The Future of Terror

In the wake of the London bombing, John Mueller discusses how to manage

Tim Cavanaugh | July 7, 2005

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JM: Yeah, you can make that case. The people who do the accounting had a lot of trouble with this and decided to call it a war. The usual threshold is about 1,000 battle deaths. That would obviously pass in this case. That attack was an outlier; there haven't been any other terrorist attacks remotely that destructive, including today's. But yes, quantifying that is a messy thing. I'm inclined not to think of 9/11 as war, not because of the body count but because it has to be a large enough group and has to be sustained. And once a year doesn't count as sustained. I don't want to downplay the significance of 9/11; I'm just disinclined to call it a war. But I can see how you might.

Reason: What could the United States and the United Kingdom do now that would either accelerate or impede the trend of declining war you see in your book?

JM: They don't have to do anything. The trajectory is pretty good on that, and the developed world doesn't deserve all that much credit for having helped it along. The main problem is all these civil wars which have now really ended. But there's a lot of peace to be kept. Many countries are fairly stable right now, but because of the wars they've just come out of they're in pretty bad shape. Maybe the G8 could do something to be of assistance. I'm not very optimistic about that. The developed world in general and the United States in particular have been very slow in addressing that. Last year, a United Nations report referred to the peacekeeping paradox: You have situations where wars have ended, and you could actually keep the peace. You don't have to get into a warlike situation, but could just make the peace work. I watched to see who picked up that news item: The Jim Lehrer NewsHour did a segment on it and Business Week did a short piece, and that was it.

If we want to help, we should be working with peacekeeping efforts, and promoting stability in these countries, and of course, simply buying the materials that these countries are producing. All that would be more productive than kicking around after terrorism.

Reason: In your book, you find some fault with the belief that nuclear stalemate kept the world out of war in the post-World War II era. Is the inverse of that true as well—that is, maybe rogue WMDs and of lower-level attacks like this one are not as generally destabilizing as we think?

JM: Yeah, probably; at least we should consider that possibility. It's possible that a war between India and Pakistan is now less likely. Certainly in the case of Iran and North Korea, if they do get a weapon it's primarily to deter an attack upon them. I'm not gung ho about encouraging proliferation, but it can have that impact. In the book I don't argue that nuclear weapons can't make a difference, but that so far they don't seem to have made a difference. And in some cases they might have made a difference: If Kuwait had had nuclear weapons in 1990 it's quite possible that Iraq would not have invaded. And of course if Iraq had had weapons now, it's quite possible the United State would not have invaded—which is what the North Koreans and Iranians are thinking.

Reason: Are there any further civil society implications of an attack like today's, especially in the case of London, which is famously loaded with surveillance cameras that apparently didn't do much to prevent these attacks?

JM: They can't prevent them, but they may be helpful in trying to identify what happened and who's responsible. Even on a tragic day like this, the number of people who died is still pretty small compared to how many people are dying in automobile accidents. I don't want to downplay the tragedy, but you simply can't guarantee that that won't happen. You can't ensure the safety of every train, every bus, every taxicab, every moped, any more than you can guarantee you'll never be mugged walking down the street. If they're cost-effective, I'm in favor of measures that reduce the danger; but I'm wary of ones that are either counterproductive or more damaging than what's been inflicted by the terrorists.

Reason: Short of further hot-war reactions, what is the proper way to bring the war to the terrorists rather than always being on the defensive?

JM: Well we're always on the defensive with crime, right? Police try to catch criminals and deal with them, and we try to have some preventive measures, but unless the amount of destruction gets massively greater, it can be dealt with and absorbed. In the case of the Lockerbie bombing, we didn't retaliate against anybody; we tried to go after the people who did it, and apparently were successful. And the same thing with the bombing in Spain, which is more directly relevant; they simply went after the people who did it, and apparently got them. And that seems to have satisfied people. They're not happy about the tragedy, but the fact that you didn't bash anybody with cruise missiles doesn't seem to bother people.

Reason: But a crime-fighting approach to terrorism is an electoral loser in the United States. John Kerry got clobbered under this argument that after 9/11 he would have dispatched an army of lawyers rather than an army of soldiers. How do you make that approach politically palatable?

JM: Well you can try and make your rhetoric stronger than the other guy's. But after the USS Cole was bombed, the real effort was to figure out who did it. Same thing with Lockerbie. During the Reagan Administration there were a bunch of terrorist activities that they didn't do anything about except try to catch the people responsible. We haven't done anything militarily about the Bali bombing. And after the first World Trade Center attack the reaction was really a police reaction. And nobody's running around saying we should have done something else.

Reason: But they are. It's a very common analysis that 9/11 happened because the U.S.—going back to the Rushdie case or the Beirut bombing or the Iranian hostage crisis—did not take a stronger line. And bin Laden has various quotes about American cowardice that seem to support that analysis.

JM: But a reaction can be counterproductive. And one of the things terrorists want is an overreaction. You haven't seen that kind of reaction over the anthrax attacks. There's been no demand that we attack Dublin or bomb a factory in Mozambique or anything like that. All they're trying to do is catch the guy who did it, so far without success, and it doesn't seem that anybody's out marching in the streets over that.

In the case of Afghanistan there was a target, a place you could go. It's extremely unlikely we'll see many cases like that, including in the London case. What can we bomb? There's no target, so what you're left with is police work.