- In the wake of mounting violence in Iraq,
reported US figures on terrorist incidents show that politically motivated
violence is running out of control. The numbers appear frightening: the
US figures suggest that such incidents in 2005 exceeded 10,000, more than
three times the 3,200 in 2004. These numbers, a compilation of loosely
defined incidents around the globe, led the Christian Science Monitor to
lament last week that "a common definition of terrorism is a great
challenge and a global issue." That lament revives a debate
that has been going on for decades.
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- This writer published a book in 1988
called the Violence Formula in which the first chapter was labeled: "Terrorism
- The War of Definitions." The summary judgment of that chapter
was that terrorism, as a tactic, is seldom if ever in dispute. People
simply have a problem with fitting all the cases into their value system.
The conflicts or confusions of values center on what such events
mean, and on who cares about that, not on how they were done.
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- Years ago, in codifying Federal crimes,
the US Government incorporated all known acts that a terrorist might commit
into Title 18 of the United States. The acts are there, spread out,
as crimes against people and property. They are easily understood,
hard to be confused about, because the focus of Title 18 is on the acts,
meaning the crimes, not on the motives of the actors.
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- Motives matter greatly, however, in onlooker
judgments about acts of terrorism. Specific grievances of the actor
or actors, causes they uphold, national identities, race, religion, tribal
connections variously enter into judgments about what is or is not an act
of terrorism. The oft-repeated rendering of that is "one man's terrorist
is another man's freedom fighter."
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- Such confusion has even been molded into
law. Before 1985, for example, an IRA gunman could march up to an
unarmed policeman on the street of Belfast, shoot him down, and retreat
to safe haven in the United States. At British request, the gunman
could be picked up and brought into a US court. He could brazenly
say "Yes, I shot the policeman, but it was a political act".
That statement invoked a "political exception" to the US/British
extradition treaty. Before an agreed US/British change in extradition rules
in 1985, the shooter could not be extradited to Britain for trial. Since
it was a recognized "political" act in the ongoing IRA rebellion,
it was not punishable in the United States either.
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- The term "terrorism" unfortunately
is overburdened with such exceptions, depending upon who is doing the talking
or the acting, or the listening. But the principal flaw is that "terrorism"
is a captive category of actions reserved by the powerful largely to define
violent actions against them by the weak. Last week, for example,
the Israel Defense Force admitted that for no particular reason it had
bombed the Gaza Strip 300 or more times a day for several days, but a US
veto kept the UN Security Council from condemning actions that were obvious
terrorism by a state. Had the Palestinians done the same or similar
bombings anywhere in Israeli territory, they would have been roundly condemned
as terrorists. The Palestinians have been under continuous military occupation
for many years, but any effort to fight back is called terrorism.
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- Iraq is the major current case in point.
Nearly a third of the acts reported in 2004, and at least a quarter of
the alleged 10,000 global acts of terrorism in 2005 occurred in Iraq. None
of the Coalition forces' killing of Iraqis, destruction of towns, villages
and neighborhoods was counted in the terrorism total. But all of
the actions of Iraqis to resist the US occupation were counted as terrorism.
None of the acts of the other (non-US) national forces were counted in
the terrorism total. But all the acts of mercenaries variously in
Iraq to help the insurgents (including al Qaida) were counted as terrorism.
The controlling input to the definition of terrorism in Iraq is simply
the opinion/preference of American officials on how to classify a specific
incident.
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- Deliberate perceptual blindness is a
major factor in knowing how to interpret terrorism numbers. For example,
in 2003 the United States used a remote controlled drone to assassinate
six people in Yemen. One was a suspected al Qaida figure. The
others were unknown quantities. If carried out by al Qaida, such an attack
would have been called terrorism. A number of governments were uncomfortable
about the Yemen attack, but they did not accuse the US of terrorism.
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- The 2004 change in data collection by
the US Department of State and the National Counterterrorism Center brings
into play another major distortion. Up through 2003 the State Department
collected data only on "international" incidents, those involving
actors, victims, property, or governments of more than one country.
In 2004, the Center began to include data on so-called "domestic"
incidents, those involving only actors, victims and property of one country.
That automatically increased the global number of incidents for 2004 from
about 650 to over 3,000. However, that is a new set of collected
data, but it is not a bolt out of the blue. Terrorism analysts in
the State Department, CIA and other collecting agencies typically have
estimated domestic incidents in past years at as many as five to ten times
the number of international ones. If the same counting rules had been used
for, say 1987 when the international terrorist incident was more than 800,
the global count of all incidents would probably have reached 5,000.
