Terror and Peace: the "Root Cause" Fallacy

By Charles Krauthammer

The idea of "root causes" has great political attraction. Some years ago in the U.S., it dominated debate on policy toward El Salvador. It was argued that the Administration's hopes for a military solution were futile because the real causes of the insurrection were poverty, misery and hunger.

Well, yes. Revolutions do need misery to feed on. (There are exceptions. Occasionally there are revolutions of the comfortable, as in the 1960s in the U.S. and France. Such facsimiles, however, are invariably short-lived and harmless.) But these conditions, while obviously a necessary cause of revolution, are not sufficient. If they were, there would be revolution everywhere and always, since, aside from in a few countries in very modern times, poverty is the common condition of mankind.

But revolution is neither ubiquitous nor permanent. We need, therefore, something beyond poverty and misery to explain why there is revolt in some places and not others. This takes us out of the realm of what is usually meant by root causes, to culture, history, revolutionary leadership, foreign sponsorship and other presumably contingent causes.

That some causes and not others are accorded the honorific "root" has consequences. The first is to confer some special legitimacy on one set of grievances and thus on the revolutionary action that is taken in its name.

A second consequence emerges from a peculiar property of root causes: on close examination they turn out to be, as a matter of practice or policy, insoluble. There is no conceivable American policy that will solve the problem of poverty in Central America. (Not that poverty can never be ameliorated. It can. But not by a simple act of political will. In the West, for example, the conquest of mass poverty was the product of two centuries of painful industrialization.) The term root tends to be assigned to the most intractable of conditions. Except in the mind of the revolutionary, that is. The idea of root causes is therefore an invitation to surrender -- to the resistant reality of misery or to the revolutionary who alone offers the promise of instant redemption.

Thus the danger of the root cause idea. It is offered as an analytic tool to understand an unpleasant reality: revolutionary violence. But whether intended or not, the logic of the root cause argument suggests one of two attitudes toward the unpleasantness: 1) despair, because root causes cannot be changed, or 2) moral ambivalence, because legitimacy necessarily accrues to those who fight with root cause on their side. One must not find oneself "on the wrong side of history."

That does not mean that revolutionary violence can never be justified. It is hard to argue, for example, that South African blacks may not take up arms for their freedom. It means only that an appeal to root causes is not automatic justification. The Philippine Islands are replete with root causes as deep and difficult as any others in the world. Appeal to these causes, however, is not enough to justify either the ends (Communist) or the means (brutal and terroristic) of the New People's Army.

Three years ago, Senator Christopher Dodd delivered a nationally televised speech on behalf of the Democratic Party opposing proposed aid to the government of El Salvador. "If Central America were not racked with poverty . . . hunger . . . injustice," argued Dodd, "there would be no revolution." That is the premise. And the conclusion? "Unless those oppressive conditions change" -- Can they? Can the U.S. will them to? -- "the region will continue to seethe with revolution." The choice? Either "to move with the tide of history" or "stand against it."

Today that argument is hardly heard anymore in the Central American context. Something happened. The Salvadoran guerrillas are in retreat, and yet, mirabile dictu, root causes remain. The tides have changed, while poverty and misery endure. As for Nicaragua, those most habituated to the use of the root cause argument are contra opponents. They are hardly likely to invoke it to explain -- i.e., legitimize -- the contra cause.

One place where the root cause idea does survive is the Middle East. The issue is terrorism, and the argument is familiar: Isn't the best way to fight terror to go after the root causes? Counterterrorism, embargoes, threats and, finally, air raids treat only symptoms. Band-Aids on a wound. (The metaphors mix.) Why not attack the root causes? In the context of the Middle East, that means "solving the Palestinian problem." Accommodation between Israel and the Palestinians. The way out of the nightmare. Jews and Arabs living together in historic Palestine. An end to war. Peace as the cure for terror.

It is an honorable dream. And it is based on a clear logic: since much of the terrorism in the Middle East is committed either by Palestinians or by others acting in their name, why not solve the terrorism problem by solving their problem?

