Colossus Read online

  This is not, it should be noted, the same as saying that al Qa’eda is the product of “Islamo-fascism,” though the two certainly have violence and anti-Semitism in common.56 The Fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s were never especially adept at terrorism, preferring to seize control of existing nation-states and to make war using traditional military forces. “Islamo-nihilism” would be nearer the mark, or perhaps “Islamo-bolshevism,” for we should not forget that in their early years Lenin and Stalin were also terrorists. Indeed, there is more than a passing resemblance between “Hereditary Nobleman Ulyanov,” as the young Lenin liked to style himself, hatching his plans for the overthrow of tsarism from dingy Swiss hotels, and the renegade Saudi millionaire, orchestrating the downfall of America from a secluded Afghan cave. That should also remind us that “Western civilization” (unless we take that to mean only the novel Protestant-Deist-Catholic-Jewish fusion that is today’s American culture) has itself been capable in the past of producing political religions just as intolerant and bloodthirsty as today’s Islamo-bolshevism.

  Terrorism—meaning the sporadic use of violence by nonstate forces in pursuit of political goals—is nothing new, least of all in the Middle East and least of all against imperial powers. By the 1940s the British were all too familiar with it, since radical minorities among their Irish and Bengali subjects had long engaged in campaigns of assassination in pursuit of independence. Terrorism had already played a decisive role in bringing down the Habsburg and Romanov empires. Since the 1860s men like the Russian anarchist Sergei Nechaev had been preaching a doctrine of terrorism in which violence—notionally to further the “revolution”—came close to becoming an end in itself. It was Nechaev who wrote the Revolutionary Catechism (1868), which declared: “The revolutionary knows only a single science: the science of destruction … [His] purpose is only one: the quickest and most sure destruction of this filthy system.”57 Another European, the Italian Carlo Pisacane, coined the phrase “propaganda by deed.”58 Joseph Conrad too would have grasped at once the thinking behind bin Laden’s choice of targets. Readers of his novel The Secret Agent will recall the words of Mr. Vladimir, the subversive mastermind who plots to bomb the Greenwich Observatory as one of a “series of outrages … executed here in this country.” “These outrages,” Vladimir explains, “must be sufficiently startling—effective. Let them be directed against buildings, for instance…. The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy … [and be] the most alarming display of ferocious imbecility.” It must, in short, be a symbolic act that speaks for itself. “What is the fetish of the hour that all the bourgeoisie recognize—eh, Mr. Verloc?” Vladimir asks his intended bomber.59 A hundred years ago the “fetish of the hour” was science; hence the attack on the observatory. In 2001 it was economics or, to be precise, economic globalization; hence, it might be argued, the attack on the World Trade Center.

  Yet terrorism in the real world is about more than symbolism. It is the continuation of war by other means—by those who are too weak to wage proper war in pursuit of their political goals. The characteristic feature of terrorism is that its violence is sporadic. Its technology is primitive. Its operatives are, contrary to popular belief, highly vulnerable to countermeasures—especially when the terrorists have no bases on foreign soil from which to operate. The terrorist’s resources are far inferior to those of the states against which he fights, so that most terrorist organizations depend on a combination of thieving and begging for their funds. It is possible for a terrorist organization to operate in a country without external sources of support, but it requires a secure locality where its members can prepare their attacks without fear of interdiction. When this is not available, the terrorists are bound to seek assistance from abroad. Countries that offer them support—or even mere sympathy—are unlikely to be targets for their violence. Conversely, foreign countries that assist the other side—the government against which the terrorists are fighting—may well find themselves drawn into the conflict.

