Letter to the London Review of Books (LRB) Does Terrorism Work?
Does terrorism work?
Richard English’s Does Terrorism Work?, at least as Thomas Nagel describes it, doesn’t live up to the promise of its title (LRB, 8 September). English, Nagel tells us, proposes to analyse terrorist campaigns ‘as the work of rational agents employing violent means to pursue definite political ends’. To begin with, I have my doubts about the feasibility of analysing politics of any sort in terms of ‘rational agents’, particularly after the Republican National Convention. More to the point, English and Nagel fail to recognise that terrorism arises, as a rule, out of desperation. Circumstances felt to be unbearable are likely to have more to do with a terrorist organisation’s raison d’être than any ‘definite political ends’. ETA, to take one example, was founded in 1959, by which time the Franco regime had been in power for nearly twenty years. Hopes for change at the end of the Second World War had been dashed when Eisenhower embraced Franco for a historic photo. The dictatorship continued for another thirty years. The Spanish government’s response to ETA was predictably fierce, and arrests, kidnapping, torture and murder continued, under various democratic administrations, well into the 1990s. By this time, many people in the Basque country had friends or family who saw themselves as victims of the repression. Support for the organisation died hard.
This pattern – terrorism, leading to repression (including the use of illegal methods), leading to increased sympathy and support for the terrorist organisation in the affected population – has been repeated so often it seems logical to assume it forms a part of terrorist strategy. The United States, with the active co-operation of a number of European countries, responded to the attack on the World Trade Center with a campaign involving kidnapping, murder, secret prisons and the systematic use of torture, culminating in the illegal invasion of Iraq. No one has ever been prosecuted for these crimes, aside from a few soldiers who were stupid enough to photograph themselves abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib. If we suppose, as seems reasonable, that one of al-Qaida’s principal objectives was to expose modern Western democracies’ contempt for the rule of law, they can certainly be said to have been successful.
David Hall
Barcelona