welsh
Junkmaster
I have used these articles before in my class as discussion pieces and thought some of you might be interested. Considering recent events in Madrid, they might be worth thinking about. Both articles are also pre 9/11 so they are without some of the bias you might expect.
One other thing- in discussing terrorism we often forget state-sponsored terrorism. But the truth is that state-sponsored terrorists have probably killed many time more people than terrorist organizations.
Ok Here they are.
http://web6.infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/569/34/23875335w6/purl=rc1_EAIM_0_A18046218&dyn=4!xrn_22_0_A18046218?sw_aep=viva_uva
if the link doesn't work-
The Economist (US), March 2, 1996 v338 n7955 pY23(3)
What is terrorism: the use of terror is more widespread and effective than is generally recognized.
Abstract: A precise definition of terrorism involves an ideological cause and random violence aimed at civilians, but it is still sometimes difficult to distinguish between acts of terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Several examples of political violence are presented.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1996 Economist Newspaper Ltd.
JUNE 1914: a young man in Sarajevo steps up to a carriage and fires his pistol. Archduke Ferdinand dies. Within weeks, the first world war has begun. The 1940s: the French resistance kill occupying troops when and how they can. June 1944: at Oradour-sur-Glane, in central France, German SS troops take revenge, massacring 642 villagers. August 1945: the United States Air Force drops the world's first nuclear weapons. Some 190,000 Japanese die, nearly all of them civilians. Within days the second world war has ended.
Which of these four events was an act of terrorism? Which achieved anything? Which, if any, will history judge as justified? And whose history? Terrorism is not the simple, sharp-edged, bad-guy phenomenon we all love to condemn. No clear line marks off politics from the threat of force, threat from use, use from covert or open war. Who is or is not a terrorist? The suicide bomber, the rebel guerrilla, the liberation front, the armed forces of the state?
In practice, what act or person earns the label depends on who wants to apply it. To Ulster loyalists all IRA violence is terrorism; to Sinn Fein it is part of a legitimate war. To many Israelis, everyone from the suicide-bombers in Jerusalem or Ashkelon to the Hizbollah grenade-thrower in South Lebanon is a terrorist; to many Arabs during the 1982 Lebanon war, the worst terrorists in the Middle East were the--entirely legitimate, uniformed--Israel Defence Force.
If the concept is not to vanish into all-embracing fudge, two distinctions can be drawn, though habitually they are not. Terrorism is indeed about terror; not just violence, but its use to spread terror. And the violence is aimed specifically at civilians.
Classical terrorism, ideological rather than territorial, reveals the niceties. Recent decades saw West Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang and Red Army Fraction murder prominent businessmen such as Alfred Herrhausen and Jurgen Ponto (bosses of Germany's two largest banks, Deutsche and Dresdner respectively). Italy's Red Brigades murdered Aldo Moro, a former prime minister. Its far right in 1980 blew up a train in Bologna station, killing 84 people. Which of these was truly terrorism? Arguably, only the last. It was an act of indiscriminate violence to terrorise citizens at large; the others were discriminate assassinations to win publicity and display power.
Likewise, lobbing mortar-bombs into a British army base in South Armagh may have deadly results, but it is guerrilla warfare. Planting a bomb that kills a dozen diners in a restaurant is terrorism. The suicide bomber in Jerusalem was a terrorist; the Hizbollah fighter in South Lebanon attacking Israeli army patrols is not.
Even in the distinction between guerrilla warfare and terrorism, there are grey areas. The soldier in a tank is a military target. What about one in a jeep escorting civilian vehicles? Or returning on a bus from leave? A bus that may--and was, when a suicide bomber attacked it in Gaza last April--be carrying civilians too?