  Humiliated on the battlefield, the Arab states early on resorted to the sponsorship of terrorism by Palestinian exiles. Operating from bases in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, Palestinian fedayeen (literally “self-sacrifices”) mounted numerous attacks on Israeli civilians after 1949. In the six years from 1951 to 1956, over four hundred Israelis were killed and nine hundred injured by these attacks. After the Six-Day War, the Palestine Liberation Organization operated with impunity from Jordanian territory until Israeli pressure forced its expulsion in 1970.60 The PLO then moved to southern Lebanon, a country whose subsequent descent into civil war created an almost perfect seedbed for terrorist organizations (something the Syrian invasion in 1976 did nothing to alter). Terrorist attacks by PLO guerrillas based in Lebanon prompted the Israelis to invade that country in the wake of a particularly bloody hijacking in March 1978, though they subsequently agreed to hand over the border zone to a United Nations force. Four years later, in June 1982, Israel launched an all-out invasion of Lebanon, besieging the PLO’s stronghold of West Beirut and once again driving their leaders out this time to distant Tunisia. The Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon was not content with this. His cynical decision to unleash the Israelis’ Maronite Christian allies on Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatilla led directly to a horrific massacre that claimed between seven hundred and a thousand lives. Amid fierce international condemnation—in which the United States joined—UN peacekeepers were again deployed. Among them were several hundred U.S. marines.

  The PLO and its associates had for many years waged their war on two fronts: not only directly against Israel but indirectly against Israelis or supposed Israeli sympathizers abroad. Terrorism is, however, a many-headed hydra. Though the PLO had been struck a severe blow by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the 1980s saw the emergence of new groups such as the Abu Nidal Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Hezbollah and Hamas. Whereas the PLO had owed more to nationalism and Marxism, this new generation of terrorists identified themselves primarily with Islam. What set their tactics apart from those of the 1960s and 1970s was their resort to suicide bombing and their much greater readiness to attack Americans. Less significance should probably be attached to the first of these traits. In most countries at most times, terrorists who have committed acts of murder have been in effect suicidal, since they have either died in flagrante or been executed subsequently for their crimes. Those experts who were momentarily baffled by the willingness of the 9/11 attackers to “kill themselves so as to kill others” were forgetting the many precedents for such behavior.61 Far more important was the fact that the terrorists now considered Americans legitimate targets. The turning point in this regard came on April 18, 1983, when a suicide bomber attacked the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including the CIA’s entire Middle Eastern team.62 Six months later, in another kamikaze mission, a truck packed with TNT was driven into a Lebanese barracks where American marines were billeted, killing 241 of them. The same tactic killed 4 people when it was used against the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait.

  Such has been the impact of the attacks of September 2001 that it is easy to forget that the number of international terrorist incidents has in fact been declining since its peak in the mid-1980s (see figure 9). There were three times as many attacks in 1987 as there were in 2002. But at the same time (though with a dip in the years 1994–95), the proportion of attacks directed at Americans and American interests has been rising. As table 4 shows, more than one in ten of all the casualties of cross-border terrorism since 1991 has been an American. The World Trade Center was first attacked in 1993. This was followed by the bombings of the U.S. barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in August 1998 and the attack on the USS Cole at Aden in October 2000. It was hardly a wild prophecy when the Commission on National Security, chaired by Gary Hart and Warren B. Rudman, warned in its first September 1999 report: “Terrorists and other disaffected
groups will acquire weapons of mass destruction and mass disruption, and some will use them. Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.”63 To repeat, the surprising thing about 9/11 was simply that it had not happened before. The United States had for years subsidized Israel. It had shored up the shah’s regime in Iraq. It had deployed troops in Arabia.

  FIGURE 9

  Total International Terrorist Incidents, 1977–2002

  Source: Department of State, Patterns of Global Terrorism, various issues, http://www.usis.usemb.se/terror/. There was no shortage of motivations for an attack by one or other of the Middle East’s terrorist groups.

