Sept 11 and the History of Terrorism

David C. Rapoport, Political Science, UCLA

Editor, Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence

September 11 is the most important and unprecedented day in the long bloody

history of terrorism. No other attack used passenger planes as bombs, produced such

staggering casualties figures, created such enormous universal outrage, and galvanized

such a wide international response, one which may reshape the character of the

international world. But even this act of terror should be studied in the context of the

history of terrorism, a history known to only a few specialists. That history demonstrates

how deeply implanted terrorism has become in modern culture during the last two

centuries, and suggests how and why its face changes.

Historical Features: Concept and Wave Pattern

Terrorism has a very long significant history in various religious traditions. But

the concept as distinguished from the phenomena is a recent development, a feature of

the French Revolution. When the term entered our language in 1795, terrorism was seen

as the indispensable tool to establish a democratic order. When Robespierre proclaimed

either “virtue or the terror”, he meant that “true” democratic dispositions required this

new instrument of government.

The practices of the Revolutionary Tribunals exemplified the purpose and

method. Ordinary courts assessed behavior of defendants, but the Revolutionary

Tribunals examined ‘hearts’ of suspects and found it necessary to scrap the ordinary rules

of evidence as impediments to accomplishing the new task. Conventional notions of guilt

1
and innocence became irrelevant. Justice was not the issue; the problem was how to

publicize a prisoner’s fate to serve as a didactic lesson by identifying appropriate and

inappropriate civic character traits.1

A century later Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will) the first terror rebel

movement emerged (1879), and its successors haunted Russia for nearly four decades

seeking a radical transformation of society. They understood terrorism as a temporary

necessity to “raise the consciousness of the masses”, and selected victims for symbolic

reasons, that is for the political and/or emotional effects the deaths would produce. Their

objectives were never achieved, but their influence endured and it generated a “culture of

terror” for successors to inherit and improve. The uniqueness of Narodnaya Volya

should be emphasized. It did have successful predecessors; the Sons of Liberty in the

American struggle for independence tarred and feathered loyalists forcing many to leave

the country, and the KKK ended the Reconstruction Period by forcing federal troops to

withdraw. But neither group gave others a strategy to ponder; they did their dirty work in

secret and kept their mouths shut afterwards.

The doctrine of Russian rebel terror involved extra-normal violence acts or acts

designed to violate conventions that regulate violence, namely rules of war which enable

one to distinguish between combatant and non-combatant. The Russians called

themselves terrorists rather than guerrillas, precisely because guerrilla targets were

military and theirs were not. A new form of publicity was necessary because

spontaneous mass uprisings had become impossible, and revolutionaries were known as

‘idle word-spillers’. Terror would command the masses’ attention, arouse latent political

1
1. But subsequent examples of state terror generally followed a different course, using secrecy
to destroy those deemed its enemies.

2
tensions, and provoke government to respond indiscriminately undermining in the

process its own credibility and legitimacy. Successful terror entailed learning how to

fight and how to die, and the most admirable death occurred as the result of a court trial

where one accepted responsibility and used the occasion to indict the regime. The

terrorist Stepniak wrote, “ is noble, terrible, irresistibly fascinating uniting the two

sublimities of human grandeur, the martyr and the hero.”

Since the 1880s four successive overlapping major waves of terror have washed

over the international world, each with its own special character, purposes, and tactics. 2

The first three lasted approximately a generation each;3 and the fourth, beginning in 1979

is still in process. Sometimes, organizations created in one wave survived when the wave

bringing it ebbed. The IRA, for example, began in the anti-colonial wave in the 20’s.

Major unexpected political turning points exposing new government

vulnerabilities precipitated each wave. Hope was excited, and hope is always an

indispensable lubricant of rebel activity, making the discontented active and the transfer

of legitimacy away from government possible.

Ironically, the first wave was stimulated by massive reforms introduced by Tsar.

