Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
A security expert says it's time for the U.S. to declare war on those who are waging war on America.
Sep 11, 2001 | While America reels from the coordinated series of terrorist attacks on Tuesday, many are asking themselves who could commit such acts and why. Salon spoke with Michele Zanini, a graduate fellow at the RAND Corporation and a contributor to the book "Countering the New Terrorism" and the forthcoming "Networks and Netwars," to get some insight on the possible motivations of the still unidentified terrorists.
How are Tuesday's attacks on the U.S. an example of what you and the other contributors to "Countering the New Terrorism" consider a new paradigm?
The basic difference is that the traditional terrorist groups -- for example the Palestinian liberation groups of the '60s, '70s and '80s -- had a way of thinking that characterized their acts. It was that violence was the means to political ends and therefore they had a stake in keeping it within limits. It was an instrument. They had a sense of the need for it to be proportional and to be moderate in exercising it. And of course they wanted to take credit. The point was to persuade someone to do something that you want them to do or to stop doing something you don't want them to do.
You're saying that the old style of terrorists used violence to communicate.
Yes. Their violence was there to hurt people but also to draw attention to their cause. It's more of a symbol. They were showing people how serious they were and that they were willing to make people suffer for it. They understood that going beyond certain boundaries would be counterproductive. It was a means to an end.
How would you characterize the new paradigm?
It's one in which people think they're fighting a war, and it's a war between the strong and the weak. The weaker side is rebelling and it understands that there's no way to defeat the stronger side head on. So it exploits the weaknesses of the stronger side. They do it through terror. They don't want to play on the standard military playing field because they know they'll get their butts kicked. So they resort to terrorism and guerrilla tactics. And they see what they do as strategic. Osama bin Laden sees himself as engaged in a long war with the U.S. that's a sequence of battles and campaigns. The strategic goal is to inflict as much damage as possible.
So although Americans compare this week's attack to Pearl Harbor, and say "This means war," if bin Laden is in fact the person behind it, then he's thinking "We were already at war, and I just scored a major victory."
Bin Laden actually issued a declaration of war against the U.S. in the mid-1990s. For his organization, the larger aim is to liberate the holy sites. Their problem is the U.S. military occupation of the countries of the greater Middle East. They want the Middle East to be free of unbelievers, among other things. And they probably also have an opposition to U.S. hegemony worldwide. They've declared war, and up to this point, they've targeted government assets and infrastructure: U.S. embassies and the destroyer USS Cole. That's U.S. government property, which is what an army would target.
But didn't they bomb the World Trade Center in 1993?
That's not clear. The person involved in running that was an amateur. He was under no direct guidance, and it was very incompetent. He could have blown the towers up if he had placed the van with the explosives in a different way. It would have worked. He had other plans as well, to bomb in Lincoln Tunnel and several other things. What's interesting is that he had a plan to plant bombs in different airlines and have them go off at the same time. He was different, though, more of amateur.
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