Even before September 11, hardly anyone wasadvocating terrorism--not even those who regularly practice and support it. Thepractice is indefensible now that it has been recognized, like rape or murder, asan attack upon the innocent. The victims of a terrorist attack are ordinary menand women, eternal bystanders. There is no special reason for targeting them. Theattack is launched indiscriminately against the entire class. Terrorists are likekillers on a rampage, except that their rampage is purposeful and programmatic.It aims at a general vulnerability. Kill these people in order to terrify those.A relatively small number of dead victims makes for a very large number of livingand frightened hostages.
This is the ramifying evil of terrorism: not just the killing of innocentpeople but also the intrusion of fear into everyday life, the violation ofprivate purposes, the insecurity of public spaces, the endless coerciveness ofprecaution. A crime wave might produce similar effects, but no one plans a crimewave; it is the work of a thousand decision makers, each one independent of theothers, brought together only by the invisible hand. Terrorism is the work ofvisible hands--an organizational project, a strategic choice, a conspiracy tomurder and intimidate. No wonder the conspirators have difficulty justifying inpublic the strategy that they have chosen.
But when moral justification is ruled out, the way is opened forideological apology. In parts of the European and American left, there has longexisted a political culture of excuses focused defensively on one or another ofthe older terrorist organizations: the IRA, FLN, PLO, and so on. The argumentsare familiar enough, and their repetition in the days since September 11 is nosurprise. Still, it is important to look at them closely and reject themexplicitly.
The first excuse is that terror is a last resort. The image is of oppressedand embittered people who have run out of options. They have tried everylegitimate form of political action, exhausted every possibility, failedeverywhere, until no alternative remains but the evil of terrorism. They must beterrorists or do nothing at all. The easy response is that, given thisdescription, they should do nothing at all. But that doesn't engage the excuse.
It is not so easy to reach the last resort. To get there, one must indeed tryeverything (which is a lot of things)--and not just once, as if a political partyor movement might organize a single demonstration, fail to win immediate victory,and claim that it is now justified in moving on to murder. Politics is an art ofrepetition. Activists learn by doing the same thing over and over again. It is byno means clear when they run out of options. The same argument applies to stateofficials who claim that they have tried everything and are now compelled to killhostages or bomb peasant villages. What exactly did they try when they weretrying everything?
Could anyone come up with a plausible list? "Last resort" has only a notionalfinality. The resort to terror is not last in an actual series of actions; it islast only for the sake of the excuse. Actually, most terrorists recommend terroras a first resort; they are for it from the beginning.
The second excuse is that they are weak and can't do anything else. But twodifferent kinds of weakness are commonly confused here: the weakness of theterrorist organization vis-à-vis its enemy and its weaknessvis-à-vis its own people. It is the second type--the inability of theorganization to mobilize its own people--that makes terrorism the option andeffectively rules out all the others: political action, nonviolent resistance,general strikes, mass demonstrations. The terrorists are weak not because theyrepresent the weak but precisely because they don't--because they have beenunable to draw the weak into a sustained oppositional politics. They act withoutthe organized political support of their own people. They may express the angerand resentment of some of those people, even a lot of them. But they have notbeen authorized to do that, and they have made no attempt to win any such authorization. They act tyrannically and, if they win, will rule in the same way.
The third excuse holds that terrorism is neither the last resort nor the only possible resort, but the universal resort. Everybody does it; that's whatpolitics (or state politics) really is; it's the only thing that works. Thisargument has the same logic as the maxim "All's fair in love and war." Love isalways fraudulent, war is always murderous, and politics always requiresterror. In fact, the world the terrorists create has its entrances and exits; wedon't always live there. If we want to understand the choice of terror, we haveto imagine what must often occur (although we have no satisfactory record ofthis): A group of men and women, officials or activists, sits around a table andargues about whether or not to adopt a terrorist strategy. Later on, the litanyof excuses obscures the argument. But at the time, around the table, it wouldhave been of no use for defenders of terrorism to say, "Everybody does it,"because they were face-to-face with people proposing to do something else.Terrorism commonly has its origins in arguments of this sort. Its first victimsare the terrorists' former colleagues, the ones who said no to terrorism. Whatreason can we have for equating these two groups?
The fourth excuse plays on the notion of innocence. Of course, it is wrong tokill the innocent, but these victims aren't entirely innocent. They are thebeneficiaries of oppression; they enjoy its tainted fruits. And so, while theirmurder isn't justifiable, it is ... understandable. What else could they expect?Well, the children among them, and even the adults, have every right to expect along life like anyone else who isn't actively engaged in war or enslavement orethnic cleansing or brutal political repression. This is called noncombatantimmunity, the crucial principle not only of war but of any decent politics. Thosewho give it up for a moment of schadenfreude are not simply making excuses for terrorism; they have joined the ranks of terror's supporters.
The last excuse is the claim that all the obvious and conventionally endorsedresponses to terror are somehow worse than terrorism itself. Any coercivepolitical or military action is denounced as revenge, the end of civil liberty,the beginning of fascism. The only morally permitted response is to reconsiderthe policies that the terrorists claim to be attacking. Here, terrorism is viewedfrom the side of the victims as a kind of moral prompting: Oh, we should havethought of that!
I have heard all these excuses in the past few days--often expressed alongwith great indignation at the chorus of national unity and determination. But thelast two have been the most common. We bomb Iraq, we support the Israelis, and weare the allies of repressive Arab regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. What elsecan we expect? Leave aside the exaggerated and distorted descriptions of Americanwickedness that underpin these excuses. There is a lot to criticize in ourcountry's foreign policy over the past decades. Many of us on the Americanliberal-left have spent the bulk of our political lives opposing the use ofviolence by the U.S. government (though I and most of my friends supported theGulf War, which ranks high in the standard version of the fourth excuse). AsAmericans, we have our own brutalities to answer for--as well as the brutalitiesof other states that we have armed and funded. None of this, however, excusesterrorism; none of it even makes terrorism morally understandable. Maybepsychologists have something to say on behalf of understanding. But the onlypolitical response to ideological fanatics and suicidal holy warriors isimplacable opposition.
