism’. The ‘new terrorism’ is said to be more networked, ad hoc, lethal and dangerous than the old terrorism (Tucker 2001). Hoffman (1998) argues that it has occurred because of the growth in the number of terrorist groups motivated by a religious imperative, the proliferation of ‘amateurs’ involved in terrorist acts, and the increasing sophistication and operational competence of ‘professional’ terrorists.

These analyses suggest that the new terrorism has been caused by the emergence of ‘religious’ and ‘millenarian’ terrorists, in contrast to the ‘political’ terrorists that dominated the old terrorism. The conclusion is that the new terrorists are apocalyptic and not interested in coercive bargaining or direct political outcomes. Much of the debate centres on conflicting evaluations of the continuing relevance of Brian Jenkins’s observation that ‘terrorists want a lot of people watching not a lot of people dead’ (Jenkins 1975, p. 16). It is argued that the decline in claims of responsibility for events is further evidence of the disinterest in political bargaining. However, the evidence for such claims is questionable: in the ITERATE data, approximately one half of the events since 1968 are unclaimed, non-attributed bombings. Writing in 2001, Tucker constructed a lethality index for international terrorism employing official US State Department statistics. He concludes: This table shows that international terrorism has literally become more lethal, whether measured over twelve year periods during the earliest and latest phases of modern international terrorism or in selected five year increments over the last 31 years. The largest percentage increase in lethality occurred, however, in the late 1970s. Since then, lethality has rested at a higher plateau rather than surged ahead. (Tucker 2001, pp. 5–6)

Also central to the argument of the new terrorism are the ‘amateurs’ often identified as the suicide terrorist. Robert Pape compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 to 2003, 315 events in all. This included every episode in which at least one terrorist killed himself or herself while trying to kill others, but excludes attacks authorized by a national government (like those by North Korean agents against South Korea). He argues that the data indicate far less of a connection between suicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than the new terrorism thesis would predict (Pape 2003).2 What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider their homeland. Pape also argues for a coercive bargaining model to understand suicide terrorism. Thus, as Spencer (2006) argues, ‘the distinction between “old” and “new terrorism” has clearly been over-done’ (p. 27). And yet, the ‘new terrorism’ argument has been used to justify many new counter-terrorism measures, many of which involve increasing levels of force based on the unproven arguments and assumptions that the ‘new terrorists’ are not interested in coercive bargaining or creating fear in the target population, but simply death and destruction.

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Conclusion: enduring realities The attacks of 11 September 2001 have shaped much of the history of the years since. But it is crucial for the understanding of terrorism to remember that it was the choices that were made after the attacks that were the most important in shaping that history. Terrorism remains communicatively constituted violence in which how the audience reacts, and the political effects of the reactions, are the core process of terrorism. The victims are the instrument of terrorism. Thus, on 11 September, as horrific as the carnage was, those victims and all the destruction were not as important to the perpetrators as the audience around the world. Paraphrasing Schelling, it was the pain, the shock and the fear of more which were the message of the attack. The decision to proclaim a war on the global network of terror created a reaction far greater than anything that bin Laden might have reasonably expected. In addition, the decision to proclaim a war reinforced the media’s disinterest in state terrorism, and thus while many more victims continue to be lost to state terrorism than insurgent terrorism, those victims remain mostly invisible to publics around the globe.

From bin Laden’s October 2001 video interview, it was learned that he was hoping for an unrestrained US government response that would clamp down on the domestic public and limit civil liberties and ‘normal’ American life. Bin Laden understood that it was the reaction to the act, both immediate and long-term, that was at the heart of the attack, not the original attack itself. In that sense his calculations were congruent with those of previous terrorists; what was different was the scope, the casualties and the reaction. While past history may have made the choice of the territory of the USA unexpected, the twin towers, the Pentagon and perhaps the capitol provided powerful symbolic targets that sent a message well beyond the horrific number of victims.

