Ever since the Palestinians developed and promulgated the use of televised terror as a tool with which to advance their strategicinterests (which then and now included the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel) terrorism has had a particular dialectic. The terrorists stage a murder spectacular, it is leveraged by the Western press such that it gains strategic advantages for the Islamists and the West's defensive forces are mobilized and restructured so as to minimize the chances of success for future similar attacks. The Terrorists must then find new ways to stage their theatrical specials, and the cycle of terrorism recurs. There are a number of important points that should be kept in mind when considering the impact of terrorism.
First, as Daniel Pipes points out, though with a very different emphasis, terrorism that does not offer an exponential increase on investment, quickly loses its effectiveness:
Victims caught in terrorist atrocities perpetrated for Islam typically experience fear, torture, horror, and murder, with sirens screaming, snipers positioning, and carnage in the streets. That was the case recently in Bombay (now called Mumbai), where some 195 people were murdered and 300 injured. But for the real target of Islamist terror, the world at large, the experience has become numbed, with apologetics and justification muting repulsion and shock.
If terrorism ranks among the cruelest and most inhumane forms of warfare, excruciating in its small-bore viciousness and intentional pain, Islamist terrorism has also become well-rehearsed political theater. Actors fulfill their scripted roles, then shuffle, soon forgotten, off the stage.
Indeed, as one reflects on the most publicized episodes of Islamist terror against Westerners since 9/11 – the attack on Australians in Bali, on Spaniards in Madrid, on Russians in Beslan, on Britons in London – a twofold pattern emerges: Muslim exultation and Western denial. The same tragedy replays itself, with only names changed.
Daniel Pipes, et al, correctly note that due to a combination of Media inanity and Western timidity, the resolve to attack the fundamentals of Islamic terror has been waning for quite some time (from a fairly low level to begin with.) But it should be noted that Islamic terrorism's increasing difficulty in shocking and horrifying (which translates into less fodder for the MSM) creates an important dilemma for the terrorists.
Terrorism only work because it is theater.
If the world successfully prevents ever-escalating terror attacks from succeeding, horror and outrage will inevitably be replaced by ennui and disinterest. A few Jews here and there being murdered or a few Hindus and the world's press yawns and moves on. This separates the strategic dimension from the tactical aspects of terror. A typical terror attack that "only" kills 25 Iraqis or a couple of hundred Hindus may not even make it to page one of the New York Times or the top stories on the nightly newscasts. If a terror attack does not make the papers, it has failed, no matter how many innocents have been murdered.
This leads to the second important aspect of terror, from the point of view of those who support the terrorists and use terror to advance their strategic interests:
Terrorists must continually find ways to increase the lethality of their attacks.
Western societies will treat "minor" terrorism as criminal activity. Recall the typical response of the authorities to each and every attack by a Muslim on non-Muslims in the United States in the last several years. Almost as soon as the attacks take place there is an FBI or police department spokesman authoritatively telling the MSM that the attack was not terrorism. This was the approach to the LAX shootings, the beltway snipers, the Seattle Jewish Center killings, the recent vehicular Sudden Jihad Syndrome, etc; the attackers are typically labeled as disturbed loners or criminals, never terrorists, (let alone Islamic terrorists, even when they self identify as such) though what they are doing is certainly attempting to terrorize.
If the murder count is not high enough or the tactics involved not novel enough, the MSM does not consider it terrorism; worse, from thepoint of view of the Islamists, if the MSM does not cover a story as terror, it has no strategic impact.
States (and non-state actors who are the equivalent of states) that depend on terror as a fundamental part of their strategic armamentarium (and sometimes their primary mode of operation) such as Iran, Syria, Hamastan, Hezbollahstan, and states that rely on or support terrorism in an only slightly more covert manner (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia) are slowly being disarmed by the failure of the terrorists to escalate sufficiently.
Once terrorism no longer works as a strategic weapon, its wielders are left with conventional military weaponry, which in practice means accepting a severe disadvantage, or finding the equivalent of the Colt-45, the great "equalizer"; in strategic terms, that means obtaining a nuclear capability.
In addition, the failed cultures of the Middle East remain tribal in organization, which means they are zero-sum cultures. They need to extort or extract wealth from others since they are poorly arranged to create wealth. For the Shia terror supporters (Iran)either they gain strategic hegemony in their neighborhood or risk their ideology failing completely. For the Sunni terror supporters (al Qaeda, the Taliban) gaining and using WMD is an existential imperative; failure to escalate their attacks threatens their ideology. In such a setting nuclear weapons have a high likelihood, once obtained, of being eventually used.
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