Alexander II Hopes were aroused but could not be fulfilled quickly enough; and in the

wake of inevitable disappointment, systematic assassination campaigns against prominent

officials began, culminating in the death of Alexander II himself. Dynamite, a recent

invention, was the weapon of choice, and the bomb the terrorist threw distinguished him

from the ordinary criminal because it usually killed the terrorist too, a point more

effectively dramatized in a period that had just developed mass daily newspapers.
2
For an earlier and in some respects more detailed account of the four waves; see my “Terrorism”
Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict, (London: Academic Press, 1999).
3
Generation here means 40 years, the first two waves did last a generation, while the third consumed about
30 and the fourth now has spawned two decades and has not yet spent itself.

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 An Armenian movement developed and the Balkans exploded, as many (i.e.

Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, Young Bosnia, and the Serbian Black

Hand) found the boundaries of states recently torn out of the Ottoman Empire

unsatisfactory. In the West revolutionary Anarchists mounted assassination campaigns to

frustrate drives towards universal suffrage, a reform they thought would make existing

political systems invulnerable. But the first wave dried up largely when the Austrian

Archduke’s assassination precipitated World War I.

The second began in the 1920s and culminated in the 1960s. Its principal

stimulus oddly enough was a major war aim of the victorious allies in both World Wars,

national self-determination. The ambivalence of colonial powers about their own

legitimacy made them ideal targets for a politics of atrocity. A variety of new states, i.e.

Ireland, Israel, Cyprus, Yemen, Algeria, etc. emerged, and the wave receded largely as

colonial powers disappeared.

A new strategy and tactics emerged in the second wave. Different and more useful

targets were chosen. Martyrdom seemed less important and so prominent political

figures were not targets. Instead, the police, a government’s ‘eyes and ears’ were

decimated, and their military replacements were too clumsy to cope without producing

counter atrocities, which generated greater social support for the terrorists. If the process

of atrocities and counter-atrocities were well planned, it worked nearly always to favor

those perceived to be weak and without alternatives.

In cities the terrorists developed cellular structures almost impervious to police

penetration. Major energies went into guerrilla like (hit and run) actions against troops,

attacks that went beyond the rules of war however because weapons were concealed and

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the assailants had no identifying insignia.4 Some groups (i.e. Irgun and IRA) made

efforts, however, to give warnings to limit damage to civilians.

Imperial territories were populated by different and mutually hostile ethnic

elements. Terrorists came from one of those groups, and they struck civilians opposed to

an independence rival elements would dominate, i.e. Cypriot Turks, Algerian Berbers,

and European residents everywhere.

Partly because anti-colonial causes were more appealing to outsiders, definition

problems became vexing. The term terrorist had accumulated so many abusive

connotations that one identified as such had enormous political liabilities, and in this

wave rebels stopped calling themselves terrorists. Lehi (the “Stern Gang”) a Zionist

revisionist group was the last group to describe its activity as terrorist. Menachem

Begin’s Irgun concentrating on purpose rather than means described themselves as

“freedom fighters,” fighting government terror, a description that all subsequent groups

used. Governments returned the compliment, deeming every rebel using violence a

terrorist. The media corrupted language further, refusing often to use terms consistently

to avoid being seen as blatantly partisan. Some developed an extraordinary policy of

describing the same individuals in the same account, alternatively as terrorists, guerrillas,

and soldiers.5

4
Because the guerrilla does carry weapons openly and wears something that identifies him, he is entitled to
be treated as a soldier.
5
For a more detailed discussion of the definition problem, see my “Politics of Atrocity” in Terrorism:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives Eds. Y. Alexander and S. Finger (New York: 1977 John Jay Press) pp.46-
5

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 The Vietnam War precipitated the third wave, when the effectiveness of Vietcong

terror against the American Goliath armed with modern technology kindled hopes that

the Western heartland was vulnerable too. A revolutionary ethos emerged comparable to

that in the initial wave. Many like the American Weather Underground, German RAF,

Italian Red Brigades, and French Action Directe saw themselves as vanguards for the

masses of the Third World, a view the Soviets encouraged covertly.