There are, in contrast, distinctions often made that ought not to be. What is or is not ``terrorism'' does not depend on the badness or goodness of the cause, nor on whether those espousing it have the chance to express their demands democratically. When President James Garfield was assassinated in America in the same year, 1881, that a Russian terrorist group blew up Tsar Alexander II, the Russians wrote an open letter condemning Garfield's killers and arguing that:
In a land where the citizens are free to express their ideas, and where the will of the people does not merely make the law but appoints the person who is to carry the law into effect, political assassination is the manifestation of despotism . . . Despotism is always blameworthy and force can only be justified when employed to resist force.
Yet despotism does not justify throwing bombs into crowds (as the group sometimes did).
The fact is that a good cause may use terrorism just as a bad one may. South Africa has provided a clear example. The ending of white dominance was a plainly good cause. For the most part, the African National Congress used mass demonstrations and industrial sabotage to advance its cause. But the men who shot up a white church congregation or planted a bomb outside a cinema were terrorists in the purest sense of the word.
Nor does the terrorists' ultimate success or failure alter the truth. Menachem Begin got to lead a country; Yasser Arafat may do; Velupillai Prabhakaran, who leads the Tamil Tigers, probably will not. None of that changes the fact that Deir Yassin (a massacre of Palestinian villagers by Israelis fighting to establish their state), the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and this year's Tamil Tiger bomb in Colombo were all acts of terror.
The terror of the state
So much for the underdogs. Can there be terrorist governments too? The Americans certainly think so when they accuse Libya or Iran of supporting international terrorism. In the cold war, international terrorists were used to wage war by proxy: the East German regime provided safe houses for Baaders and Meinhofs; the modern era's most notorious terrorist, the gun-for-hire Carlos the Jackal, made his career in this world of state-sponsored terrorism.
All that was diplomacy by terror. Can a recognised government also be guilty of terrorism against its own people?
Yes. Stalin used terror systematically to consolidate his power--random murders of Communist-Party members and army officers in the 1930s, massacres and exiles of smaller ethnic groups throughout his rule. Much of Latin America practised state terrorism in recent decades. The brasshat regimes of the day faced left-wing, sometimes terrorist movements. Many fought back with terror. And not just through paramilitaries or unacknowledged death squads. The infamous massacre at El Mozote in El Salvador in 1981 was the work of that country's regular army. The unit that did it had a cheerful song of its own, ``Somos Guerreros'':
We are warriors,
Warriors all!
We are setting out to kill
A mountain of terrorists.
What in fact they killed was over 500 peasants; probably the worst ``official'' massacre in Latin America's recent history.
Can regular armies, in regular war, be guilty of terrorism? The answer, surely, is yes. Look at the Japanese rape of Nanking in 1937, when not hundreds or thousands but ten of thousands of civilians were murdered, to terrorise the rest of China. Then go a step further. Can the armies of proud democracies be guilty too? A century ago, the rich world, with the rules of war that it claimed to use, would have called attacking civilians impermissable. The modern world has other ideas. The Allied bombing of Germany was aimed at civilians in the hope of shattering morale: in short, terror. The fire bombing of Tokyo and the atomic weapons that vaporised Hiroshima and Nagasaki were arguably aimed at government morale, not that of Japan's population. Their victims did not notice the difference.
Who kills and how?
What use, one can ask, is a definition so wide that it can go from Stalin to the American air force? There are two answers.
First, it is a reminder that terrorism, historically, has been the tool of the strong, not the weak. Medieval armies, having taken a besieged town, would slaughter some or all of the citizens to encourage other towns to surrender faster. During India's struggle for independence, by far the worst terror was the Amritsar massacre in 1919, when British-officered troops shot up a political gathering, and carried on shooting until the bullets ran out; 379 civilians died (and it worked: the rebellious province of Punjab returned to order). In contrast, discriminate assassination was the typical weapon of the 19th-century anarchist and nihilist.