Unfortunately -- unfortunately for Palestinians, Israelis and assorted innocents who wander into the crossfire -- the logic fails. To understand why, one must start by asking, Who are the terrorists? The major sponsors of Middle East terror are Iran, Syria and Libya. And its major practitioners are Islamic fundamentalists, pro-Syrian nationalists and Palestinian extremists. These groups and states are distinguished not just by their choice of means but by the nature of their end. And their end is not peace with Israel. It is peace with no Israel.

The various terror groups have different versions of the end of days, but none include a Jewish state. The Achille Lauro hijackers, for example, issued a communique in Cyprus saying they had planned to land at "Ashdod harbor in occupied Palestine." Ashdod is not in the West Bank or Gaza. It is within pre-1967 Israel. If you consider Ashdod "occupied," every inch of Israel is occupied.

For such people, the only peaceful solution to the Middle East problem is a peace of the grave, a Zionist grave. Any settlement short of that will leave the terrorists unappeased. It will not solve the terrorists' problem. It thus does not solve the terrorism problem.

Indeed, it aggravates it. Any movement toward a negotiated peace that permits any part of Palestine to remain occupied is considered a threat. Negotiations are thus a spur, not a deterrent, to terror. Whenever a "peace scare" breaks out, terrorism increases, as King Hussein of Jordan is well aware. During the time he was trying to arrange for joint Jordanian- Palestinian negotiations with Israel, his diplomats in Ankara, Bucharest and Madrid were assassinated. The talks are off now, and Jordanians abroad are enjoying a rare respite from attack.

Last July Prime Minister Peres of Israel flew to Morocco for peace talks with King Hassan II, and before anyone knew the contents of the negotiations, Syria broke off diplomatic relations with Morocco and the P.L.O. declared it would oppose to the end any outcome. Some interested observers of this overture were candid and clear about the relationship between terrorism and peace, even a hint of peace: "Now," Royal Air Maroc stewards told a New York Times correspondent, "we will have to start worrying about hijackings and terrorist attacks." The fundamental fact of the Middle East today is that those who engage in terror do not want peace, and those who want peace are not engaged in terror. Those who make the slightest move to eliminate the vaunted root cause of terror -- i.e., those who genuinely seek a compromise solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem -- get shot. The latest victim is the mayor of Nablus, whose crime was to take over responsibility for fixing potholes. That was too much accommodation with the Zionist entity, as the rejectionists like to refer to Israel.

Issam Sartawi, the one P.L.O. leader who advocated exactly the kind of solution Americans like to dream about, a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel, was also murdered, shot dead in Portugal in 1983. Not too many Palestinians have since risen to take up his cause. It is truer to say that terrorism is a root cause of the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict than vice versa.

Syria has little sympathy for either half of the peace envisioned in the West. Syria not only rejects the existence of an Israeli state, it has little use for a Palestinian state. Syria and its favorite Lebanese terror group, the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, have a different vision. An Associated Press dispatch summarizes it nicely: "The secular SSNP seeks the merger of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, pre-Israel Palestine, Iraq, Kuwait and Cyprus" -- Cyprus! -- "into a Greater Syria."

Abu Nidal, a Palestinian who was the author of last December's Vienna and Rome airport massacres and may also be linked to the Karachi airport attack, concurs. "Syria for us is the mother country," he says. "For 2,000 years the Palestinians have not lived in an independent territory. Palestine of the future must be incorporated within Syrian territory."

Such people -- and these are the people going around spraying airliners and synagogues with bullets -- will not retire even if Israel makes the most extreme concession and gives up the West Bank in favor of a Palestinian state. What Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas and indeed every Palestinian guerrilla group demand as a right is not a Hebron vineyard but downtown Tel Aviv. Even a radical West Bank solution will leave all of today's major terror groups and their sponsoring states aggrieved and in the field.

