USCFL - The Root Cause of Terrorism

What are the “root causes” of terrorism ? Based on history and logic, they are not what most people assume; poverty, revolutionary nationalism and oppression. Instead, there is a brutal simplicity to terrorism: Terrorism is often seen as an effective tactic. That leads to the conclusion that de-legitimizing terrorism, crushing terrorist organizations and, in general, making certain that terrorism invariably fails are the only ways to seriously address the “root causes” of terrorism. By the same token, careless assumptions about “root causes” which serve as justifications for terrorism, must themselves be seen as root causes of terrorism because they make terrorism seem less outrageous — which makes terrorism seem more rational, more likely to succeed and, most significantly, more likely to be utilized again and again.

In the wake of September 11th, there have been serial appeals for the United States to address the “root causes” of terrorism. These appeals seem particularly abundant in the mouths of critics of military responses to terrorism. When the United States crushed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and when the Israeli Defense Forces attacked terrorist strongholds in the West Bank, critics of American and Israeli policy argued either that there can be no long-term military solution to terrorism, or that military responses will be insufficient unless the root causes also are addressed.

By definition, addressing root causes is the only effective solution to any difficulty which in fact has clearly identifiable root causes: Uproot the cause and the problem vanishes. By contrast, leave the roots intact and the problem will bloom again. Such is the power of metaphor. But does this metaphor aptly describe the reality? It is worth remembering that the United States and its allies destroyed the terrorist states of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan without paying vast attention to the root causes of their terrorism. And such attention as was paid was often misdirected. For example, some analysts of Nazi terror ascribed it to the persistent political power of the “East Elbe Junkers” — the so-called “marriage of rye and iron.” While post-war Germany saw the destruction of Junker estates, few if any analysts ascribe the transition of Germany into a democratic society to the disappearance of the Junkers.

Similarly, analysts who before the war located the roots of regime violance in legitimate grievances, which they sought to appease, ran afoul of the problem that legitimate grievances may well coexist with illegitimate ones, from which they are in practical terms inseparable. In practice, the United States and its allies destroyed the root causes of Fascist, Nazi and Imperial Japanese terror in the most straightforward way: they ripped out – branch and root – the regimes willing to use such means. But people who urge us to “address the root causes of terror” never seem to favor this approach. Rather, they proceed with great confidence on the assumption that the root causes of terrorism fall into three categories: poverty, revolutionary nationalism, and in the case of some anti-American terrorism, the response to “oppression,” which usually means imagined American complicity in Israel’s alleged crimes, i.e. maintaining our alliance with Israel. For example, in the particular case of Palestinian terrorism, all three “root causes” are said to come into play: Israeli control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is always assumed to be the root cause of terrorism directed against both Israel and the United States.

Palestinian terror is assumed to be rooted in frustrated nationalism aggravated by relative immiseration. It is assumed to be no accident that polls showing strong and recent Palestinian support for terrorism parallel the collapse of the Oslo process and the deteriorating Palestinian economy. And terror directed against the United States is assumed to be rooted in American complicity in Israeli rule.

But this analysis does not hold up to scrutiny. In the case of Palestinian terrorism, Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak at various times offered to turn over virtually all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority, only to see their offers scorned. In fact, it is not implausible to suggest that it was the prospect of the creation of a Palestinian state which itself caused the terrorist wave called the second intifada—first, as part of a negotiating strategy (the tool of political leaders seeking an improved Israeli offer), and then, in the hands of rejectionists (those who explicitly scorn a two-state solution) who least of all want to see a Palestinian state living side-by-side with a viable Israel.

What about the economic analyses of terror’s roots? The invocation of Third World Poverty as the root cause of terrorism is very frequently heard nowadays, and indeed acted upon. American and European Union (EU) policy in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center has seen massive increases in economic aid to poor countries, and these increases are described as responses to the terror. It is thus interesting to note that scholarly research has a hard time establishing much of a fit between poverty and terror.

A new paper by Alan Krueger,a Princeton economist, and Jitka Maleckova of Charles University in Prague, includes a statistical analysis of 129 Lebanese Hezbollah terrorists killed by the Israelis. These men tended to be richer and better educated than were average Lebanese. As Sebastian Mallaby has noted in a column in the Washington Post, such findings are in line with past studies of terrorism. Two thirds of 350 terrorists identified in newspapers between 1966 and 1976 had been to college. A 1980 study of Islamist extremists jailed in Egypt found most to be educated and upwardly mobile. And scholar Daniel Pipes has recently demonstrated that Islamic militants are drawn mainly from the region’s middle classes. So based on the data, the only conclusion one can draw is that while many people in the world are poor, few of the poor are terrorists, and relatively few terrorists are poor. In other words, while convictions about economic injustice can fuel terrorism, poverty itself has no such effect. And it is not economic hopelessness that fuels terror, but hope of a very specific and irrational variety, hope that terror will significantly improve the situation. (Irrationality may in some sense be a root cause of terrorism, but it is a not a cause that can be effectively addressed by government policy.)

