As the deadline for this issue of Sojourners approaches, the subject of terrorism is very much with us. The tragedy of the hijacked TWA flight 847 has just ended, and talk of U.S. retaliation is in the air. The TWA hijacking is only the most recent in a series of bombings, kidnappings, and other crimes aimed at U.S. citizens and institutions in the Middle East. And it is unlikely to be the last.
These incidents are all morally inexcusable and cruelly tragic for the individuals and families involved. The TWA hijacking was especially despicable both for the point-blank murder of an American sailor and for the ominous racism displayed in separating out passengers with "Jewish-sounding names." But such incidents also have implications for U.S. foreign policy that are being lost in the current fury over terrorism.
When President Reagan sent the Marines to Lebanon in 1983, he began the chain of events that led to the hijacking of TWA flight 847. In Lebanon the United States stepped blindly into the middle of a developing nation's serious internal conflicts. The post-colonial "confessional" system of government, which gave a permanent dominant role to the Maronite Christians, had been rendered obsolete and unjust by the growth of a Muslim majority. These internal conflicts had, for more than a decade, been aggravated by Lebanon's becoming, through no fault of its own, the battleground for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That battle culminated in the massive Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in June 1982.
When the United States entered Lebanon we were widely, and not inaccurately, perceived as the sponsor of the Israeli invasion coming to bail out our client when things got complicated after the Sabra-Shatila massacres. In addition, by giving the Marines the amorphous mission of "restoring the sovereignty of the Lebanese central government," Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz cast the political and military power of the United States wholly on the side of Lebanon's Maronite minority. This symbolic endorsement of the old order was ultimately made concrete when the battleship USS New Jersey turned its big guns on Lebanese Muslim and Druze areas around Beirut.
If that wasn't enough, the Marines entered Lebanon at the same time that Lebanon's Shiite Muslim community was coming into a new era of militancy. For some time now the Shiites have been the largest single religious group in Lebanon.
But of all the groups in Lebanon, the Shiites suffered the most from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and received the least under Lebanon's old distribution of power. With the breakdown of the old order and the inspiration of the Shiite Islamic revolution in Iran, the Shiites of Lebanon finally asserted themselves.
If religious radicals among the Lebanese Shiites needed any encouragement to turn their wrath against the United States, their Iranian mentors were happy to provide it. In addition to ideology, the Iranians have supplied their Lebanese comrades with training, equipment, and money. But U.S. theories blaming the rise of Shiite radicalism in Lebanon entirely on Iran don't hold water. The fundamentalists are only one faction of the Lebanese Shiite movement. Within that faction are numerous small groups that act independently, sometimes with the blessing of Iran, and sometimes without it.
SO NOW WE have the new wave of anti-American terrorism in the Middle East and the accompanying wave of discussion, debate, and documentaries on what to do about it. Secretary of State Shultz is already on record favoring both preemptive and retaliatory strikes against supposed terrorist targets, noting that tragic mistakes and considerable civilian casualties will be inevitable. Others favor prevention, by which they usually mean a bigger and more elaborate high-tech and high-caliber security apparatus for U.S. installations abroad and eventually at home.
The problem is that the terrorism debate is entirely over tactics. Even in media treatments, "terrorism" is viewed as a thing apart from history and politics, like the bubonic plague. It is considered the irrational outburst of those psychotic/fanatic, inscrutable, savage (and non-white) people out there against "civilization."
The unavoidable fact is that what we today call terrorism is simply a form of war. It is one of the uglier ones, but not necessarily the ugliest. In our post-holocaust, post-Hiroshima, post-Stalin world, where nations of every ideological stripe routinely slaughter civilians by the thousands (or threaten to), it is simple hypocrisy to set aside a separate moral category for the brutality practiced by smaller political groupings lacking conventional (or nuclear) military hardware. And it is self-serving hypocrisy for U.S. officials to single out such violence as the greatest evil of our time.
The TWA hijacking deserves the widespread condemnation it has received. There are no justifications or excuses for either murder or anti-Semitism. But there have been plenty of other horrendous events in Lebanon that deserve the same condemnation. Many of them were carried out with the connivance of the U.S. government and have gone largely unpublicized.
For instance, on March 18 of this year a car bomb exploded in West Beirut, demolishing a city block and killing at least 80 people. The target of the bombing was Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, a radical Shiite leader who escaped unharmed. The U.S. media duly reported the event as the worst bombing in Lebanon since the attack on the U.S. Marine barracks and went on to speculate on which Lebanese faction may have been responsible. Meanwhile the Shiites hung a huge banner across the bombed-out rubble reading, "Made in the U.S.A.," a gesture reported as simply more fanatic propaganda against The Great Satan.
A few weeks later the Washington Post reported that the deadly car bomb and the damage it wrought were indeed, for all practical purposes, made in the U.S.A. The Post reported that the bombing had been carried out by a "counter-terrorism" team recruited, funded, and trained by our CIA for the purpose of taking vengeance on Lebanese suspected of involvement in attacks on U.S. citizens and property.
The U.S. government claimed that our terrorists had carried out the attack without CIA permission. But, explicit permission or not, the bombers were clearly doing the job our government hired them to do. This particular piece of U.S. terrorism was the logical result of the Shultz doctrine of ruthless retaliatory and pre-emptive strikes against suspected terrorists, regardless of the cost in human life.
The Shiite hijackers and their allies also hold the United States responsible for Israeli actions in Lebanon. The most well-known of these took place during the three years of Israeli invasion and occupation, but they didn't begin then. Since the early 1970s, when the PLO began staging raids into Israel from southern Lebanon, Israel has conducted dozens of "retaliatory" air strikes and commando raids into Lebanon, often taking a horrible toll in Lebanese and Palestinian civilian lives. Many of those raids were on predominantly Shiite villages in southern Lebanon.
More recently, during the last months of Israeli occupation in south Lebanon, Operation Iron Fist was designed to quell local resistance to the Israeli presence. Iron Fist was the operation that swept up the 800 Lebanese men the flight 847 hijackers sought to free. This operation, and the fact that the Lebanese prisoners were removed to Israel in violation of international law, have only come to public attention in this country as a result of the hijacking.
The hijackers were plainly wrong to threaten and even kill innocent hostages. But they were justified in blaming the United States for the suffering Israel has inflicted on their people. Throughout the Israeli occupation the United States continued, and even increased, the enormous flow of military aid to Israel and extended our political protection against international condemnations of Israeli actions. In fact, as the former U.S. ambassador to Israel recently confirmed, the 1982 invasion itself was undertaken with the full knowledge and tacit approval of high U.S. government officials. As long as the United States is involved in such actions, our country will be a target for the vengeance of the desperate and those who manipulate their rage, in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Military force is ultimately powerless against the kidnappers, hijackers, and car-bombers of the world. It can only exacerbate their rage and strengthen their determination. Among other things, Israel's three-year stay in Lebanon is proof of that point. Ultimately the United States' only defense against terrorism is to change our international behavior. We have to stop acting in ways that give violent ideological zealots reason to consider us The Great Satan.
Danny Collum was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!