News accounts describe the anthrax envelopes being sent through Washington as “devastating.” The New York Times says they represent “one of the gravest acts of terrorism since Pearl Harbor.” And the Congressional Quarterly says anthrax in an envelope from Florida “threatens the stability of our democratic system.”
But these apocalyptic accounts are a bit heavy-handed.
Indeed, to be truly accurate, the word “terrorism” requires a bit of clarification. Terrorists don’t want to hurt anyone physically. They simply want to destabilize the government through an attack.
So when we say terrorists want to kill us or destroy us, the country shouldn’t be shocked or shocked to realize that such a claim would be leveled against us, and that our enemies would point out our moral weaknesses, our actions of pride and vanity and our complacency — our crimes.
Before we start imagining what happened at New York’s World Trade Center to our heads, however, we should step back and realize that terrorists are not perfectly rational actors, the brilliant minds who must have access to specific atomic bombs and messages encoded with code.
Rather, terrorists can be understood as amoral people who plot to harm us, to do us harm, because they believe they have a mission and a purpose, and that killing us is in their best interest.
The German soldier Adolph Eichmann went to the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem in the 1930s to warn that the Jews of Europe would find safety in America. He came back empty-handed.
Alan Goldsmith, a Zionist from Toronto, helped arrange the then-impossible for a member of the Jewish underground in Toronto: to meet Adolf Eichmann, the man who would become the architect of the Holocaust.
Goldsmith’s niece, Alma Goldsmith, traveled to Los Angeles in the 1970s with her aunt and brother-in-law and a posse of other Jewish terrorists to discuss plans for an international Jewish uprising against Arab armies. “We thought our time had come,” said Alma Goldsmith, “and that if we got into the right atmosphere, these terrorists could kill millions of Arabs.”
So, a terrorist group can as easily be motivated by an out-of-place piece of luggage at the airport as by the slightest whisper of a government conspiracy.
A terrorist planning a biochemical attack that kills hundreds of people, like the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, will have researched the U.S. government and discovered that we are not a country that makes errors, that we quickly analyze and correct their mistakes.
He or she also will have heard stories about Niger, Iraq and Mexico. The group that decides to strike at the World Trade Center will want to hit their target once, in this moment.
Terrorists see the United States as ripe for destruction. And, in an era when we are trying to right Washington’s balance sheet, they feel emboldened by our naïveté — and might lash out at the most vulnerable object of our life-and-death decisions.
Their homeland is not Libya, not North Korea. Our goal is to restore our international standing and to present ourselves as a country capable of government by law. Their best means of doing this is to unite the people of the United States in a fight of courage against those who seek to kill us.
Terrorists are not going to say “we want to make you feel uncomfortable” — which would be a nonsense, and at odds with the premise of a terrorist attack. Terrorists want to intimidate, to disrupt your life, to send you running from your seats.
So, to avoid being vulnerable to being terrorized ourselves, we need to remind ourselves that a terrorist attack at the World Trade Center is not necessarily the end of civilization. In fact, it probably isn’t.
Terrorism might be the only source of publicity we have and that we can lose. Why should a terrorist organization want to put on a terror campaign? We have only limited means for publicity and limited budget to communicate. So even when terrorists stop attacking us, we might as well devote our energies toward stopping them.
T.R. Reid is a political writer based in Washington.