Does frustrated nationalism make terrorists? Only in some cases. Kurdish nationalists are profoundly frustrated, and in many cases desperately poor, but of the three major Kurdish nationalist movements, only one, the PKK, was addicted to terrorist methods. It is fair to say that the Kurds have been rather more brutally oppressed than have the Palestinians, but they generally decline to murder other people’s children in response. The Tibetans are a repressed nation— one repressed with astonishing violence and cruelty and faced with the possibility of cultural annihilation. Yet there have been almost no Tibetan terrorists. Croats submerged in Yugoslavia were more likely to favor a terrorist strategy than were Slovenes submerged in the same multi-national state. Serbs submerged in the Habsburg Empire were much more likely to adopt a terrorist strategy than were Poles or Czechs, who almost invariably disdained such methods. Irishmen submerged within the British state were vastly more likely to adopt a terrorist strategy than were Scots or Welshmen. Basques adopted terrorist methods; Catalans generally disdained them.

In short, repressed nationalism is neither a sufficient nor even a necessary condition for terrorist tactics: Looking only at recent American history, a handful of anti-abortion and anti-war activists were more likely to turn to terror than were almost any separatist Black or other nationalists, other than a few Puerto Rican nationalists, who were indeed willing to adopt terrorist tactics. Groups with no nationalist motives, inhabiting some of the richer countries in the world—Germany, Italy and Japan—very memorably embraced terror in the 1970s. So, clearly, the nature of the grievance does not make the terrorists.

Similarly, it is often said that terror has its roots in the poverty of resources that could be used in combat. For example, it is sometimes argued that the absence of Palestinian armored vehicles and fighter-bombers produce Palestinian terrorism. But this is absurd, since most repressed nationalities, along with other revolutionary movements, were and are similarly poor in military resources, yet have disdained the deliberate targeting of civilians as a favored strategy.

A variety of non-terrorist methods have been employed in preference to terror, methods ranging from civil disobedience to coup d’etat to guerrilla warfare restricted to military targets. In fact, history reveals that terror is never a forced choice.

And comparisons of current terrorist groups to the European resistance movements of the Second World War are historically illiterate since few if any of the Resistance movements employed a terrorist strategy against German civilians.

For one thing, few such movements had ready access to such targets, but even had they possessed such access, it is difficult to imagine a number of the Partisan movements for example, the Danes, Dutch, French or Italians—employing such means. (Bomber Harris embraced such an approach, but most European partisans, whether professors or peasants shunned them.) And while it is difficult to credit Communist movements with moral scruples about terror against civilians -- after all, state terror was the method of rule for Communist political cultures once they obtained state power— in practice, most European Communist movements long condemned terrorist tactics as a road to power. (Indeed, one of V.I. Lenin’s most famous quotes – “We shall take a different path” – referred to his rejection of anarchist terrorism in favor of mass mobilization and “scientific socialism.”)

What about the “response to oppression” hypothesis? This theory assumes that in the case of Islamic terror against the United States, a root cause is American complicity in violence done to the Islamic world; if we cease to so offend, we shall cease to be hated. The first difficulty with this theory is it neglects the fact that in recent years American lives and/or treasure have been sacrificed to defend Muslim communities in Kuwait, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo and Somalia. The second difficulty with this alleged root cause is that Islamic rage at complicity in killing Muslims is hit or miss. The Soviet Union’s very direct Muslim-killing operations in Afghanistan—where the dead probably exceeded a million—seem to have aroused less anti-Russian terror than has our supplying the Israelis with helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft to use in self defense against Arab nations that have declared themselves in a perpetual state of war with Israel, as well as against West Bank- and Gaza-based terrorists.

Indeed, the Israelis’ total of Arab dead — in all the Israeli-Arab wars and in response to anti-Israeli terrorism is down several orders of magnitude from the Russians’ Afghan score. When you think about it a bit, that seems curious, and is pretty rough on the theory that “response to oppression” and American complicity with Israeli violence is the root cause we should really be worrying about. Leave aside Stalin’s murders of, say, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and other Muslims, which approached a million, and look only at the recent killing of Chechens which aroused far less anti-Russian terrorism than does our “complicity” in much less bloody Israeli operations.

