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Old myths, new fantasies and theenduring realities of terrorismMichael Stohl aa Department of Communication, University of California, SantaBarbara, CA, USA

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RTER1753-91531753-9161Critical Studies on Terrorism, Vol. 1, No. 1, Jan 2008: pp. 0–0Critical Studies on TerrorismSYMPOSIUM

Old myths, new fantasies and the enduring realities of terrorismCritical Studies on TerrorismM. StohlMichael Stohl*

Department of Communication, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Keywords: knowledge claims; myths; fantasies; media; networks; September 11; al-Qaeda; counter-terrorism; communication

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 aseight and eventually ten myths of terrorism as a tool for confronting existing knowledgeclaims about terrorism. The functional device of investigating the myths was very muchcongruent with the core commitments of critical terrorism studies identified by RichardJackson, namely, adopting a skeptical attitude toward state-centric understandings of ter-rorism and approaching the study of terrorism through the examination of existing knowl-edge claims and subjecting them to appropriate ‘tests’ (Jackson 2007). The discussion ofthe myths was also intended to introduce the reader to the complexities of terrorism and toelucidate 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 atsome new fantasies, and then conclude with the enduring realities of terrorism and thecontinuing 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 non-governmental actors), the sixth (the purpose of terrorism is the production of chaos), andthe seventh (governments always oppose terrorism) – directly confronted the state-centric,security focus of the terrorist specialist. As then, the vast majority of scholars who studyterrorism today continue to ignore the etymological roots and historical employment ofterrorism by the state and rarely consider the violence perpetrated by the state against its

*Email: mstohl@comm.ucsb.edu

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

More importantly for the contemporary study of terrorism, it means that insights frommuch of the finest analytic work on the use of terrorism by governments continues to beignored. For example, Eugene Walter characterized the process of political terrorism asconsisting of three component parts: the act or threat of violence; the emotional reaction tosuch an act or threat; and the social effects resultant from the acts and reaction (Walter1969, p. 9). In addition, he argued that terrorism was a specific choice amongst numerousoptions (p. 292). Duvall and Stohl (1983) explored these choices for modern states withinthe domestic arena, while Stohl extended the discussion to state behaviour within the inter-national arena (Stohl 1988b). As both Walter and Duvall and Stohl indicate, the initiation ofterrorism arises for a number of quite different specific purposes – purposes which aredependent upon the position of both the agents and the targets of terror. While a primarypurpose of terrorism, as practised by challengers to governmental authority, is the produc-tion of chaos to accelerate social disintegration to demonstrate the inability of the regime togovern or impose order, it remains the case that the most persistent and successful use ofterror both in the past and in the modern era has been demonstrated by governments for thepurpose of creating, maintaining, and imposing order. The number of victims produced bystate terror is on a scale exponentially larger than that of insurgent terrorists.1

States also employ violence coercively and symbolically within their foreign policyrepertoires. These behaviours, as Thomas Schelling observed, are concerned with themanipulation of violence and threat. Within the international arena, these behaviours areoften obscured by the language employed to describe them, such as Alexander George’snotion of ‘coercive diplomacy’. The idea of the tactic is to make the possibility of non-capitulation ‘terrible beyond endurance’; few authors within the international relationsliterature 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 Nagasakirepresented violence against the country itself and not mainly an attack on Japan’s materialstrength. The effect of the bombs, and their purpose, were not mainly the military destructionthey 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 ofthe 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 theprocess of terrorism and its effects than are the victims of the violent act.

Contemporary research on violence and politics has traditionally considered govern-ment 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 conflictand not necessarily a neutral one. The myth that governments view all non-governmentalterrorism as disruptive and are therefore against non-governmental terrorism within theirown 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 toassist the government in the maintenance of order and governments perceive these actions

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Critical Studies on Terrorism 7

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

The second myth, that all terrorists are madmen, continues to find a warm reception inthe media and in government rhetoric. The main argument is that only madmen would resortto the actions that terrorists have undertaken. In the immediate aftermath of the 11 September2001 attacks, President George W. Bush modified the madman image; he referred instead tothe ‘evil’ of terrorism. On the evening of the attacks, he proclaimed: ‘Today, our nation sawevil, the very worst of human nature’; and on 15 September, he stated that: ‘evil folks stilllurk 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 thereasonable 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 meaningexcept that which the audience can decipher from the presentation of the demands or mes-sages that the media pundits and government spokesmen provide. Rarely are the actions ofinsurgent terrorists presented as part of an ongoing political struggle, related to any partic-ular goals or presented as reasonable or even meaningful. This is consistent with the pen-chant of US and English media to psychologize, and to reduce structural and politicalproblems to those of individual pathologies and personal problems (Iyengar and Kinder1987). As Hacker (1983, p. 23) has argued:

