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October
22, 2002 1:35
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bout a year
ago I was a guest on the Chris Matthews program, à propos a book
I had written on the Nuremberg trials and the international court, and
the first question was: What did I have to say about Gary Condit? He is
the congressman who did or did not kill the intern (somebody did). I answered
limply that I had nothing to volunteer about Mr. Condit. A year later,
staying up late to see a program on the Berlin Wall, I found that it was
preempted — by the sniper. For several days the sniper has omnivorously
swallowed the news, frustrating commentators who feel the need to say
something, much as Condit frustrated them. Slate's Today's
Papers summarized the quandary: "The WP's Howard Kurtz notices
some of the smarter questions TV anchors have been asking on-air 'experts'
about the sniper: 'Will this person strike again?' queried Fox's Alan
Colmes. 'Is this the type of person that would be taken alive?' probed
NBC's Matt Lauer. The best question came, of course, from CNN's Larry
King: 'Would he be inclined to watch this program?'"
The canvas enlarges, and we are almost every day advised of a fresh act of terrorism. "Sporadic Strikes," Time's essay begins, listing 1) the abduction and execution of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in January, 2) the church bombing in Islamabad in March, 3) the synagogue explosion in Tunisia in April, 4) the bus bombing in Karachi in May, 5) the car bombing in Karachi in June, and 6) the car bomb in Kabul in September. "...Then a Bloody Month," Time goes on, listing seven episodes in October beginning with the karaoke-bar bombing on Mindanao Island in the Philippines.
The insight is that these strikes are not acts instigated by a central al-Qaeda authority. Rather, they are, so to speak, free enterprise acts, in the spirit of al-Qaeda. There is a temper loose in the world that is assuaged by killing people, and by striking terror.
In 1942, Herbert Agar, the author and columnist for the Louisville Courier Journal, wrote in his book A Time for Greatness, about what he labeled, "the anarchic passion to smash." He was writing at the time about the phenomenon of Nazi behavior in Europe, its apparently unmotivated disposition to kill and destroy irrespective of any military gain.
Such is the unregulated passion of what we can for convenience refer to as al-Qaeda operations. It would be enormously easier to cope with the phenomenon if there were an orderly Hitler and his high command to target. Bin Laden was perceived, no doubt correctly, to be the high priest of the movement, but it is unlikely that orders went from him, assuming he is alive, or from a surviving deputy, to attack U.S. Marines at an island training facility in Kuwait on October 8. The anarchic passion to smash is certainly self-generated. Where concerted technology is required, as in the bombing in Bali, which had to be planned by men of destructive learning, one can assume that there was the strength and organization of a collectivity, as in the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiah movement.
But the killings can't all reasonably be ascribed to organizational arrangements. There are people out there everywhere, the sniper hypothetically one of them, who derive satisfaction from killing. The historical narrative shakes us loose from the original analysis. September 11 was taken to inaugurate a war against the United States. We are of course the center of non-Muslim power, and the conspicuous patron of Israel. But recent targets include Filipinos, Australians, French, and all the countries whose citizens thought to bask in Bali.
The problem is therefore more formidable than as viewed in the days of Osama bin Laden and his cadre of terrorists. We will need to rely hugely on intelligence, the kind that seeks out the killers and their designs, but also the other kind, that speaks to the anarchic passion to smash.