And it is not just the Russians who are, relatively speaking, off the hook. Chinese torment of Muslim Uighurs does not arouse a sustained terrorist response, and while Hindu suppression of Muslim Kashmiris enrages Pakistanis, it does not seem to feature too prominently in the politics of other Islamic countries. In other words, “oppressing” Muslims does not invariably arouse general fury and a terrorist response unless an American or an Israeli is the offender. Further reflection only deepens this puzzlement. From the moment of the massacres at Shatila and Sabra, Ariel Sharon’s derelictions, which permitted Maronite Lebanese to mass-murder Palestinians, have been accounted far more vile than the direct actions of the mass murderers themselves. Indeed, 20 years on, one is hard-pressed to find reference to Sharon that does not mention this crime. Yet the nearly contemporaneous destruction of a city in Syria — when dictator Hafez al Assad shelled Hama, killing 20,000 of his fellow Syrians remains comparatively obscure, and arouses no terrorist reprisals. In parallel, Saddam Hussein’s employment of nerve gas against Muslim Kurds does not seem to linger in the memory of Al Qaeda. Jordanian and Kuwaiti killings of Palestinians have proved very much less memorable than have Israeli killings, and terrorists generally leave Jordan and Kuwait alone. American attacks against Iraqis, carried out to safeguard Saudis, are apparently resented by the Saudi beneficiaries themselves.

All this suggests that the argument being advanced to attend to terrorism’s root causes by mending our ways and thus becoming less hated is, in fact, bad advice. The hatred seems to some degree independent of our alleged crimes, which suggests the possibility that our terrorist enemies cannot be appeased. If actions are a cause of terror against America, it is striking that the same sorts of actions, performed by others, do not arouse a systematic terrorist response. This suggests that even the most-pilloried American actions cannot be the root cause of terror directed at the United States. Logically, America must be hated, and struck at, for deeper reasons. The root cause of the hatred is very probably things we cannot or will not change—our wealth, which is imagined to be the mere product of successful predation, our maddening decadence and sexual egalitarianism, our status as the incarnation of a seductive and infuriating modernity.

So what, if anything, can be said about “the root causes of terror”, and what, if anything, can be learned as a result of that exercise? Two things stand out: People adopt terrorist methods when they think them morally acceptable and politically effective. And there is a link between these two conditions. If terror arouses sufficient disgust and condemnation, its political effectiveness wanes, for the disgust alienates otherwise sympathetic observers. The current diminishment of international tolerance for Pakistani-backed terror in Kashmir, along with the Indian government’s apparent decision to risk war to put a stop to it, may well kill off that phenomenon (although we must attend to the possible involvement of al-Qaeda terrorists, who do not seek a change of status for the Muslims of Kashmir so much as they seek to stir a conflict between “infidel” India and what they view as a Pakistani government that is too cordial toward “infidel” America.) Similarly, effective repression does not only disrupt terrorists: It can discredit them.

The Israeli government’s recent raids into the West Bank seem to have persuaded significant numbers of Palestinians, perhaps along with some Saudi and Egyptian officials, that terror is a disastrous mistake not a crime, but a blunder. but if it seems to bring victory no closer while provoking harsh reprisals, terror may become less attractive. In response to this calculus, it is not impossible that support for Palestinian terror by those who genuinely seek a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza will diminish. Terrorism by those who are indifferent about the creation of such a Palestinian state but who seek the destruction of the Jewish state will be more difficult to root out. Similarly, it is likely that continuing Syrian and Iranian support for Palestinian terror will protract it—which means that a failure to make Syria and Iran pay a significant price for their backing of terror is to let one root cause of terror bloom and flourish. If support for terror seems to further Syrian or Iranian goals, whether ideological or territorial, then terror is a rational strategy for those regime, until the reprisals are extended to the regimes themselves, and not restricted to their proxies. In this sense, there is a brutal simplicity to one root cause of terrorism: Terrorism is seen to work, which makes some political actors embrace it. Terror is thought to have driven the French from Algeria, indeed to have won “national liberation struggles” around the world, to have driven first the Americans and finally the Israelis from Lebanon.

Many Palestinians, and their supporters, are convinced that terror will drive the Israelis from the West Bank—and some, perhaps many, think that it will eventually drive the Israelis out of the Middle East altogether. If this conviction that terror works is one significant root cause, then making sure that terror does not succeed in achieving its aims is the only way to address such a root cause. To counter this requires that the United States and the international community make it clear that the use of terrorism will de-legitimize even the most legitimate causes. Indeed, we should consider helping smash any cause which zealously and persistently embraces terrorist methods.

In the final analysis, effusive expressions of sympathy for the injuries which allegedly drive groups to terrorism, and careless assumptions about “root causes” which serve as a measure of apology for terrorism, must themselves be seen as among the most significant root causes of terrorism, for they almost inevitably serve to make terror seem less outrageous—and this makes it more rational because the probability of its political success increases.

When the EU rushes to pay the bills of a terror-embracing Palestinian Authority, when our media refuse to call terrorists by that name, and euphemize them as “militants” or “fighters” or even “activists,” when human rights organizations condemn the measures taken against terror with far more enthusiasm and energy than they condemn terror itself, some of the root causes of terror are on display.

While we still may not know as much as we need to about the root causes of terrorism, careless rhetoric about those root causes is surely part of the problem.

Frederic Smoler is a professor of history at Sarah Lawrence College, a Contributing Editor at American Heritage Magazine, and a Senior Fellow of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

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Article:	The Root Cause of Terrorism - Dispelling the Myths
Author:	Frederic Smoler
Date:	June 2002