[T]his psychologizing of the problem produces an immunization strategy. By making theaccusation of mental illness stick, everyone else is acquitted of guilt or participation. Thesocial, 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 alsobehaviours whose distinction from other acts of violence is that they are communicativelyconstituted. That is, the actions are intended to send an audience a message of fear and toindicate 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 theactions of the terrorist and the reactions of the authorities and the public, transmit both ter-rorist and government messages to the audience. Thus, the media and their reporting arecentral to terrorism and counter-terrorism as political action.

Indeed, much of the early focus by policy-makers and scholars centred on the chargethat the media, by covering acts of terrorism, provided a boost to the terrorist by spreadingboth 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 MargaretThatcher 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 scholarssuch as Laqueur (1999, p. 42). Cohen-Almagor (2000, p. 252) argued that: ‘The slant theygive 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 terroriststhe opportunity to ‘communicate’ with the public, favours the terrorist over the government.Thatcher subsequently enacted restrictions on press coverage of terrorists and forbade theBBC 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 ofinsurgent terrorism, rather than on its grievances or the social conditions that breed it – topresent 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 distinctfrom reflective analysis. Further, Kern et al. (2003, p. 286) cite the results of Weimannand Winn who found that from 1968 to 1980, only 15–18% of terror attacks were reportedby the three main American television networks. They contend that the importance of thelocal angle in news reporting on terrorism during the 1970s and the 1980s led the Ameri-can media to pay little attention to terror attacks around the world, except when Americanswere involved.

Significant previous research has demonstrated that news coverage of post-SecondWorld War foreign policy crises in the USA consistently presents the agendas of the politicalelite. These patterns of coverage highlight journalistic gate-keeping practices in coverageof government policy, and support what Bennett (1990) identified as ‘indexing’ (Zallerand Chiu 1996). Bennett argues that American journalists ‘index’ the range of voices andviewpoints in both news and editorials according to the range of views expressed in main-stream government debate about a given topic. Bennett has also described the authority-disorder bias in news gathering, which originates from the misplaced assumption thatauthority figures, experts, and well-placed informants offer a complete story so thatreporters need not delve deeper nor be sceptical of their informants’ motives. News storiesbuilt in this way are thus likely to reflect the dominant frame of the political elites orauthorities (Bennett 2006). The result is that ‘the press has grown too close to the sourcesof 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 dothe elite press provide significant voice for official positions, but also they present thatvoice within the particular frames that their respective governments provide for both theevents as they occur and how the issue is considered within thematic coverage. Theysuggest that media coverage of terrorism presents frames supportive of the governmentposition, as opposed to providing the terrorists with the ‘oxygen’ they seek to have theirmessage prevail. And, as Richard Jackson has chronicled in the context of the BushAdministration in the aftermath of 9/11, the government frame might also serve to constitutethe 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 astheatre: 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 attacksand war. However, while the central ingredients are present in all forms of terrorism, as inthe legitimate theatre, only certain plays are given prominent reviews and fewer stillbecome 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 twosatanic actors, addressed this issue in that over the past 30 years there have been very fewmajor terrorist actors who have achieved stardom on the governmental and media stage,particularly when comparing the differences in press coverage of insurgent terrorists andstate terrorists (Stohl 1987). This focus on terrorist ‘devils’ such as Carlos the Jackal, YasirArafat, Ayatollah Khomeini, Mohmmar Qadaffi, and, more recently, Osama bin Ladendovetails with the personalization of terrorism and terrorist motives and distorts the cover-age of insurgent terrorism events. Along with ascribing attacks primarily to these actors inadvance of the evidence of responsibility, the focus on these relatively few actors meansmost events around the world are simply ignored by the international media (Stohl 2006b).

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Critical Studies on Terrorism 9

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

An interesting augmentation of the myth arose from the effort of Alex Schmid toconstruct a meaningful way out of the definitional morass by arguing that one should treatacts of terror as war crimes and use existing Geneva conventions and international law asguidelines (Schmid 1993). Schmid, who continued to advocate this position while work-ing in the office of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, argued that by treatingacts of terror as war crimes, the criminal nature of such acts would be highlighted whilerecognizing their political context. The unintended consequence of such an approachwould 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 didmake some movement in that direction in September 2005 at the World Summit in NewYork when world leaders unequivocally condemned terrorism:

in all its forms and manifestations, committed by whomever, wherever and for whateverpurposes’ as ‘one of the most serious threats to international peace and security. (UN Actionagainst Terrorism n.d.)