Occasionally, a revolutionary ethos and separatist purposes were linked, i.e. the

Basque Nation and Liberty, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, the

Peasant Front for the Liberation of Corsica, and the IRA. But separatism always has a

larger potential constituency than revolution, and over time separatism dominated these

groups.

The PLO taking up the fight emerging after three Arab armies collapsed in the

1967 Six-Day War became the heroic model when Vietnam War ended. There were

other reasons for its central position. Its chief enemy, Israel, was an integral part of the

West, it got Soviet support and was able to provide facilities in Lebanon to train terrorists

from many countries.

The term “international terrorism” was used to describe the third wave for a

variety of reasons. PLO training facilities were available. The revolutionary ethos

created bonds between separate national groups, and targets chosen reflected

international dimensions. Some groups conducted more assaults abroad than they did in

indigenous territories; the PLO, for example, was more active in Europe than on the West

Bank, and sometimes more active in Europe than European groups themselves were! On

their own national soil, groups often struck targets with special international significance,

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especially Americans and their installations. Teams composed of different national

groups cooperated in attacks in foreign countries, i.e. the Munich Olympics massacre

1972, the kidnapping of OPEC Ministers Vienna, 1975, the hijackings to Uganda, 1976,

and Somalia. Finally, states (i.e. Libya, Iraq, and Syria) employed terrorists in other

countries as foreign policy instruments.

Airline hijacking was the wave’s most novel tactic; over a hundred occurred every

year during the 1970s. They had an international character for foreign landing fields

were more available than domestic ones. Hijacking also reflected an impulse for

spectacular acts; a theme expressed in the first wave but abandoned in the second for

more effective military-like strikes. Planes were taken to get hostages, and hostage crises

dominated the period. The most memorable was the 1979 kidnapping of the Italian Prime

Minister Moro who was then murdered when his government refused to negotiate his

release. The Sandinistas took Nicaragua’s Congress hostage (1978), an act so audacious

that it sparked a popular insurrection and brought the Somoza regime down a year later.

The Colombian M-19 tried but failed to duplicate the act by taking a foreign embassy

(1980) but to no avail. It struck again soon seizing the Colombian Supreme Court and an

enraged government killed over 100 people including 11 justices rather than yield. A

recent example occurred when a Peruvian Marxist group, Tupac Amaru held 72 hostages

in the Japanese Embassy for more than four months (1996-7) until a rescue operation

killed all the terrorists.

The third wave began ebbing in the 1980s, as revolutionary terrorists were

defeated in one country after another. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon (1982) eliminated

PLO facilities to train terrorist groups, and international counter-terrorist cooperation

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became more effective. Two related events provided the dramatic unexpected political

turning point, the necessary condition for a fourth wave, the revolution in Iran and the

Soviet defeat in Afghanistan effected partly by volunteers from large portions of the

Muslim world. Those events gave evidence that religion now provided more hope than

the prevailing revolutionary ethos did. When the Soviet world disintegrated (1991) partly

because of the Afghan defeat, new separatist movements based on religion appeared.

There were religious elements in earlier waves because religious and ethnic

identities overlap often. But the aim then was to create secular sovereign states, in

principle no different from those already in international world i.e., Ireland, Cyprus

Macedonia, Israel, Algeria etc. In the new wave, religious justification was the crucial

ingredient.

