"Pulling Lessons from the Ash and Rubble"

Dallas Morning News-Viewpoints, 9/14/01

Lloyd Dumas (links to online Media Guide)

Last Tuesday, terrorists finally succeeded in doing what they had tried and failed to do before--bring down the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. The same man who was convicted of masterminding the 1993 Trade Center bombing was also convicted of a failed 1995 plot to hijack and destroy a dozen American airliners in the same day. This time, the terrorists managed to knit pieces of both these plots together, with devastating effect. To put the magnitude of this tragedy into sharp relief, State Department data show that there were more than 14,000 international terrorist incidents worldwide from 1968-2000. In all those incidents combined, over more than three decades, a total of fewer than 10,000 people died. It will be a major miracle if the death toll from that one terrible Tuesday does not approach or exceed that number. We have paid an awful price.

What lessons are we to learn? For one, like it or not, the fact is that all the billions of dollars we have poured into high tech weaponry--B-2 bombers, nuclear missile submarines and F-22's--did not and cannot prevent or defend us against a devastating terrorist attack. At the very least, we must pull our heads out of the Cold War and face the changed character of the real threats to our physical security. National Missile Defense too has very little to offer us. No "rogue state" that wishes to cause us terrible pain will launch one or two long-range missiles against us. Long-range missiles are too expensive, too complex, and in the hands of unsophisticated states, too likely to fail. They are also far too easy to trace to their point of launch. We saw last Tuesday how vulnerable we are to much simpler, cheaper and more effective means of attack. And how much more difficult it is to determine who is responsible.

Our own technology has made us more vulnerable. The primary weapons used to cause such horrifying damage in Tuesday's attacks were our own high tech jumbo jets, loaded with fuel. Had the terrorists decided to crash one of those jets into the containment of a nuclear power plant, there is a very good chance we would now have an American Chernobyl on our hands. The only way to effectively fight terrorism is with a combination of improved intelligence, greater international cooperation and a far better understanding of the character of terrorist groups. We have perhaps become too reliant for information on advanced electronic technologies to intercept messages and break through encryption schemes.

It may be time to pay more attention to low-tech, on-the-ground, means of information gathering, such as using people to infiltrate groups that we have reason to believe are engaged in terrorist activity. All terrorist groups use the same reprehensible tactics--killing and injuring innocent people to capture the attention of the public, and spread fear, shock and alarm. That is what makes them terrorists. But not all terrorist groups are equally likely to commit acts of mass murder on the scale we have just experienced.

For example, groups with well-defined, rational and limited political goals, goals such as political independence for their people, are likely to limit the amount of violence they commit. If they overdo it, they will undercut any chance they have of winning enough public support to achieve their objectives. Groups with vague ideological goals, driven by motives that are not rational--such as ancient traditional hatreds and violence-prone doomsday religion--are much more dangerous. For them, revenge for past injury or the desire to hasten Armageddon, make violence on a massive scale not only thinkable but even attractive. Such groups require very close scrutiny.

In all this, there are two things we must always keep in mind. Lashing out blindly with our military might, because we are angry and afraid, risks killing more innocent people and accomplishing nothing. And allowing any significant compromise of our civil liberties because of our fear and need for security, will undermine everything this country stands for, and hand the terrorists of the world a greater victory than they could ever dream of achieving on their own.

Lloyd J. Dumas is professor of political economy at the University of Texas at Dallas, and author of Lethal Arrogance: Human Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999). He is also an analyst with the Foreign Policy in Focus project.

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