And even if peace were attainable, terrorism would outlive peace for another reason: the Arab-Israeli dispute is not the sole -- the root -- cause of terror in the Middle East. There are at least two other fundamental causes of instability, war and murder. One is the anti-Western, antimodern, antisecularist movement that is sweeping the Islamic world and has already wholly captured Iran. As Daniel Moynihan has said of the United Nations, the anti-Zionist campaign there is but the leading edge of a larger anti-Western campaign. Israel, as the most vulnerable Western outpost, becomes the most convenient target. Israeli territory, however, turns out to be well guarded, and thus a dangerous and inconvenient target for terrorists to attack. So the imperialist demon is confronted at other, easier points: European planes, ships, discos -- wherever Westerners, preferably Americans, preferably civilians, are to be found.

Anti-Western terrorism -- from the seizure of American hostages in Tehran to the blowing up of Western embassies in Kuwait to the killing of American G.I.s in Germany -- is not primarily concerned with Israel. It is concerned with expelling an alien and corrupting West from the Islamic world. The Ayatullah has had much to say on the subject.

The other great fuel for Middle East terrorism is also anti-Western, but modern and secular, and is thus often at war with Islamic fundamentalism (sometimes quite literally, as in 1982 when President Assad of Syria killed an estimated 30,000 of his own people in putting down the Muslim Brotherhood revolt in Hama). Principally, however, this form of terrorism is at war with the West or, more precisely, with Western influence in the Middle East. This anti-Western strain is nationalist. The grievance is that after centuries of ascendancy, the Arab world has in modern times been subordinated by the West, first by naked colonialism, now by the more subtle devices of political, cultural and economic neocolonialism. This complaint echoes "anti- imperialist" sentiments felt in other parts of the Third World. And, as with anti-imperialism elsewhere, the issue is not Israel. Eradicate Israel and you have not eradicated the grievance.

Nor the terrorism. Grievances, after all, need not result in terror. Many groups have grievances. Occasionally, a few issue in terror. In the Middle East, however, the resort to terror is ubiquitous. Think only of the numberless atrocities of the Lebanese civil war, now twelve years old. Revolutionary violence in the Middle East, whether Palestinian, Islamic or pan-Arab in objective, routinely turns to terror as an extension of war by other means. First, because terrorism as an instrument suits those who are otherwise not equipped to challenge superior power in direct military confrontation. Terrorism thus becomes a kind of appropriate technology for the warfare of the weak. But terrorism must not only fit the struggle; it must fit the political culture. "To speak of solving the problems of terrorism is an illusion," argues the West German Middle East expert Helmut Hubel. "Over the past three centuries, terrorism has been regarded as a legitimate instrument of policy and is part of Middle Eastern political culture."

The proof of this proposition is that in the Middle East terror is not merely an instrument of the weak against the powerful Western enemy. It is an endemic feature of local politics. In fact, most of the terror practiced in the Middle East is not anti-Israel or even anti-West but intra-Arab and intra- Muslim. It is a way for Syria to check Jordan, for Iran to subvert Iraq (and vice versa), for Lebanese factions to deal with one another, and for Libya to tame its enemies everywhere.

To see the Palestinian issue as the all-encompassing root cause of terrorism is not just a misperception. It is a danger. To await the messianic resolution of the Palestinian issue (messianic because the terrorists reject any imaginable compromise) is to invite dangerous despair and passivity. It is to neglect those things that can be done to restrain terrorism by way of this- worldly means, such as political, economic and military pressure. The U.S. air raid on Libya was followed by months of relative quiet. With Karachi and Istanbul the respite is over. Perhaps a new wave of terror is about to begin. To expect that after 20 years of passivity, a single act of American retaliation should have put a permanent end to terrorism is absurd. Only the steady, unwavering application of all forms of pressure against terrorists and their more easily found sponsors will have any lasting effect.

There are men around who, in the name of some cause, take machine guns onto airplanes and into synagogues and kill as many as they can. One of the overriding obligations of the age is to use every available means to hunt down today's machine gunners and deter tomorrow's. The pursuit of peace is also an obligation. But it is an entirely different enterprise.