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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us July 15, 2005 Commentary Terrorism has been, will be around awhile London’s 7/7 bombings and Hurricane Dennis both hit on the same week — and they had more in common than we realized. Robert Asghar They may both be examples of waves of calamity that we can do a certain amount to prepare for. After that, we must ride them out as best we can. David Rapoport, founding editor of the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence and emeritus professor of political science at UCLA, is one of the few observing the current war on terror in broad terms, identifying international terror as a phenomenon that began around 125 years ago. It has consisted of four distinct waves: anarchists of the Eastern European variety, anti-colonialists, the New Left and now a religious wave. Each wave lasts roughly 40 years and dissipates when the zeal and hope driving the revolutionary generation fizzles. “This (current religious) wave should be over by the third decade of this century,” Rapoport told me the day after the London bombings. Take a deep breath, though. “We might then see a new wave” from a different source, he added. “There is something in our culture that produces terrorism. It comes and goes and comes and goes.” We have been engaged in our second war on terror (the first one, Rapoport notes, was launched by Teddy Roosevelt after anarchists assassinated William McKinley). This time around, we have overreacted in terms of airports and Iraqis — and underreacted in terms of more mundane prevention measures. We have gone to great economic and social expense to contour ourselves to terrorism and to define ourselves in relation to it. That could be exactly what al-Qaida and its ilk have wanted. Are such thugs driven by a schedule to wreak maximum damage on the West? Not likely. “It’s a mistake to think terrorists want to destroy as much as they can,” Rapoport told me. “You can become a victim of your own description.” For a terrorist, he said, “it’s not how many people you kill, but the message you want to send.” There is a practical downside to our American rhetoric about terrorists as evil forces who can be exterminated without creating a Hydra effect. “Terrorists may be evil, but they are very intelligent politically,” he said. “The aim of a strike is to create a counter-reaction.” They specifically mean to goad an overreaction. “It’s the politics of atrocity,” he said, as overreactions by governments increase underground or popular support for the terrorists. Just as terrorism expert Richard Dekmejian predicted recently that the next major incident was more likely to happen in Europe than the United States, Rapoport said that “Europe is in a much more difficult situation: There is an enormous diaspora population that has not been assimilated and is hostile” to Western culture. He observed that Muslims are more integrated into American society than European society, making them less likely to align with al-Qaida-style causes. Given Rapoport’s wave theory of global terrorism, maybe John Kerry’s terror-management approach wasn’t as irresponsible as some contended. Many torched him for campaign trail comments such as these last fall: “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives but they’re a nuisance. ... As a former law enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling.” Never mind that Kerry was using language strikingly similar to what former Bush Sr. aide Brent Scowcroft used two years earlier. Partisans took Kerry’s use of “nuisance” as an excuse to clobber him as a wimp. Yet you can live in a dangerous world by obsessing about every conceivable threat, or you can take reasonable precautions and get on with it. As an old Hindu saying goes, you can prevent foot injuries by paving the entire world with leather — or you can just put on a good pair of shoes. Kerry seemed to get closer to that ideal than most American politicians. So did George Bush, in a refreshingly sober moment last year, when he conceded that terror cannot completely be eradicated. It was ironic and unfortunate that Kerry’s team tried to use that candor against Bush. Everybody talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it. We can prepare and sometimes pre-empt the hurricane forces of terrorism, but we need to move beyond lofty rhetoric to a more realistic, less draining way of preserving our society’s character and welfare. 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