Terrorists May Have Hit Home, but the Fear Fails to Take Hold

It was a day, a week and a month that probably changed America forever--a stunning and almost unbelievable string of blatant or suspected violence against the Atlanta Olympics, a TWA aircraft and American troops in Saudi Arabia.

Henceforth, the open and easy flow that characterizes the “American way of life” will almost certainly be cramped by the kind of heightened concern and tighter security that until recently typified other societies, but never the United States.

America is changed, certainly. But not cowed.

The Olympic Games are proceeding as scheduled. Even more people turned out Saturday than had Friday; in fact, the greatest damper to attendance was the rainy weather.

TWA Flight 800 continues to fly. Over the past 10 days, all but a small percentage of passengers booked to go overseas have carried on with their travel plans.

U.S. troops remain at their posts. Officials say the reasons cited by soldiers in Saudi Arabia for wanting to come home this summer have to do with the torturous desert temperatures and Saudi arrogance, not physical threats.

So in the end, do terrorists win?

President Clinton was correct when he said that the Atlanta pipe-bombing was “clearly directed at the spirit of our own democracy.” In that respect, terrorists temporarily make tangible gains; their deeds can be punishing on many fronts.

The costs of providing high-tech airline security and repositioning American troops in Saudi Arabia, for example, will each run into tens of millions of dollars. On the geostrategic chessboard of the Persian Gulf, terrorism forced a retreat to a safer position.

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Politically, the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and a host of other U.S. agencies--not to mention the inevitable series of congressional hearings--are almost certain to be preoccupied for months, if not years, with terrorism assessments and prevention.

Resources and manpower will be diverted to the perceived threat rather than being spent to further human progress or address other societal problems. The reaction will almost certainly be far disproportionate to the real dangers.

Psychologically, the impact is substantial. “Historically, the public will probably look back at this collection of individual events as a watershed after which there will be a growing preoccupation with terrorism,” says Jerrold Post, a psychiatrist and head of George Washington University’s political psychology program.

Indeed, while terrorism is the weapon of the weak, it has proved to be the weapon with the most impact in challenging the world’s dominant power at the end of the 20th century. The yellow ribbon--a mark of American vulnerability during the hostage ordeals of the 1970s and 1980s--has almost become as much a symbol of American nationalism as motherhood, apple pie and baseball.

Yet at several levels, official and unofficial, America is showing that it can adapt. And in the end, terrorists usually lose--as the record of the past quarter-century shows.

For every electrifying picture and breathless television commentary accompanying an act of terrorism, there is a less-noticed but more comforting counterpoint: U.S. warplanes take off hourly from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, to enforce Iraq’s southern “no-fly” zone and come back safely. Ordinary people stroll without incident through thousands of open American parks, fairgrounds and streets. Passenger planes take off from international airport terminals across the United States and reach their destinations unscathed.

Among such facilities is bustling John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, the city where just three years ago American naivete about the potential for domestic terrorism was shattered by 1,000-plus pounds of fertilizer and fuel oil packed in a Ryder rental truck and parked in the World Trade Center’s underground garage by Islamic extremists.

“What happened to tourism after the World Trade Center bombing? It didn’t drop. People came anyway,” observes Terry Anderson, who as a seven-year hostage in Beirut can claim to have paid the greatest personal price of any surviving terrorist victim.

“Most of the major disasters haven’t changed people’s ideas or determination to go on doing whatever they’re doing,” says Anderson, who now lives in New York.

Bill Baker, a former FBI and CIA official who oversaw U.S. counter-terrorism efforts at both agencies, compares public reaction to terrorist incidents to the impact of California earthquakes. “A few can’t take it and leave. But most stay,” says Baker, who lives outside Los Angeles.

“We all may give more thought to flying--what airline, what airport or where we go,” Baker adds. “But in the end, we’ll fly. I think most people are aware that if you cancel events or plans, then that’s when the terrorist wins.”

The United States is not the first nation to face the challenge of terrorism--foreign and domestic, from the left or the right--and to endure.

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Italy’s flamboyant but more fragile democracy survived some of the earliest and nastiest terrorism. The deadliest such act in post-World War II Europe was the 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station, which killed 85 people and injured hundreds, by the right-wing Armed Revolutionary Nuclei. Among the dozens of victims of left-wing terrorism in Italy was American Gen. James L. Dozier, who was kidnapped in 1981 and held by the Red Brigades for six weeks.

Today the Red Brigades have no more than 50 members, according to the State Department’s 1996 “Patterns of Global Terrorism.” And the Nuclei hasn’t been heard from for years; it is no longer even cited in the State Department list of dangerous groups.

As democracy has spread throughout Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa, some of the world’s most notorious terrorist cells of years past have begun to disintegrate or even disappear. Peru’s Shining Path has been decimated. Japan’s Red Army has fewer than 30 hard-core members. Germany’s Baader-Meinhof group has somewhere between 10 and 20.

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Many individuals who once worked to overthrow governments have emerged from the underground to run for, and in some cases obtain, office. Venezuela’s Teodoro Petkoff, a former Marxist rebel, is now minister of planning. Jose Antonio Navarro, a founder of Colombia’s M-19, ran for the presidency in 1994 and is now mayor of Pasto. The largest voting bloc in Lebanon’s parliament is, almost unbelievably, Hezbollah.

“Terrorism scares and kills and causes a lot of individual pain, but long term, it can’t change a society. In the end, the only change it can effect is the change we do to ourselves to protect ourselves,” says Anderson.

Clinton put it another way. “We cannot let terror win,” he said before departing for a scheduled weekend at Camp David, Md. “That is not the American way.”

But Americans have already shown they know that.