Rather than recognizing the multiple audiences for both bin Laden’s message through the attacks, and the need to address those multiple audiences in the development of a response, the Bush administration responded with a message to what it conceived as its base. The political expediency of identifying terrorism with ‘evil’ and to focus on one particular evil such as bin Laden is clear in the mobilization of political support of the home audience and much of the international audience in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

The early black–white imagery of good versus evil employed by George W. Bush generated immediate elite and public support from that base in the initial stages of response.

However, ignoring the political conflicts that underlay the terrorism created fissures in that wider audience over time. Refusing to consider how bin Laden’s message resonated with supporters, why wealthy Saudis as well as poor Pakistanis, Indonesians, Egyptians and recent European immigrants responded to the message, lost valuable public support from the vast majority of the populations of nations around the globe.3 Because there are many different terrorist actors operating across the globe, most of whom are pursuing local agendas, even were George W. Bush eventually to be successful in eliminating bin Laden and the original core of al-Qaeda, it will not eliminate the threat of terrorism. In parallel, one should not slip into the trap of equating the al-Qaeda network with a mythical grand network of international terrorism. It needs to be understood that the changes in the past decade in information technology have enabled some organizations to move from vertical to horizontal organizations, and to communicate across secure cells in ways that only closely knit family units could in years past. Understanding networks and its marriage with information technology is an important key to understanding the ‘power’ of this new organization. It allows widely distributed cells to communicate effectively, channel resources, and maintain a very high degree of security.

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While recognizing the existence of bin Laden’s network, one should be careful to locate and specify its boundaries properly and understand its capacity. One must recognize that it is not only the ‘axis of evil’ identified by Bush that has supported or acquiesced to terrorism. Unfortunately, there are numerous instances where the terrorism of non-state entities coincides with the national interests of sovereign states. State support in this respect continues to depend on a cost–benefit analysis that calculates the benefit thought possible from the desired outcome, the believed probability with which the action will bring about the desired state of affairs, and the probable cost of engaging in the action. To engage in a ‘war’ against all states which support or use ‘terrorism’, the USA (which has its own skeletons in the closet) will need to convince states not only to end their support for all forms of terrorism, but also to cease their acquiescence to those acts which are conceived as serving the particular national interest. For example, many have noted that the Saudi state acquiesced to the transfer of funds and other means of support for groups engaged in terrorism as long as those groups did not target the Saudi state. Pakistan’s security service was intimately involved with Kashmiris engaged in struggle against the Indian state and still, it has frequently been charged during the past five years, remains connected to the Taliban and, through them, al-Qaeda.

Finally, it is important to recognize the enormous costs of the reaction to 11 September in terms of the increased manipulation of fear in the domestic politics of the USA, the expansion of government power, and the abrogation of traditional beliefs about rights and justice within the USA. Rather than Franklin Roosevelt’s warning that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, administration officials made fear a central feature of their appeals for action. The Senate confirmation in November 2007 of an attorney general who refused to state that water boarding, a form of torture recognized since the Spanish inquisition, was indeed torture, and was thus a prohibited act, serves as a symbol for what has transpired in American political life since 2001. Bush’s reaction to 11 September included not only war abroad, but also fear at home. In these two reactions, the enduring reality of the terror attacks remain far longer than the original harm caused.

Notes 1. Compare the data presented by the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism on insurgent terrorism since 1968 (http://www.mipt.org/) with that which Rudolph Rummel presented on his democide website (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM) to obtain an immediate sense of the dimension of the problem.

2. Pape’s data are consistent with studies by Merari (2005) within the context of the Israeli experience.

3. As demonstrated by the annual Pew Global Attitudes Survey (n.d.).

References Abrams, M., 2006. Why terrorism does not work. International Security, 31 (2), 42–78.

Bennett, L., 1990. Toward a theory of press-state relations in the United States. Journal of Communications, 40 (2), 103–125.

Bennett, L., 2006. News: the politics of illusion. 7th ed. New York, NY: Longman.

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