It is remarkable how firmly entrenched the myth that one person’s terrorist isanother’s freedom fighter remains, particularly in the USA. The primary root of themyth is the confusion of what terrorism is with the terrorist actor and the political causeof that actor. An actor is a terrorist when the actor employs terrorist methods; althoughone might argue that particular ends justify particular means, they do not alter whatthose means are. US officials have been fond of quoting former Senator HenryJackson’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; terroristmurderers do. Freedom fighters don’t set out to capture and slaughter schoolchildren; terroristmurderers do. Freedom fighters don’t assassinate innocent businessmen, or hijack and holdhostage innocent men, women, and children; terrorist murderers do. It is a disgrace thatdemocracies would allow the treasured word ‘freedom’ to be associated with acts ofterrorists. (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 aroundthe world, who are the terrorists and who are the freedom fighters . . . The Contras in Nicaraguado 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 LuisPosada Carriles, a man charged with the 1976 terrorist bombing of Cubana Airlines flight455 that killed 73 passengers. One of his co-conspirators, Orlando Bosch, was pardonedby George H. W. Bush in 1990 for his crimes. In addition to their CIA-sponsored activitiesagainst Cuba, they also assisted the Nicaraguan Contras defended by George Shultz (Ryan2007).

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The fifth myth is the converse of the previous myth: all actions by groups that haveperformed terrorist action in the past are ipso facto terrorism. It is a commonplace forcommentators as well as governments to portray regime opponents as terrorists and alltheir actions as terrorism, because, as Fromkin (1975, p. 695) has argued, ‘terrorism is somuch more evil than other strategies of violence that public opinion sometimes can be ral-lied against it’. The problem affects understanding by preventing actually considering therole of such groups within their societies. Thus, thinking of Hamas or Hezbollah simply asterrorists eliminates the analyst’s ability to understand the social and political movementsthey have embedded within their societies and therefore the multivariate nature of theirsupport amongst particular populations who are not simply approving their terrorism buttheir larger political objectives and support programs. Confronting Hamas and Hezbollahby calling for their elimination rather than their cessation of terrorist actions is unlikely tofind 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 terroristas terrorism. Thus, when al-Qaeda uses the internet to post videos, many characterize theact as ‘cyber terrorism’. A recent study suggests that much current writing on cyber terror-ism appears to spring from the titles of Tom Clancy’s fiction, such as Clear and PresentDanger (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 Iraqwar. In the fall of 2001, when the Bush administration began to make a connectionbetween Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, Joshua Dean reported the assertions of terrorismanalyst Yonah Alexander connecting Iraq and cyber terrorism:

Iraq has quietly been developing a cyber arsenal called Iraq Net since the mid-1990s. Alexan-der said it consists of a series of more than 100 Web sites located in domains throughout theworld. Iraq Net, he said, is designed to overwhelm cyber-based infrastructures by distributeddenial of service and other cyber attacks. ‘Saddam Hussein would not hesitate to use thecyber 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 ofIraq Net has yet to be proven. Six months later, it was argued that al-Qaeda would employthe web as a ‘Tool of Bloodshed’ (Gellman 2002).

The media, reporting these fears, are not usually vigilant and rarely discriminatebetween those threats which are possible and those which are not. These articles persist-ently remind the public of the continued danger of, and the lack of preparations to defendagainst, cyber attacks, even as year after year cyber terrorism fails to materialize. In asense terrorist groups are simply exploiting modern tools to accomplish the same goalsthey sought in the past. Terrorists thus might employ digital technologies to enhance easeof operations, for information acquisition and distribution, and to increase the ease ofanonymous 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 yearsago, 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 causedestruction and the loss of human life. It will always attract more publicity, but politicallyit tends to be ineffective’ (p. 105). More recently, Abrams (2006) has argued that ‘terror-ism does not work’ because terrorists do not obtain their maximalist, or as in the cases hepresents, many of their more limited objectives through particular acts. Neither Laqueurnor Abrams takes notice of the state’s use of terror in their assessments.