  What was demonstrated to ordinary Americans on September 11, 2001, had been widely recognized by experts for many years. Not only were Americans a target, but they were also an easy target. Terrorism may not be new, but today’s terrorists have astonishing advantages over their predecessors. Technology means that vast destruction can be inflicted at negligible cost; hence the rising number of casualties per attack.64 A Kalashnikov assault rifle can be purchased for a few hundred dollars. The real cost of a nuclear warhead—and certainly the real cost of a kiloton of nuclear yield—are almost certainly lower today than at any time since the Manhattan Project achieved its goal. The first bomb cost around $2 billion in 1945 dollars. Converted into prices of 1993, that figure rises tenfold, enough to buy 400 Trident II missiles.65 The fact that France could almost double its nuclear arsenal (from 222 warheads in 1985 to 436 in 1991) while increasing its defense budget by less than 7 percent in real terms speaks for itself.66 Yet al Qa’eda needed nothing so sophisticated to destroy the tallest buildings in Manhattan: just flying lessons and box cutters. At the time of writing, it is possible to buy eighty hours of aircraft hire and instruction for less than $9,000. A box cutter with six blades costs $2.11. For a trifling outlay of cash, then, a handful of men were able to kill 3,173 people67 and inflict immediate economic costs estimated at $27.2 billion, a tiny fraction of the estimated cumulative loss in national income, which was initially projected to be as high as 5 percent of GDP. For the insurance industry, the disaster’s final costs were said to be between $30 billion and $58 billion; the American airlines were also hit hard, as was tourism. Taxpayers faced a bill not only for reconstruction but also for airline bailouts and substantially increased defense and “homeland security” expenditures.68 The longer-term costs of the 9/11 attacks—in the form of increased uncertainty, market volatility, security costs and risk premiums—can still only be guessed at.69

  TABLE 4

  Source: As for figure 9.

  The U.S. economy weathered this blow more easily than many feared at the time. Viewed in strictly economic terms, the attacks of September 11 were comparable with a very severe natural disaster: expensive but affordable, and of much less significance than the deflation of the stock market bubble that had begun a year and a half earlier.70 Compared with the damage that might have been inflicted by the Soviet Union in the event that the cold war had turned hot, they were indeed trivial. Simply because World War III did not happen should not lead us to draw the wrong conclusion that al Qa’eda is more dangerous to the United States than was Soviet communism. As we have seen, the ideologies of the two entities bear certain resemblances to each other, but the military capabilities of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev exceeded those of bin Laden by numerous orders of magnitude. An attack by the Soviet Union would have left hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans dead and would have obliterated not two towers but multiple cities. The problem with al Qa’eda is not that it is a big threat; it is that such a small and organizationally diffuse threat is exceedingly difficult to locate, whether to annihilate or to negotiate with. On one side, then, we have a powerful consensus that a man-made calamity like 9/11 must not be allowed to happen again. On the other we have the sneaking doubt that avoiding such a repetition may be all but impossible.

  11/9

  Just as it was a myth in the 1930s to believe that “the bomber will always get through,” so it is a myth today that the terrorist will always get through. Domestic terrorism can be reduced, if not wholly eliminated, by a combination of policing and parleying. The problem of terrorism was a severe one in Western Europe during the 1970s as nationalist minorities (in Ireland and Spain) and extreme Marxists (in Italy, Germany and Greece) waged campaigns of assassination and destruction. Today, with the exception of the Basque separatist group Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA), the perpetrators of these crimes have been jailed, marginalized or induced to renounce violence. The number of terrorist incidents has fallen sharply.71 The Provisional Irish Republican Army has effectively been split, its leadership ultimately forced to choose between the bullet and the ballot box, despite the fact that it is not even remotely close to attaining its goal of a united Ireland. The extreme Leftists of 1968 are dead, in jail or—their views miraculously moderated by the temptations of power—in government. No terrorist movement is immune from schism when confronted by both duress and dialogue.

  Is such a defusion of terrorism conceivable in the Middle East? Not, it seems clear, so long as Israel seeks a purely military solution to the problem.72 At the time of writing (the summer of 2003), violence between Israelis and Palestinians in both Israel and the occupied territories has claimed nearly three thousand lives since the beginning of the “al-Aqsa” intifada in September 2000: more than two thousand Palestinians and more than seven hundred Israelis.73 That the government of Ariel Sharon has been driven to the construction of a wall around areas of Palestinian residence is a measure of its desperation; this is a policy that owes something to Ulbricht’s East Germany and something to Verwoerd’s South Africa—a Berlin Wall through the Holy Land to enforce a new apartheid.