The Iranian Revolution revived ties with Shiites elsewhere, and Shiite terrorists

operated in Lebanon and suicide bombing, self-martyrdom, a striking new tactic that

drove out American and foreign troops who had entered the country after the 1982 Israeli

invasion. Inspired by the practices of the ancient Assassins a Shi offshoot, it reasserted in

a new way the martyrdom theme the first wave emphasized but the second neglected. 6

The success in Lebanon inspired the Tamils in Sri Lanka, a secular third wave group, to

use the tactic to revive their movement. Ironically, they used it more often than all

6
When she was made a prisoner, Vera Figner , a major figure in Narodnaya Volya wrote that her memory
would be immortalized by the revolutionary tradition, i.e. she would become a martyr. Memoirs of a
Revolutionist, (New York: 1927 International Publications) p. 95 For a discussion in self-martyrdom in the
ancient Islamic tradition, see my “Fear and Trembling: Terror in Three Religious Traditions.”
American Political Science Review (78:3) 1984 658-77.

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Islamic groups put together, the most spectacular example being the bombing that killed

Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi.

A new century began in 1979, according to the Muslim calendar, and the tradition

was that a redeemer would come with a new century, a tradition that regularly sparked

uprisings earlier. This time Sunnis stormed the Grand Mosque in Mecca in the first

minutes of the new century. Sunni terrorism appeared in many states with large Islamic

populations, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Morocco, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Sunni

groups competed with the PLO in strikes against Israel. Sunnis from all parts of the

Islamic world fought in Afghanistan, and then returned home with the will confidence,

and training to begin terrorist operations against weak home governments. Ironically, the

U.S. helped bring most outsiders to Afghanistan, including some involved in both World

Trade Center bombings.

Terrorists from other religious communities became active too. Sikhs sought a

religious state in the Punjab. Jewish terrorists attempted to blow up Islam’s most sacred

shrine in Jerusalem, waged an assassination campaign against Palestinian mayors,

murdered 29 worshippers in Abraham’s tomb (Hebron, 1994) and assassinated Israeli

Prime Minister Rabin (1995). In that year Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese religious group

released nerve gas on the Tokyo subway killing 12 injuring 3000, creating a world wide

trauma that a new threshold in terrorist experience had materialized. Soon many experts

thought various groups would use chemo-bio weapons, and that each separate attack

would produce casualties numbering tens of thousands.

Christian expressions, based on racial interpretations of the Bible, emerged in the

U.S. mostly in the amorphous Christian Identity movement. In true millenarian fashion,

9
whole families formed armed rural communes rejecting all state authority, waiting for the

Second Coming and its great racial war. So far the level of violence has been minimal,

although the Oklahoma City bombing (1995) is popularly associated with the movement.

Obviously, Islam produced the most active and potentially appealing religious

groups. It was important that the movements had the support of the three religious states

recently established in Islam Iran, Sudan (after a coup by Islamicist military officers) and

Afghanistan after the Taliban victory in 1996). It was also crucial that Islam had an

appealing ideal, one which had been realized in the past, namely a single state for all

Moslems to be governed by the sharia, Islamic law. Traditional cleavages between Shia

and Sunni did not disappear. But Sunni aspirations seemed most ambitious for the

contemporary scene, because large Sunni populations existed in every secular state of the

Moslem world. Various forms of Sunni resistance existed in each of these states, a

resistance that often bonded with other elements elsewhere. The aim of Bin Laden’s

movement is to achieve the grand ideal, first by eliminating the American presence near

Islam’s holiest shrines and ultimately making it impossible for Americans to support

secular states created along national lines, described as residues of colonial rule. His

movement contributed recruits, which often were seminal elements in the civil strife in

the most crucial states.

International Dimensions

While the third wave popularized the term international terrorism, every wave

contained at least three international ingredients: 1.) group commitments to international

revolution, 2) willingness of foreign governments and publics to help, and 3 the

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sympathies and capacities of diaspora populations. Clearly, the relationship of the three

ingredients varied in each wave and they did not always mix well.