By and large, true random terrorism has come in the past 30 years, as in the Bologna train bomb, the recent nerve-gassing of the Tokyo metro by a religious cult, or the Oklahoma City bomb; all three crimes were aimed at no matter whom for a purpose so vague or Utopian as to seem irrelevant, except to the deranged. Even in this period most--not all--IRA killing was aimed at defined targets: soldiers, policemen, individual Protestant farmers in border areas. The Basque violence of ETA has often followed this pattern. Peru's Shining Path guerrillas are truer terrorists, but even they (mostly) prefer the tactics, honed by the Vietcong, of killing officials, not just (as in some infamous massacres) everyone in sight. Algeria's and Sri Lanka's terrorists today probably have the strongest claim to be called spreaders of true random terror.
The second thing one can learn from the wide definition that the phenomenon is neither uniquely wicked, nor--still less--uniquely deadly. People fight with the weapons they have: knives, Semtex, rifles, fighter-bombers. All their users are alike convinced of their own righteousness, all kill and all their victims are equally dead. What they are not is equal in number. The Munich terrorists killed 11 Israelis; Israel's retaliation against the Lebanese town of Nabatiyeh, however justified, killed about 100 Arabs. The State Department has totted up the deaths due to international terrorism from 1968 through 1995. Its total, and it defines terrorism broadly, is 8,700. Twenty-four hours of air raids killed six times as many in Dresden in 1945. One is a crime, says international law, the other a legitimate act of war.
The response
Is all this mere word-play? It is not. It crucially affects responses to terrorism.
One true difference between a terrorist group and a government is that the group is almost impossible to smash. You can destroy or seize a government's ability to make conventional war; you will never get terrorist's last stick of dynamite or timing mechanism, and it requires wonderfully few terrorists to keep a civilised society on edge.
But many other imagined differences are less great than they might appear. It is a common error to suppose that because terrorism is not war, and because its weapons are not the full panoply of war, then the psychology of terrorists must be different too. Of course, there are plenty of curious specimens among terrorism's ranks: Carlos the Jackal, now in French hands, was not just any old gunman; or consider Abimael Guzman, an academic who until his capture in 1992 led Peru's Shining Path movement. Every terrorist must have personal devotion to the cause--he is, after all, risking his liberty, and often his life; not many reluctant army conscripts, drafted by a legitimate government, are likely feel the same way. And plainly, say those who know them, the IRA and other groups include people who enjoy violence for its own sake.
But so do most armies. And most governments, once at war, can produce remarkable devotion to the national cause. In its own terms, a warring terrorist group, like a warring government, is ``pursuing diplomacy by other means'', even if its means of war are different. It too is subject to highs and lows, to war fatigue and collapses of morale, to premature a battle won as if it had been the war. It too can be threatened with a heavy hand; some of its members may be wooed with a lighter one.
Terrorists, like governments, may be rational: they are pursuing a policy they hope will succeed. And the more it works, the more vigorously they will pursue it.
It is always hard, when terrorism is just one element in a complex pattern of events, to identify its impact. But the world is manifestly a different place because of acts of terror. In 1948, the Israelis blew up the King David hotel, the administrative centre of the British rulers of Palestine. The atrocity helped persuade the British to leave.
Often, terrorists help advance a general cause, but aims. That may be the case with the IRA. Irish Republican terrorism helped dramatise the nationalist cause throughout periods of discriminatory Protestant rule. And Britain has made concessions to the nationalists. In the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985, the British accepted the right of the Irish Republic to a say in a province of the United Kingdom; in the two governments' Downing Street declaration of 1993 Britain said it had ``no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland''. It is hard to imagine any other government saying such things of its own accord. Yet whether it was the IRA that brought this about, or persistent pressure from the Irish government and peaceful nationalists in the north, is debatable. The leader of the biggest nationalist party in Northern Ireland, John Hume, argues that IRA terrorism has been the main obstacle to a peaceful settlement in Ulster. If so, the IRA may also have harmed the nationalist cause.
And sometimes, terrorists can advance both a general cause and themselves. The PLO's campaigns in the 1970s made the organisation the dominant representative of the Palestinians. They also helped solid Palestinians' own sense of their distinct identity, which until then had been relatively weak.
