April 1993
American Purpose
Issue 4, Volume 7

Publication Date: April 1, 1993
Posted: Thursday, April 4, 1993

This issue includes 'After the Twin Towers Attack'; 'Understanding Terrorism'; 'Counterterrorism: Four Levantine Strategies'; and 'Counterterrorism: A Policy Outline'.


In This Issue :

After the Twin Towers Attack
Terrorism and America
Those who think that Americans are permitted a certain indifference to passions and politics beyond the water's edge might have been shaken out of their insouciance had they been driving up the New Jersey Turnpike on the night of February 26. For there, in the familiar illuminated skyline of lower Manhattan, one saw an eerie, Olympian darkness where the twin towers of the World Trade Center should have been. But this particular blackout was not the result of a natural disaster or mechanical malfunction. No, this looked very much like the deliberate act of an enemy. Something like war—proxy war, perhaps— seemed to have been declared. [More]

Understanding Terrorism
Eleven Mistakes
In his revised 1987 study The Age of Terrorism, Walter Laqueur of the Center for Strategic and International Studies identified eleven misconceptions about terrorism whose ubiquity in the press and among government officials helps explain some of our present confusion on the subject. Pondering Laqueur's Dirty Almost-Dozen is a good way to start thinking about the problem of terrorism today. [More]

Counterterrorism
Four Levantine Strategies
While terrorism has been a major problem in Latin America and a serious problem in western Europe, analysts of terrorism and counterterrorism strategists have tended to focus their attention on the Middle East. This is a somewhat distorting prism through which to view our own problems. For, since the collapse of radical fringe groups like the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and the Symbionese Liberation Army, there has been virtually no domestic terrorism in the United States. Nor is this country in a protracted struggle for national survival, in which aggressive neighbors use terrorism as one component in an overall strategy of annihilation.  [More]

Counterterrorism
A Policy Outline
International law and international conventions are of little use in confronting and confounding terrorism today. International law is primarily of interest to lawyers and to insurance companies; international anti-terrorist conventions provide little leverage in a situation in which an Egypt cannot even get counterterrorist cooperation from its Islamic brethren in other countries. No, what counts is national policy and its effective implementation—sometimes, to be sure, in active collaboration with friends and allies.  [More]