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- That larger number did not arouse urges
to go to war in 1987, and it does not justify war now.
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- However, that larger number confuses
and/or intimidates the public. To be blunt, the bigger number seems to
justify a global War on Terrorism. The smaller number does not.
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- Any country obviously has an interest
in its own stability conditions; therefore domestic incidents are important
in every country where they occur. Terrorist attacks in most countries,
however, are rare. Those incidents are dealt with by law enforcement
people or, as in such cases as the Philippines, by quasi-military national
police. Most countries pay more attention to what traveling terrorists
do or they watch closely the habit of national groups that may attack foreigners.
That smaller number, the international attacks, in short is the set of
incidents--the danger to their people-- most governments watch closely
and plan against to the extent planning is feasible.
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- The large numbers in the new data base
have enormous political utility, but as the Monitor suggests, the numbers
have little concrete meaning. There is, at the moment, no agreed
upon international definition that would give the numbers specific meaning.
Governments in general have been unable to agree on a definition of terrorism
because they start by excluding (a) everything they do themselves and (b)
anything that groups they favor do. In that setting, the United States
can support UNITAS in Angola, or the Contras in Nicaragua, or for that
matter the Shi'a in Iraq; Ireland can sustain a long-term ambiguous position
toward the IRA, Syria and Iran can support Hezbollah in Lebanon.
And each can argue that its support for its group is different.
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- War zones pose a special problem.
The first problem in Iraq is the desire of the US to avoid recognition
of an active and valid insurgency that is fighting back against an occupying
army. The odds are that virtually all the attacks in Iraq that are
not instances of outright civil war are insurgent attacks on US forces
and Iraqi or other Coalition forces affiliated with the US. If that number
of attacks, probably as many as a quarter of the 10,000 so-called terrorist
incidents recorded for 2005, are put in the category of insurgency,
then the remaining 7,500 or so terrorist incidents is not any larger than
the total number of incidents that occurred in 1987-88, when the number
of international incidents exceeded 800 a year.
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- The remaining dilemma here concerns determining
which incidents are really terrorism and which, properly speaking, are
acts of insurgency. Israeli and U.S. officials and media have managed to
dominate the labeling of events in Palestine and Israel by asserting that
anything the Palestinian people do to fight back against Israeli invasion,
occupation, confiscation of land, assassination and imprisonment of their
people is terrorism. However, the Palestinian people have the right
to fight back against an invading army.
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- The same basic confusion of terms has
been operating in Iraq, although there is growing recognition of the Iraqi
insurgency. However, the global problem of defining terrorism resides with
the simple fact that most politically violent groups in most countries
are rebelling against their own governments or ruling elites. Governments
generally are comfortable with the label terrorist, because that label
helps them avoid recognizing the legitimacy of a group's grievances or
complaints. The label insurgency carries an aura of legitimacy that commands
attention.
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- In that respect, we probably can accept
the numbers recited by the National Counterterrorism Center as a more or
less accurate tabulation of violent politically motivated incidents in
the world during 2005. We are left to guess, however, which of the acts
actually should be classed as terrorism, meaning politically motivated
crimes against people and property. Nor will we know which incidents
were legitimate, albeit extreme, acts of rebellion against political and
social injustice. Until governments, including our own, are willing to
level with us--and with themselves--about the motivations and causes of
dissident groups within their societies, no reliable definitions are possible.
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- The Christian Science Monitor's complaint
about the numbers can be resolved simply enough, if everybody will just
agree that all politically motivated acts by non-state actors against non-combatants
are acts of terrorism. However, that choice would simply sweep under
the rug the legitimate complaints of hundreds of thousands of people in
almost half the countries in the world. We have the enduring problem of
defining terrorism, because we have the enduring habit of imposing our
preferences on conflict situations. Political ambiguity is the culprit.
The numbers are innocent. The labels people put on them are loaded.
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- **********
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- The writer is the author of the recently
published work, A World Less Safe, now available on Amazon, and he is a
regular columnist on rense.com. He is a retired Senior Foreign Service
Officer of the US Department of State whose immediate pre-retirement positions
were as Deputy Director of the State Office of Counterterrorism, and as
Chairman of the Department of International Studies of the National War
College. He will welcome comment at wecanstopit@charter.net.
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