Just as terrorists make a difference to the world, so changes in the world make a difference to terrorists. It was not just their own weakness that the British to quit India, or later Cyprus (whose EOKA gunmen, though damned as terrorists, were more like guerrilla fighters), or later still Kenya (where they faced a genuinely terrorist liberation movement). Weakness played its part, but so did a world view that said colonial empires had had their day. Much the same was true in South Africa. F.W. de Klerk, probably the last white president there, may not have been a more virtuous man than the architects of apartheid who preceded him. But he was and is a realist, who lived in different days and under different pressures.
In that case, a just cause plainly helped the terrorists. For Muslim countries the Palestinian cause was no less just. Western countries, guiltily aware of the horrors of Jewish history, disagreed, and it took 20 years of Israeli occupation and the intifada, the Palestinian uprising of 1987-90, to persuade them that the PLO too had a case. It is still not one that much impresses Americans; and though other westerners may have sympathy with Palestinian dreams of statehood, any movement that still seeks a quite different thing, the destruction of Israel, on top will--very rightly--find that its bombers face a western world united behind the Jewish state.
Like the rest of us--mostly
In all this, what is different about dealing with terrorism? The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is not very much.
Any government has its own interests, its own pressures, its concessions it can make and those it cannot. It fights its conventional wars with tanks and aircraft, its small-scale wars--partly terrorist, mostly not--with intelligence men and small arms. It cannot, usually, zap the terrorists' territory as it could that of a hostile state. But its psychology will be much the same in the two cases--and so will that of it terrorist or suicide bomber or gun-man or fighter or liberation hero is not different from other men (men, sic; rarely have women played any notable part, any more than they have in old-fashioned war).
With one notable exception: the nutters, whether with a cause or no evident cause at all. The American way-out redneck who thinks he has to plant a bomb, when he could vote for Pat Buchanan, is beyond any but a psychiatrist's reach. So too elitist solipsists convinced that murder was justified because they knew all the answers and it was society that was out of step. Among the almost causeless, Italy's far right may have sought instability, but for what? That was never clear. And no known concession could have led Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult to put aside its chemistry set.
Is it coincidence that three of these four groups seem to specialise in the true terrorism, the random murder of civilians for terror's sake. Perhaps it is not.
One other thing- in discussing terrorism we often forget state-sponsored terrorism. But the truth is that state-sponsored terrorists have probably killed many time more people than terrorist organizations.
Ok Here they are.
http://web6.infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/569/34/23875335w6/purl=rc1_EAIM_0_A18046218&dyn=4!xrn_22_0_A18046218?sw_aep=viva_uva
if the link doesn't work-
The Economist (US), March 2, 1996 v338 n7955 pY23(3)
What is terrorism: the use of terror is more widespread and effective than is generally recognized.
Abstract: A precise definition of terrorism involves an ideological cause and random violence aimed at civilians, but it is still sometimes difficult to distinguish between acts of terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Several examples of political violence are presented.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1996 Economist Newspaper Ltd.
JUNE 1914: a young man in Sarajevo steps up to a carriage and fires his pistol. Archduke Ferdinand dies. Within weeks, the first world war has begun. The 1940s: the French resistance kill occupying troops when and how they can. June 1944: at Oradour-sur-Glane, in central France, German SS troops take revenge, massacring 642 villagers. August 1945: the United States Air Force drops the world's first nuclear weapons. Some 190,000 Japanese die, nearly all of them civilians. Within days the second world war has ended.
Which of these four events was an act of terrorism? Which achieved anything? Which, if any, will history judge as justified? And whose history? Terrorism is not the simple, sharp-edged, bad-guy phenomenon we all love to condemn. No clear line marks off politics from the threat of force, threat from use, use from covert or open war. Who is or is not a terrorist? The suicide bomber, the rebel guerrilla, the liberation front, the armed forces of the state?
In practice, what act or person earns the label depends on who wants to apply it. To Ulster loyalists all IRA violence is terrorism; to Sinn Fein it is part of a legitimate war. To many Israelis, everyone from the suicide-bombers in Jerusalem or Ashkelon to the Hizbollah grenade-thrower in South Lebanon is a terrorist; to many Arabs during the 1982 Lebanon war, the worst terrorists in the Middle East were the--entirely legitimate, uniformed--Israel Defence Force.
