So I spent most of a week with my 18 year old son, and other than worrying about the usual parental concerns (Does he have enough condoms? Does he understand his school’s sexual harassment policy? WTF is he doing with a tobacco pipe?), being with him makes we think about our immediate future and so about terrorism.
If you have read this blog at all, you know that I’m no friend of Hamas or any of the other alphabet-soup of Islamists up and to Bin Laden the Asimov-reading nutjob who destroyed the World Trade Center. I don’t believe that a Palestinian state is the answer at this point, nor have I excused terror as the inevitable consequence of oppression.
But being with my son made me worry, both about the impacts on my sons’ futures of not doing anything about terrorism, and about the cost in young lives (like my son’s) of doing something. And when I worry, I think.
First, let me set the stage.
I think that we’re headed into some dark times. While many in the world are better off than they have ever been, they are also plugged in enough to know how much more others have than they do. And the key to resentment isn’t absolute deprivation, but relative. Add to that the global mobility…of money, people, goods…and we in the U.S. are tied closer than ever to a world population that not only resents us for our wrongdoings (such as they may be) but for simply living the lives we lead every day.
I think, as does Kevin Phillips, that we are a late-stage empire, and that the habits that brought us our power and wealth are becoming weakened. There’s good and bad in that; I don’t mean to judge them normatively, but rather to use them in a way that offers a theory of what the medium-term future – my sons’ future – may look like.
Now, let me talk about terrorism.
I’ve been reading a lot about terrorism, and a lot of the rhetoric about it has finally begun to gel in my head.
Most broadly, terrorism is the use of violence against civilian targets in a manner designed to create fear and so to drive a political action home.
It has been the subject of much debate and many competing definitions. A few include:

“Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons, whereby – in contrast to assassination – the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperilled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought” (Schmid, 1988).
From U.N Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention
…the definition of terrorism contained in Title 22 of the United States Code, Section 2656f(d). That statute contains the following definitions:
The term “terrorism” means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant (1) targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.
From U.S. Navy Department Library

So what we have are three core features:
1) Violence against civilians
2) Violence for nonmilitary purposes
3) Violence by a subnational or clandestine group
Let’s go through these. Violence against civilians ought to be obvious…soldiers wear uniforms, drive marked behicles, etc. etc. But there are gradations. There is a profound difference between attacking the Speaker of the House and attacking his grocer in order to frighten him. [Inserted: Both are civilians, but one occupies a role that is both functional and ceremonial in the leadership of the country and by extension, our military capacity.] If you hate the United States, or Republicans, you might believe that killing Hastert, even though he is nominally a ‘civilian’ would somehow strike at the effectiveness or strength of the U.S. or the Republican party (note: I don’t advocate this, Ann, please don’t get any ideas…). You’d be deranged in these cases, because one of the strength of our system is its relative independence from who wields the levers of power. But you’d be ‘understandably’ evil. Comprehensibly evil. But to kill the guy who runs the Quick Mart where Dennis stops and gets his Slim-Jims, in order to frighten or intimidate Hastert moves the evil to a whole new category. The grocer’s life becomes meaningless, you make him into a pawn, devalue him as a moral agent, and in so doing, devalue yourself morally.
This fits into 2), the concept of violence for nonmilitary purposes. Let’s look back at WWII and strategic bombing. There was a huge difference between bombing factories in the Ruhr, or bombing railroads…the destruction of which would have degraded the ability of Germany to fight…and bombing Dresden, which was designed to frighten German citizens. Attacking the armed forces of an enemy, or the resources on which the armed forced depend to fight has a legitimacy which simply killing the civilians of the enemy lacks.
And finally, 3) the question of identifiable combatants. There are two justifications for the clear identification of soldiers; first because we morally believe in ‘fighting fair’, and the notion that we have to take the reactions from our actions is important; but more importantly, because if enemy combatants are hiding among the civilian population and killing my soldiers, one very likely outcome involves the wholesale slaughter of the enemy civilian population in order to kill the hidden combatants.
In my life, there have been three waves of terrorism:
1) Undeclared and declared wars of national liberation. Algeria, the Congo, Vietnam, Ulster, Sri Lanka. In each of these, the tactics of terror were used to combat a colonial power, in the interest of founding an independent nation.
2) Western middle-class terrorists; what I’ll call “academic” terrorism. Baader-Meinhof, Red Army Faction, the Weather Underground (how pathetic is it that the Germans and Japanese grew better middle-class terrorists than we did?), on to groups and individuals I’ll suggest stand in the same continuum but without the overt politics…Charles Manson, Charles Whitman, the SLA, and Columbine.
3) Palestinian and other Arab terrorism. From Munich to Lockerbie, the secular Arab nationalist movements (note that the Islamist movements have been relatively free from terrorism…the capture of the American Embassy arguably was an action against ‘combatants’) have attacked Israel and secondarily Western countries that have supported Israel.
In the next part, I want to try and make some connections between these three waves, and to try and outline a theory of the connection and progress of terrorism, with some disturbing suggestions about its future.