TERROR : HAS ITS OWN ITINERARY

The hijacking of a Kuwaiti airliner, the assassination of a Palestine Liberation Organization official in Tunis, the bombing of a USO club in Naples and a recent wave of killings in Northern Ireland all suggest that terrorism has become a substitute for war in the twilight years of the 20th Century. Taken one at a time these spasms of violence seem random and pointless, but set in context each reveals the unmistakable pattern of cool deliberation--a continuation of policy, in Karl von Clausewitz’s classic definition of war, by other means.

Terror is as old as warfare, but “terrorism” as we have come to know it on the nightly news seems brutally different--violence for its own sake, expressions of murderous anger without hope of result. Where is the “policy” in the grisly photo opportunity of bodies dumped on the Tarmac in Cyprus? The hijackers of the Kuwaiti airliner, a Boeing 747 on a flight from Bangkok, Thailand, to Kuwait when it was seized April 5, had a clear-enough goal--the release of 17 comrades-in-arms who have been jailed in Kuwait since 1984 for bombing the U.S. and French embassies there the previous year. A similar effort failed three years ago when 39 Americans were held hostage aboard a TWA airliner for 17 days. One of the Americans was brutally murdered in 1985, his face so battered he had to be identified by dental records. One of his killers was apparently among the hijackers on the Kuwaiti airliner, a man identified by intelligence officials as a member of the Lebanese Hezbollah, or Party of God, group. But even a “successful” hijacking, like a “successful” bombing, would seem to lead nowhere--just one more page of horror in the fat record of the last 20 years.

Americans suffered their own small taste of terrorism in the early 1970s--truly random attacks mainly protesting the wind-down phase of the Vietnam War. But it didn’t last long and Americans have been infrequent victims since, while full-scale terror campaigns swept Northern Ireland, West Germany, Italy, Latin America and, above all, the Middle East. In every place, terror has been enormous trouble--death or injury for the few, fear for the many, steady growth in the power of the security organs of the state--but in no place has terror been effective. Ireland is still divided, West Germany and Italy are still capitalist bourgeois societies despite the efforts of the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Brigades, and the Middle East is still locked in a four-sided anarchic struggle between Arab “moderates” and Islamic fundamentalists, Israel and the Palestinians.

Failure seems to be the terrorists’ lot. Perhaps the most “successful” of all modern terror campaigns, in terms of violence alone, was the brutal war waged by a secret French army organization against Algerians in an attempt to overturn the Evian Agreements that ended 150 years of French rule in North Africa. Hundreds of bombings and machine gun attacks in broad daylight killed thousands of Algerians--innocent bystanders all--without postponing Algerian independence by a day.

French plastique has been superseded in Lebanon by a leap in terrorist technology--the invention of “car bombs,” vehicles packed with high explosives. The bang is not only big, but sometimes shaped --in effect pointed in a single direction in order to maximize the effect. The truck that destroyed the U.S. Marines’ barracks in Lebanon was packed with explosives shaped to direct the blast upward, through the multistory structure. But even that notable “success,” which killed the truck’s driver along with 241 Americans and persuaded President Reagan to withdraw the remainder without delay, left the mixture as before. Marines or no Marines, Lebanon was racked by a war of all against all.

What keeps the terrorists going? One answer, often overlooked, is money. If someone is willing to pay for terror, someone will be willing to organize and carry it out. The price of domestic peace in the Persian Gulf states, which are largely run by Palestinian white-collar workers, has been billions of dollars of government support for Palestinian “liberation”--which means Palestinian guerrilla groups, which means terror. To this extent the war against drugs is a good deal like the war against terrorism; neither can hope to succeed by military or police action without pinching off the supply of money. But while money can nourish and sustain terrorist political movements, it’s not enough to get them off the ground in the first place.

Terror finds its breeding ground where politics is no use, where the odds are insuperable and where military gestures are the defiant response to military weakness. At the heart of every terrorist campaign is an impossible dream--for the revolutionary transformation of society (when the majority is content with the status quo), for the expulsion of Britain from Northern Ireland (when Britain won’t go), for black liberation in South Africa (when the whites have all the guns), for an independent Palestinian state (when Israel won’t surrender the territory).

Terrorists can’t win but refuse to give up. Terrorists are like lawyers with guilty clients, who fall back in desperation on the law’s delay. The witnesses might die, the police might lose the evidence. What’s to be gained from going to trial? In the same spirit, terrorists drag out the struggle--if Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher won’t get out of Northern Ireland, maybe her successor will. It wouldn’t be the first time “never” turned into “maybe.” Intransigence is the last resort of those who are beaten and don’t know it. All they know is that so long as the struggle continues, it can never be lost.

Looked at in this light, state-sponsored terrorism begins to look a good deal like its first cousin in the private sector. It, too, has despaired of politics, faces insuperable odds, can only make military gestures in pursuit of ends beyond military means. And it, too, has an impossible dream--to crush the IRA once and for all in “shoot-to-kill” raids or to break up the PLO by raiding its sanctuaries and killing its leaders. No state-sponsored terror is really equal to the magnitude of the task: The IRA’s passion for reunification of Ireland is a climate of opinion, not a military target. Thus counterterrorism, like terrorism itself, is essentially a tactic of delay, a way of sustaining a struggle in the hope that something better will come along.

The killing of PLO leader Khalil Wazir, also known as Abu Jihad (“father of the holy war”), may be described as a classic instance of state-sponsored terror. Much has been made of Wazir’s role as the PLO leader in closest touch with Palestinian groups organizing riots in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but Wazir’s death can hardly be expected to end the angry frustration of Palestinians. Quite the contrary; the initial result was a renewed outbreak of rioting in the occupied territories--one dozen Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army.

Is a state foolish, then, to have carried out a provocative assassination that promised no hope of decisive result? Very likely not. The problem posed by West Bank unrest is its essentially political character, a sign that the Palestinians may finally be moving from futile military gestures--terror, which Israel can easily counter with terror--to organized political resistance. Wazir’s assassination is probably best understood as an attempt to push the struggle back to familiar ground--the war of terror which Israel has shown it can sustain indefinitely.

Terrorism, then, is not simple anger--an attempt by the weak to hurt the strong--but policy pursued by other means. It is war trying to happen. The outcome can never be predicted with ease; delay offers too many opportunities for the surprises of history. As President Reagan learned in Lebanon, there is scant profit in picking a fight with terrorism. The best advice, for the lucky who can, is to get out of the way.