If the concept is not to vanish into all-embracing fudge, two distinctions can be drawn, though habitually they are not. Terrorism is indeed about terror; not just violence, but its use to spread terror. And the violence is aimed specifically at civilians.
Classical terrorism, ideological rather than territorial, reveals the niceties. Recent decades saw West Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang and Red Army Fraction murder prominent businessmen such as Alfred Herrhausen and Jurgen Ponto (bosses of Germany's two largest banks, Deutsche and Dresdner respectively). Italy's Red Brigades murdered Aldo Moro, a former prime minister. Its far right in 1980 blew up a train in Bologna station, killing 84 people. Which of these was truly terrorism? Arguably, only the last. It was an act of indiscriminate violence to terrorise citizens at large; the others were discriminate assassinations to win publicity and display power.
Likewise, lobbing mortar-bombs into a British army base in South Armagh may have deadly results, but it is guerrilla warfare. Planting a bomb that kills a dozen diners in a restaurant is terrorism. The suicide bomber in Jerusalem was a terrorist; the Hizbollah fighter in South Lebanon attacking Israeli army patrols is not.
Even in the distinction between guerrilla warfare and terrorism, there are grey areas. The soldier in a tank is a military target. What about one in a jeep escorting civilian vehicles? Or returning on a bus from leave? A bus that may--and was, when a suicide bomber attacked it in Gaza last April--be carrying civilians too?
There are, in contrast, distinctions often made that ought not to be. What is or is not ``terrorism'' does not depend on the badness or goodness of the cause, nor on whether those espousing it have the chance to express their demands democratically. When President James Garfield was assassinated in America in the same year, 1881, that a Russian terrorist group blew up Tsar Alexander II, the Russians wrote an open letter condemning Garfield's killers and arguing that:
In a land where the citizens are free to express their ideas, and where the will of the people does not merely make the law but appoints the person who is to carry the law into effect, political assassination is the manifestation of despotism . . . Despotism is always blameworthy and force can only be justified when employed to resist force.
Yet despotism does not justify throwing bombs into crowds (as the group sometimes did).
The fact is that a good cause may use terrorism just as a bad one may. South Africa has provided a clear example. The ending of white dominance was a plainly good cause. For the most part, the African National Congress used mass demonstrations and industrial sabotage to advance its cause. But the men who shot up a white church congregation or planted a bomb outside a cinema were terrorists in the purest sense of the word.
Nor does the terrorists' ultimate success or failure alter the truth. Menachem Begin got to lead a country; Yasser Arafat may do; Velupillai Prabhakaran, who leads the Tamil Tigers, probably will not. None of that changes the fact that Deir Yassin (a massacre of Palestinian villagers by Israelis fighting to establish their state), the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and this year's Tamil Tiger bomb in Colombo were all acts of terror.
The terror of the state
So much for the underdogs. Can there be terrorist governments too? The Americans certainly think so when they accuse Libya or Iran of supporting international terrorism. In the cold war, international terrorists were used to wage war by proxy: the East German regime provided safe houses for Baaders and Meinhofs; the modern era's most notorious terrorist, the gun-for-hire Carlos the Jackal, made his career in this world of state-sponsored terrorism.
All that was diplomacy by terror. Can a recognised government also be guilty of terrorism against its own people?
Yes. Stalin used terror systematically to consolidate his power--random murders of Communist-Party members and army officers in the 1930s, massacres and exiles of smaller ethnic groups throughout his rule. Much of Latin America practised state terrorism in recent decades. The brasshat regimes of the day faced left-wing, sometimes terrorist movements. Many fought back with terror. And not just through paramilitaries or unacknowledged death squads. The infamous massacre at El Mozote in El Salvador in 1981 was the work of that country's regular army. The unit that did it had a cheerful song of its own, ``Somos Guerreros'':
We are warriors,
Warriors all!
