It Could Happen Here: Facing the New Terrorism

According to Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, last summer's embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania were not two more examples of old-fashioned terrorism. "What is new," she declared, "is the emergence of terrorist coalitions that do not answer fully to any government, that operate across national borders and have access to advanced technology." The bomb victims, she claimed, were caught up "in a new kind of confrontation that looms as a new century is about to begin . . . a clash between civilization itself and anarchy -- between the rule of law and no rules at all."

The secretary's words would have been accurate had they been uttered a century earlier, when a loose-knit transnational movement quite literally devoted to the promotion of anarchy wreaked havoc across the globe. From 1894 to 1901, anarchists managed to assassinate the president of France, the prime minister of Spain, the empress of Austria, the king of Italy, and the president of the United States. All this was accomplished without downloading weapons diagrams from the Internet; they relied instead on manuals such as Johann Most's widely distributed pamphlet, The Science of Revolutionary Warfare: A Little Handbook of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerin, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc. etc.

Some anarchists showed no scruples in inflicting large numbers of civilian casualties. As the bomber of a crowded Parisian cafe put it at his trial, "[Anarchists] do not spare bourgeois women and children, because the wives and children of those they love are not spared either." And authorities responded then as they do today; one British police officer wrote in 1898, "Murderous organizations have increased in size and scope; they are more daring, they are served by the more terrible weapons offered by modern science, and the world is nowadays threatened by new forces which . . . may someday wreak universal destruction."

Extralegal political violence by individuals and groups has occurred throughout history, hysterical media coverage of today's terrorism "crises" notwithstanding. Even religious terrorism is nothing new. "Thug," "zealot," and "assassin" are now generic terms of abuse, but each entered the language as the name of a religious terrorist movement centuries ago (emerging from Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam, respectively). And contrary to official statements about the grave danger terrorism poses, most American national security experts and bureaucracies have traditionally paid it scant attention. Terrorism kills fewer Americans than does lightning, they say in private -- which happens to be true -- and overreaction to it is therefore a sucker's move. Conventional state violence is a far more serious and pressing threat, they insist.

In the last few years, however, this dismissive attitude has come under fire. Some argue that terrorism merits a higher priority now because other threats, like great-power war, have grown so remote. Others say the danger is mounting in absolute as well as relative terms because of changes in terrorist motivations, methods, and organization. And almost everyone was scared by the 1995 nerve gas attack on a Tokyo subway by the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo. As terrorism expert Brian Jenkins has remarked, before that incident the debate over terrorists using weapons of mass destruction (WMD) pitted "disbelievers," who thought it would not happen because it had not, against "Murphy's Lawyers," who thought catastrophes were inevitable. The Aum Shinrikyo attack proved the first camp wrong but not the second camp right.

The appearance of several good new books on the subject is therefore a welcome surprise -- welcome because they help answer crucial questions and surprising because, with a few exceptions, the literature on terrorism thus far has not been especially distinguished. Bruce Hoffman's Inside Terrorism is a concise yet authoritative survey of trends in terrorism past and present. Philip Heymann's Terrorism and America gives us a sensible guide to how the U.S. government should respond. And three other volumes -- America's Achilles' Heel, by Richard Falkenrath, Robert Newman, and Bradley Thayer; The Ultimate Terrorists, by Jessica Stern; and Terrorism with Chemical and Biological Weapons, edited by Brad Roberts -- focus specifically on the WMD threat. All five books combine serious scholarship with practical wisdom, and the volumes by Hoffman and Falkenrath et al. are particularly comprehensive. What is most interesting, however, is that these independent efforts display a remarkable degree of consensus on the nature of contemporary challenges and what should be done about them.

BE AFRAID. BE MODERATELY AFRAID.

Discussion of the future threat, the authors agree, should begin with recognition that previous predictions of rampant catastrophic terrorism have proved grossly exaggerated. Although WMD have been available for decades, terrorists have generally not tried to acquire them, let alone use them against actual targets. Until recently, in fact, terrorists had not even begun to exploit the full destructive potential of conventional weapons. The reason is simple: most terrorism involves carefully calibrated acts of symbolic violence designed to advance a political, social, or bureaucratic agenda, and true mass murder could be counterproductive. It might stigmatize the cause in the eyes of important international or domestic audiences, provoke massive retaliation from the authorities, or spark conflict within the terrorist group itself. Garden-variety terrorists, as Jenkins once famously put it, want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.