Vera Figner, who organized the Narodnaya Volya’s “foreign policy”, utilized

each asset. She identified totally with an international revolutionary tradition, especially

socialists and Anarchists. Her agents, she claims, regained the emigrants hitherto “lost to

the revolutionary tradition.” And finally they cultivated liberals in the Western world. 7

When President Garfield was assassinated, for example, she expressed regret saying that

terror was not necessary in democratic states, a statement some radicals deemed a

betrayal. But the international climate was favorable enough for terrorists on the run to

find refuge in and sometimes use foreign territories to organize strikes against Russia.

The Combat Organization of the Social Revolutionaries, a successor to Figner’s group,

had its headquarters in Switzerland, used Finland (a sympathetic autonomous region of

Russia) to launch most strikes, got arms from an Armenian terrorist group, and was

offered funds by Japan laundered through American millionaires.

Anarchists moving easily back and forth across state borders to assassinate of

foreign leaders precipitated the first serious international effort to curb terrorism. In the

1890’s, the “golden age of assassination” monarchs, presidents, and Prime Ministers were

struck down with horrifying regularity. Governments everywhere felt a necessity to share

police information and establish better control over borders. In 1901 Theodore Roosevelt,

who succeeded the assassinated President McKinley, called for an international crusade

to eliminate the terror.

Anarchy is a crime against the whole human race, and all mankind
should band against the Anarchist. His crime should be made a crime

7
Vera Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, (New York: 1927 International Publications) p. 25.

11
 against the law of nations…. declared by treaties among all civilized
powers.8

But three years later when Germany and Russia called upon all concerned states

to sign an international protocol in St. Petersburg to deal with Anarchism, the U.S.

refused to go. It had three concerns; hostility to Germany, anxieties about involvement in

European politics, and most of all it had no federal police force and the protocol’s major

purpose was to share police information. Italy’s refused to sign too; but it had a different

and very revealing concern. If Anarchists everywhere were sent back to their countries of

origin, Italy’s domestic problems might become greater than its international ones! 9

First wave events clearly indicate that terrorism can exacerbate tensions between

states. Potentially, the most dangerous situation occurs when one is suspected of using

terrorists to further its own foreign policy ends, a suspicion common in Balkan intrigues.

The most dramatic example is the assassination triggering World War I; the extent of

foreign involvement was the issue.

The international ingredient in the second wave had a different shape. Terrorist

leaders acknowledged common international revolutionary bonds, but groups in separate

states did not cooperate and the heroes invoked in their literature were almost always

national ones. They seemed to understand that a search for an international brotherhood

would weaken abilities to utilize other international resources.

The UN inherited the League’s ultimate authority over the mandates governed by

colonial powers, territories that produced significant terrorist activity. As the UN grew

by admitting new states virtually all of which were former colonial territories, that body
8
Cited by Richard B. Jensen, “The United States, International Policing and the War Against Anarchist
Terrorism,” Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence 13:1 (Spring 2001) p.19
9. Ibid, p. 16
9

12
gave the anti-colonial sentiment more structure, focus and opportunities. The UN itself

regularly described anti-colonial terrorists as “freedom fighters”.10

Diaspora groups sometimes displayed abilities not seen in earlier waves. The

Israelis received funds, weapons, and volunteers from the Jewish diaspora, and the

American Jewish community significantly influenced U.S. policy. The Algerian FLN

got significant aid from the Arab world and neighboring Arab states offered sanctuaries

and did not prevent their lands from being used as staging grounds for attacks. The

Greek government sponsored the Cypriot uprising against the British. But as the revolt

grew more successful the more enraged Turkish Cypriots and Turkey became, and the

Cyprus problem is still unresolved nearly a half century later. The different Irish

experiences illustrate how crucial influences are shaped by foreign perceptions of

purpose and context. The first effort in the 20, seen as anti-colonial gained enormous

support from Irish Americans and U.S. governments support that culminated in an Irish

state. The supporting parties abandoned the IRA during very brief campaigns to gain

Northern Ireland in World War II and during the 50s during the Cold War. The 60s

outbreak was met more favorably but there was considerable anxiety about a significant

early Marxist dimension in the IRA; and not until the Cold War was over did the

American government show serious interest in the issue again, helping to initiate and

perhaps resolve the conflict.