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Critical Studies on Terrorism 11

It is true that terrorism by itself has not been militarily responsible for regimechange, but is this the single proper measure to judge success or failure of terroristactions? If one considers this charge in terms of Palestinian terrorism, it is clear that thevarious terrorist groups have not accomplished their major purpose of dislodging Israelfrom occupied territory, nor have they achieved any significant military victories. How-ever, following the terrorist spectaculars at Dawson Field, and the audience of 800 millionfor the attack on the Olympic Village in Munich in 1972, the question of Palestiniandemands was forced onto the public agenda regardless of the success or failure of theoperation in tactical or strategic terms. Many such failures followed. Despite the humancost, over the next two decades the terrible price in lives and fear was in large partresponsible for the political change which described the ‘Palestinian situation’ and thenthe ‘Palestinian question’ and the ‘Palestinian problem’. Western leaders, the Israelis,and the Arab states developed a much greater interest in providing a solution to thePalestinian question in the Middle East because the Palestinians made it ever morecostly for all parties to continue to ignore them. At the same time, the transformations ofHamas and Hezbollah into organizations with a much wider political and communitypresence provide possibilities for political transformations and choices that movebeyond 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 hasbeen written in scholarly or popular venues on the conceptualization and utilization of theterm ‘network’ to describe terrorist organizing. Stohl and Stohl (2007) identify criticaldisjunctures between what communication scholars suggest about organizational networkdynamics, and the appropriation of network concepts and terminology by the US Admin-istration to devise strategies and tactics for addressing terrorism. Within the terrorismliterature, the metaphor ‘organization as network’ had appeared as early as OvidDemaris’s Brothers in Blood: The International Terrorist Network (1977) and ClaireSterling’s The Terror Network (1981). These authors argued that terrorist groups hadestablished worldwide liaisons and networks, securing cooperation among national andinternational terrorist organizations in the form of common financial and technicalsupport.

What is most interesting about the early use of the term ‘terror network’ is that itreflects two central problems still apparent today. First, in spite of the inherent dyna-mism and emergent flexibility embedded in the term, public policy-makers viewedterrorist networks as hierarchically organized and centralized bureaucracies. Second,the clandestine nature of terrorist networks enabled political opportunism tocompromise the reliability and validity of boundary specifications, reports of link-ages, and subsequent conclusions. This is further confounded by the divergence inanalyses of al-Qaeda by international terrorism scholars and regional security schol-ars, as against country specialists. Thayer argues that international terrorism expertsand regional security scholars generally argue that al-Qaeda has deliberately targetedpolitical organizations in Southeast Asia and that regional leaders have willinglypermitted their organizations to become co-opted by al-Qaeda and that some haveeven sworn an oath of loyalty to Osama bin Laden. On the other hand, countryspecialists 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, reachand capabilities of al-Qaeda and the other members of its ‘network’, and therefore, aninability to determine if the strategies and tactics employed in the war on terror have hadany success in confronting the network, not only in Southeast Asia but other parts of theworld as well.

The networked terrorist also forms part of the fantasy of the argument for so-called ‘new terrorism’. The ‘new terrorism’ is said to be more networked, ad hoc,lethal and dangerous than the old terrorism (Tucker 2001). Hoffman (1998) arguesthat it has occurred because of the growth in the number of terrorist groups motivatedby a religious imperative, the proliferation of ‘amateurs’ involved in terrorist acts, andthe 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 dom-inated the old terrorism. The conclusion is that the new terrorists are apocalyptic andnot interested in coercive bargaining or direct political outcomes. Much of the debatecentres on conflicting evaluations of the continuing relevance of Brian Jenkins’sobservation 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 forevents is further evidence of the disinterest in political bargaining. However, the evi-dence for such claims is questionable: in the ITERATE data, approximately one halfof the events since 1968 are unclaimed, non-attributed bombings. Writing in 2001,Tucker constructed a lethality index for international terrorism employing official USState Department statistics. He concludes:

This table shows that international terrorism has literally become more lethal, whether meas-ured over twelve year periods during the earliest and latest phases of modern international ter-rorism or in selected five year increments over the last 31 years. The largest percentageincrease in lethality occurred, however, in the late 1970s. Since then, lethality has rested at ahigher plateau rather than surged ahead. (Tucker 2001, pp. 5–6)

Also central to the argument of the new terrorism are the ‘amateurs’ often identified asthe suicide terrorist. Robert Pape compiled a database of every suicide bombing andattack around the globe from 1980 to 2003, 315 events in all. This included every episodein which at least one terrorist killed himself or herself while trying to kill others, butexcludes attacks authorized by a national government (like those by North Korean agentsagainst South Korea). He argues that the data indicate far less of a connection betweensuicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than the new terrorism thesis would pre-dict (Pape 2003).2 What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is aspecific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw militaryforces from territory that the terrorists consider their homeland. Pape also argues for acoercive 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 coun-ter-terrorism measures, many of which involve increasing levels of force based on theunproven arguments and assumptions that the ‘new terrorists’ are not interested incoercive bargaining or creating fear in the target population, but simply death anddestruction.

