Foreign Affairs Journal: The Anatomy of Terrorism

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The Anatomy of Terrorism
By Ronald Spiers
Published in the Foreign Affairs Journal, September 2004

TERRORISM IS AN INSTRUMENT OR TACTIC - A WEAPON, NOT AN ENEMY. THUS, A "WAR" ON TERRORISM MAKES NO MORE SENSE THAN A "WAR" ON WAR.
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My former boss, Secretary of State George Shultz, was a pretty unhappy camper whenever anyone repeated the cliché that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," but the thought carries a lot of truth. I once asked him why the French underground, which resorted to assassinations and bombings during World War II, and which was looked on by the Nazis and the Vichy regime as "terrorists" - and by us as freedom fighters - didn't illustrate the validity of that characterization. He simply insisted that they were "not terrorists."
As that anecdote illustrates, for many people a terrorist is someone whose objectives you don't agree with - it is not a matter of the instruments they use to advance those objectives. Thus Gavrillo Princip, the Serbian student whose shot at Austria-Hungarian Crown Prince Ferdinand in Sarajevo sparked World War I, was a hero to Serbians, but a "terrorist" to the Austrians. We have many contemporary examples, as well: the Tamil Tigers who use violence against the Singhalese in Sri Lanka; the Palestinians who want relief from Israeli occupation; the Palestinians who want self-determination; the Chechens who want independence from Russia; the Basques; and the IRA. Which are they, terrorist or freedom fighters - or both?
To answer that thorny question, we first have to look at other questions. What do we mean by "terrorism"? Is it a new phenomenon, or does it have a history we need to understand? What motivates it? What instruments are best suited to combat it? ...cont'd

http://www.afsa.org/fsj/sept04/Spiers.pdf