The third wave, or international terrorism wave, was the shortest one, partly

because it was dependent on forces it could not control. The emphasis on the

revolutionary bond or the brotherhood of terrorists everywhere alienated potential

10
10. See John Dugard, “International Terrorism and the Just War” The Morality of Terrorism 2nd ed. D.
C. Rapoport and Y. Alexander, eds. (New York: 1989 Columbia Univ. Press) pp. 77-98.

13
domestic and liberal constituencies, particularly in the context of the Cold War.

Cooperating with kindred groups posed serious problems for the weaker ones, as the

German-Palestinian connection indicates. The Revolutionary Cells, partners of the

Palestine Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in hijacking efforts, tried to secure

help from the PFLP to get German prisoners released. But they discovered they had

become wholly “dependent on the will of Wadi Haddad and his group,” whose agenda

was very different than the German one was after all.11 A leader of another German small

group (2nd June) notes that the obsession with the Palestinian cause made it put a bomb

in a Jewish synagogue on the anniversary of Crystal Night, a significant Nazi attack on

the Jews. This “stupidity’ he says alienated potential German constituencies. 12

The PLO, a loose confederation of Palestinian groups, found that the price paid

for some international ties was high. Abu Iyad, founding member and intelligence chief,

writes in the 1970s that because the Palestinian cause was so important in the politics of

Arab states, some like Syria and Iraq captured organizations within the confederation to

serve their own state ends in effect complicating the enormous PLO divisions. He notes

that foreign involvement made it more difficult to settle for a more limited goal as the

Irgun and the EOKA, the Cypriot group, had done earlier.13 When the one PLO element

hijacked British and American planes to Jordan (1970) the first time non Israelis were

deliberately targeted, the Jordanians after much bloodshed forced the PLO to go

elsewhere. A PLO raid from Egypt precipitated the 1956 war and the PLO lost its

Egyptian home. A similar process and result occurred to bring Syria in the 1967 Six-Day

11
Hans J. Klein in Jean M. Bourguereau. German Guerrilla: Terror, Rebel Reaction, and Resistance
(Sanday, Orkney, U.K.: 1981 Cienfuegos Press) p. 31
12
Michael Baumann, Terror or Love (New York: 1977 Grove Press) p. 61
10. Abu Iyad with Eric Rouleau, My Home, My Land (New York: Times Book 1978) p.148
13

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War, and an assassination attempt of an Israeli diplomat in Britain sparked the 1982

invasion of Lebanon. Iraq used Shiite terrorist attacks against Iraqi officials to justify the

1980 war against Iran.

To eliminate such problems states began to sponsor their own terror groups, an

activity unknown in the second wave. But the new policy was risky too. During the

decade of the 80s Britain severed diplomatic relations with Libya and Syria for

sponsoring terrorism on British soil, and in the same period France broke with Iran when

Iran refused to let the French interrogate its embassy staff about assassinations of Iranian

émigrés. The limited value of state-sponsored terror in this wave is emphasized by Iraqi

restraint during the Gulf War, despite widespread predictions that Iraqi terrorists would

flood Europe. But if terror had in fact materialized, bringing Saddam Hussein to trial for

war crimes would have become a war aim. Avoiding that certainty is the most plausible

explanation for Hussein’s uncharacteristic restraint. Lebanon provided the most

successful use of state sponsorship suicide bombing at least in a strategic sense. The

attacks Iran and Syria facilitated compelled most multi-national forces to withdraw. But

local elements on their own terrain made the attacks, which may have inhibited the

targeted parties from striking the sponsoring state. Another one was that the confused

objectives of the multi-national forces lacked popular support in the states sending them.