  Nor, however, will terrorism in the Middle East cease so long as there are states willing to sponsor it. Terrorist internationalism—or to be precise, the spread of international terror toward the United States—necessitated a cross-border response. It should have been obvious long before September 2001 that the support of terrorist groups by Afghanistan, Cuba, Iraq,74 Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria could be stopped only by intervention in these countries’ internal affairs. Such interventions were far from easy during the cold war, when any American action was certain to elicit a Soviet reaction. But even after the collapse of the Soviet Union had brought the United States an unexpected “hegemony by default,”75 American policy makers found it hard to imagine doing more than meting out exemplary but largely symbolic punishments. In April 1986 President Reagan had ordered air strikes against five Libyan targets “to teach Qaddafi a lesson that the practice of state-sponsored terrorism carried a high cost,” in the words of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger.76 Twelve years later, in August 1998, President Clinton was still using the same tactic, launching missile strikes against alleged “terrorist-related facilities” in Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Ethiopia.77 These demonstrations achieved little. Indeed, the image of a cruise missile hitting an (empty) tent seemed to symbolize American impotence; in the words of Clinton’s successor, such tactics were simply a “joke.”78

  Yet the United States began to grow more confident in its own military capability during the 1980s. After the nadir of April 1980, when an airborne attempt to rescue the American hostages in Tehran had failed ignominiously, there were important changes at the Pentagon. The United States continued to engage in covert anti-Communist operations in Central America, sponsoring the contras’ war against the Sandinista regime that had come to power in Nicaragua in 1979, subsidizing the anti-Communist government in El Salvador and turning Honduras into little less than an American armed camp.79 In many ways, this was the old “our son of a bitch” approach to the region, dressed up in cold war rhetoric that was only slightly fresher. Public interest was limited; one poll revealed that nearly a third of Americans thought the contras were fighting in Norway.80 More novel were the overt interventio
ns of the 1980s. In October 1983 President Reagan ordered a full-scale invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada to reverse a left-wing coup. The code name of the operation, Urgent Fury, conveyed something of the changing military mood.81 Success in Grenada was followed in Panama six years later, when President George Bush Senior ordered the overthrow of the dictator General Manuel Noriega. Despite the fact that the United States had previously agreed to hand over the Panama Canal to Panama by January 1, 1990, Noriega’s annulment of the elections of the previous May furnished the justification for a full-scale invasion by twenty-five thousand U.S. troops.82 Operation Just Cause was a new departure: disproportionate force used unilaterally to overthrow, rather than install, a dictator.

  This new self-confidence came partly from within. The Goldwater-Nichols Act (1986) had transformed the command structure of the American military, promoting the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the role of principal military adviser to the president and, more important, creating a new elite of five “unified combatant commands,” each with responsibility for all the armed services in a specific geographical area.83 Of particular importance was the transformation of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force into a new Central Command, which was to be central in more than a geographical sense.84 The redrawing of the atlas implicit in this new structure had important operational implications, since the United States patently did not have forces deployed equally in all five regions. CENTCOM in particular had relatively few available troops; the commander in charge of this strategically vital region, stretching from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia, was at first a chief with few Indians. One consequence of this was the growth in importance of the highly mobile Special Operations forces.85 Significantly, the substantial increases in the budgets of these new military entities coincided with sharp reductions in the funding of the State Department.86 Above all, the process of rethinking the American way of war—to be precise, the process of learning the lessons of Vietnam—finally bore doctrinal fruit. As Bush Senior’s chairman of the JCS, General Colin Powell spelled out what these lessons should be. Never again would the generation of officers who had led the war effort in Vietnam “quietly acquiesce in halfhearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand or support.” Henceforth the United States “should not commit forces to combat overseas unless the particular engagement or occasion is deemed vital to our national interest and that of our allies”; when such cases arose, and only as a “last resort,” troops should be committed “wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of winning”; they should be given “clearly defined political and military objectives,” but both the means and the ends “must be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary,” and there must be “some reasonable assurance we will have the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress.” (It was partly to ensure that such support was forthcoming that Powell later added the important rider that all American interventions should have an “exit strategy.”) 87