We are setting out to kill
A mountain of terrorists.
What in fact they killed was over 500 peasants; probably the worst ``official'' massacre in Latin America's recent history.
Can regular armies, in regular war, be guilty of terrorism? The answer, surely, is yes. Look at the Japanese rape of Nanking in 1937, when not hundreds or thousands but ten of thousands of civilians were murdered, to terrorise the rest of China. Then go a step further. Can the armies of proud democracies be guilty too? A century ago, the rich world, with the rules of war that it claimed to use, would have called attacking civilians impermissable. The modern world has other ideas. The Allied bombing of Germany was aimed at civilians in the hope of shattering morale: in short, terror. The fire bombing of Tokyo and the atomic weapons that vaporised Hiroshima and Nagasaki were arguably aimed at government morale, not that of Japan's population. Their victims did not notice the difference.
Who kills and how?
What use, one can ask, is a definition so wide that it can go from Stalin to the American air force? There are two answers.
First, it is a reminder that terrorism, historically, has been the tool of the strong, not the weak. Medieval armies, having taken a besieged town, would slaughter some or all of the citizens to encourage other towns to surrender faster. During India's struggle for independence, by far the worst terror was the Amritsar massacre in 1919, when British-officered troops shot up a political gathering, and carried on shooting until the bullets ran out; 379 civilians died (and it worked: the rebellious province of Punjab returned to order). In contrast, discriminate assassination was the typical weapon of the 19th-century anarchist and nihilist.
By and large, true random terrorism has come in the past 30 years, as in the Bologna train bomb, the recent nerve-gassing of the Tokyo metro by a religious cult, or the Oklahoma City bomb; all three crimes were aimed at no matter whom for a purpose so vague or Utopian as to seem irrelevant, except to the deranged. Even in this period most--not all--IRA killing was aimed at defined targets: soldiers, policemen, individual Protestant farmers in border areas. The Basque violence of ETA has often followed this pattern. Peru's Shining Path guerrillas are truer terrorists, but even they (mostly) prefer the tactics, honed by the Vietcong, of killing officials, not just (as in some infamous massacres) everyone in sight. Algeria's and Sri Lanka's terrorists today probably have the strongest claim to be called spreaders of true random terror.
The second thing one can learn from the wide definition that the phenomenon is neither uniquely wicked, nor--still less--uniquely deadly. People fight with the weapons they have: knives, Semtex, rifles, fighter-bombers. All their users are alike convinced of their own righteousness, all kill and all their victims are equally dead. What they are not is equal in number. The Munich terrorists killed 11 Israelis; Israel's retaliation against the Lebanese town of Nabatiyeh, however justified, killed about 100 Arabs. The State Department has totted up the deaths due to international terrorism from 1968 through 1995. Its total, and it defines terrorism broadly, is 8,700. Twenty-four hours of air raids killed six times as many in Dresden in 1945. One is a crime, says international law, the other a legitimate act of war.
The response
Is all this mere word-play? It is not. It crucially affects responses to terrorism.
One true difference between a terrorist group and a government is that the group is almost impossible to smash. You can destroy or seize a government's ability to make conventional war; you will never get terrorist's last stick of dynamite or timing mechanism, and it requires wonderfully few terrorists to keep a civilised society on edge.
But many other imagined differences are less great than they might appear. It is a common error to suppose that because terrorism is not war, and because its weapons are not the full panoply of war, then the psychology of terrorists must be different too. Of course, there are plenty of curious specimens among terrorism's ranks: Carlos the Jackal, now in French hands, was not just any old gunman; or consider Abimael Guzman, an academic who until his capture in 1992 led Peru's Shining Path movement. Every terrorist must have personal devotion to the cause--he is, after all, risking his liberty, and often his life; not many reluctant army conscripts, drafted by a legitimate government, are likely feel the same way. And plainly, say those who know them, the IRA and other groups include people who enjoy violence for its own sake.