States in this period began to cooperate formally in counter terror efforts. The

Americans with British aid bombed Libya (1986) to punish it for the terrorist attacks

sponsored, and the European Community imposed an arms embargo. Two years later

some evidence that Libya’s agents were involved in the Lockerbie crash, led to a

unanimous UN Security Council decision obliging Libya to extradite the suspects, and a

15
decade later Libya complied. In 1904 the St. Petersburg Conference sought to establish

formal mechanisms for international police cooperation. But it was not until the 1980s

that they were finally established through Interpol and TREVI

But there were always obstacles to cooperation even among closely allied states in

NATO. France refused to extradite PLO, Red Brigade, and ETA suspects to West

Germany, Italy, and Spain respectively. Italy spurned American requests to extradite the

Palestinian alleged to have organized the seizure of the Achille Lauro (1984). The U.S.

has refused extradition requests for IRA suspects. In 1988 Italy refused to extradite a

Kurd, because Turkey might execute him and Italian law forbids capital punishment.

Such events will not stop happening until the laws and interests of separate states are

identical, a virtually unimaginable condition.

Religion, the fourth wave’s distinctive characteristic, transcends the state bond, a

particularly important fact in Islam whether religious elements are especially active in a

vast Sunni population dispersed among so many states dominated by secular Muslims.

Obviously terrorist groups from different mainstream religious traditions do not

cooperate, and even traditional cleavages within a religion, i.e. Shia and Sunni, may be

intensified.

The third wave saw the first terrorist organization in history seeking to train and

coordinate other terrorist entities, an opportunity made possible because no effective

Lebanese government existed. When Israel expelled the PLO from Lebanon, states

hosting the PLO afterwards refused to provide facilities to continue the training, and to a

large extent, the PLO’s career as an effective terrorist organization was over. Ironically,

16
the PLO as the Oslo Accords demonstrated achieved more of its objectives when it

became a less dangerous terrorist adversary.

The fourth’s wave parallel for the PLO is al Qaeda, but the differences are

significant. A weak friendly Afghan government needs al Qaeda’s aid, one reason why

the terrorist training spaces are there. Geography (remoteness, mountains, and climate)

conveys enormous advantages in protecting the group. The PLO trained elements of pre-

existing group; al Qaeda trains individuals committed to its goal from various places in

the Sunni world, largely in the Middle East. The PLO had a loose divided form while al

Qaeda really does seem like a single unit.

Conclusion

My conclusion is brief and not optimistic. The September 11 attack has created a

resolve in America and elsewhere to end terror once and for all. But the history of terror

does not inspire confidence that this determination will be successful, and problems in

sustaining the international coalition formed seem clearly to mirror past efforts too.

The history of terrorism shows how deeply rooted in modern culture terrorism is.

Even if the fourth wave follows the path of its three predecessors soon, another inspiring

cause for hope is likely to emerge unexpectedly as it has too often in the past. That

history shows that organizations can be decimated and useful institutions like

ununiformed police forces can be created. It shows that terrorism can be made less

significant, but terrorists also regularly invent new ways to conduct activity. Previous

international efforts were difficult to sustain and the new coalition is running into similar

problems now. Members do not agree on how to apply the term, and the decision not to

use the term for groups in the Kashmir, Lebanon, and Israel demonstrate that the interests

17
of states simply do not sufficiently coincide, and that some will encourage groups others

abhor.

Even if the only task is destroying Al Queda, there are formidable problems. If

our own troops are required, the experiences of the second wave suggest military forces

may have great difficulties. In Cyprus, Jewish Palestine, Algeria, and Ireland for

example, the terrorists were never found and the long costly search was conducted over

familiar territory.

The PLO stayed above ground to train foreign terrorists. Perhaps they had to do

so, and maybe Al Queda must stay above too to continue similar operations. Forcing it

underground will be no great task, but are we willing let it stay under because the cost of

finding it is too great?

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