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Critical Studies on Terrorism 13

Conclusion: enduring realities

The attacks of 11 September 2001 have shaped much of the history of the years since. Butit is crucial for the understanding of terrorism to remember that it was the choices that weremade after the attacks that were the most important in shaping that history. Terrorismremains communicatively constituted violence in which how the audience reacts, and thepolitical effects of the reactions, are the core process of terrorism. The victims are theinstrument of terrorism. Thus, on 11 September, as horrific as the carnage was, those vic-tims and all the destruction were not as important to the perpetrators as the audience aroundthe world. Paraphrasing Schelling, it was the pain, the shock and the fear of more whichwere the message of the attack. The decision to proclaim a war on the global network of ter-ror created a reaction far greater than anything that bin Laden might have reasonablyexpected. In addition, the decision to proclaim a war reinforced the media’s disinterest instate terrorism, and thus while many more victims continue to be lost to state terrorism thaninsurgent 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 foran unrestrained US government response that would clamp down on the domestic publicand limit civil liberties and ‘normal’ American life. Bin Laden understood that it was thereaction to the act, both immediate and long-term, that was at the heart of the attack, notthe original attack itself. In that sense his calculations were congruent with those of previ-ous terrorists; what was different was the scope, the casualties and the reaction. While pasthistory 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 mes-sage well beyond the horrific number of victims.

Rather than recognizing the multiple audiences for both bin Laden’s message throughthe attacks, and the need to address those multiple audiences in the development of aresponse, the Bush administration responded with a message to what it conceived as itsbase. The political expediency of identifying terrorism with ‘evil’ and to focus on one par-ticular evil such as bin Laden is clear in the mobilization of political support of the homeaudience 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 gener-ated 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 inthat wider audience over time. Refusing to consider how bin Laden’s message resonatedwith supporters, why wealthy Saudis as well as poor Pakistanis, Indonesians, Egyptiansand recent European immigrants responded to the message, lost valuable public supportfrom the vast majority of the populations of nations around the globe.3

Because there are many different terrorist actors operating across the globe, most ofwhom are pursuing local agendas, even were George W. Bush eventually to be successfulin eliminating bin Laden and the original core of al-Qaeda, it will not eliminate the threatof terrorism. In parallel, one should not slip into the trap of equating the al-Qaeda networkwith a mythical grand network of international terrorism. It needs to be understood that thechanges in the past decade in information technology have enabled some organizations tomove from vertical to horizontal organizations, and to communicate across secure cells inways that only closely knit family units could in years past. Understanding networks andits 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 tolocate and specify its boundaries properly and understand its capacity. One must rec-ognize that it is not only the ‘axis of evil’ identified by Bush that has supported oracquiesced to terrorism. Unfortunately, there are numerous instances where the terror-ism of non-state entities coincides with the national interests of sovereign states. Statesupport in this respect continues to depend on a cost–benefit analysis that calculatesthe benefit thought possible from the desired outcome, the believed probability withwhich the action will bring about the desired state of affairs, and the probable cost ofengaging 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 convincestates not only to end their support for all forms of terrorism, but also to cease theiracquiescence to those acts which are conceived as serving the particular nationalinterest. For example, many have noted that the Saudi state acquiesced to the transferof funds and other means of support for groups engaged in terrorism as long as thosegroups did not target the Saudi state. Pakistan’s security service was intimatelyinvolved with Kashmiris engaged in struggle against the Indian state and still, it hasfrequently been charged during the past five years, remains connected to the Talibanand, through them, al-Qaeda.

Finally, it is important to recognize the enormous costs of the reaction to 11 Septemberin terms of the increased manipulation of fear in the domestic politics of the USA, theexpansion of government power, and the abrogation of traditional beliefs about rights andjustice within the USA. Rather than Franklin Roosevelt’s warning that the only thing wehave to fear is fear itself, administration officials made fear a central feature of theirappeals for action. The Senate confirmation in November 2007 of an attorney general whorefused to state that water boarding, a form of torture recognized since the Spanish inqui-sition, was indeed torture, and was thus a prohibited act, serves as a symbol for what hastranspired in American political life since 2001. Bush’s reaction to 11 September includednot only war abroad, but also fear at home. In these two reactions, the enduring reality ofthe 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 insur-gent terrorism since 1968 (http://www.mipt.org/) with that which Rudolph Rummel presented onhis democide website (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM) to obtain an immediatesense of the dimension of the problem.

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

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

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