But so do most armies. And most governments, once at war, can produce remarkable devotion to the national cause. In its own terms, a warring terrorist group, like a warring government, is ``pursuing diplomacy by other means'', even if its means of war are different. It too is subject to highs and lows, to war fatigue and collapses of morale, to premature a battle won as if it had been the war. It too can be threatened with a heavy hand; some of its members may be wooed with a lighter one.
Terrorists, like governments, may be rational: they are pursuing a policy they hope will succeed. And the more it works, the more vigorously they will pursue it.
It is always hard, when terrorism is just one element in a complex pattern of events, to identify its impact. But the world is manifestly a different place because of acts of terror. In 1948, the Israelis blew up the King David hotel, the administrative centre of the British rulers of Palestine. The atrocity helped persuade the British to leave.
Often, terrorists help advance a general cause, but aims. That may be the case with the IRA. Irish Republican terrorism helped dramatise the nationalist cause throughout periods of discriminatory Protestant rule. And Britain has made concessions to the nationalists. In the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985, the British accepted the right of the Irish Republic to a say in a province of the United Kingdom; in the two governments' Downing Street declaration of 1993 Britain said it had ``no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland''. It is hard to imagine any other government saying such things of its own accord. Yet whether it was the IRA that brought this about, or persistent pressure from the Irish government and peaceful nationalists in the north, is debatable. The leader of the biggest nationalist party in Northern Ireland, John Hume, argues that IRA terrorism has been the main obstacle to a peaceful settlement in Ulster. If so, the IRA may also have harmed the nationalist cause.
And sometimes, terrorists can advance both a general cause and themselves. The PLO's campaigns in the 1970s made the organisation the dominant representative of the Palestinians. They also helped solid Palestinians' own sense of their distinct identity, which until then had been relatively weak.
Just as terrorists make a difference to the world, so changes in the world make a difference to terrorists. It was not just their own weakness that the British to quit India, or later Cyprus (whose EOKA gunmen, though damned as terrorists, were more like guerrilla fighters), or later still Kenya (where they faced a genuinely terrorist liberation movement). Weakness played its part, but so did a world view that said colonial empires had had their day. Much the same was true in South Africa. F.W. de Klerk, probably the last white president there, may not have been a more virtuous man than the architects of apartheid who preceded him. But he was and is a realist, who lived in different days and under different pressures.
In that case, a just cause plainly helped the terrorists. For Muslim countries the Palestinian cause was no less just. Western countries, guiltily aware of the horrors of Jewish history, disagreed, and it took 20 years of Israeli occupation and the intifada, the Palestinian uprising of 1987-90, to persuade them that the PLO too had a case. It is still not one that much impresses Americans; and though other westerners may have sympathy with Palestinian dreams of statehood, any movement that still seeks a quite different thing, the destruction of Israel, on top will--very rightly--find that its bombers face a western world united behind the Jewish state.
Like the rest of us--mostly
In all this, what is different about dealing with terrorism? The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is not very much.
Any government has its own interests, its own pressures, its concessions it can make and those it cannot. It fights its conventional wars with tanks and aircraft, its small-scale wars--partly terrorist, mostly not--with intelligence men and small arms. It cannot, usually, zap the terrorists' territory as it could that of a hostile state. But its psychology will be much the same in the two cases--and so will that of it terrorist or suicide bomber or gun-man or fighter or liberation hero is not different from other men (men, sic; rarely have women played any notable part, any more than they have in old-fashioned war).
With one notable exception: the nutters, whether with a cause or no evident cause at all. The American way-out redneck who thinks he has to plant a bomb, when he could vote for Pat Buchanan, is beyond any but a psychiatrist's reach. So too elitist solipsists convinced that murder was justified because they knew all the answers and it was society that was out of step. Among the almost causeless, Italy's far right may have sought instability, but for what? That was never clear. And no known concession could have led Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult to put aside its chemistry set.
Is it coincidence that three of these four groups seem to specialise in the true terrorism, the random murder of civilians for terror's sake. Perhaps it is not.