NationalPost

Killing terrorists is an honourable thing to do

By George Jonas National Post

After 11 Israeli athletes were massacred at the 1972 Olympics in Munich by a Palestinian group called Black September, Israel dispatched several counterterrorist teams to find and kill the architects of the massacre. I traced the story of one such team in my 1984 book Vengeance.

Counterterrorism entails many things, from surveillance to infiltration. Most aren't particularly controversial. They're practised by the appropriate agencies of all democracies. However, over the years, Israel has also implemented certain extra-judicial counterterrorism policies. They ranged from international abduction (as in the 1960 case of Adolph Eichmann) or hostage-rescue missions (as in Entebbe in 1976) to the targeted assassination of terrorist leaders.

This last type of counterterrorist action was controversial enough for Israel not to admit it publicly for years. (Though Israel's role in the assassination of the Munich terrorists was common knowledge, the government didn't officially acknowledge it until the early 1990s.) The mood has changed since, and Israeli assassination of terrorist leaders -- for instance, by helicopter gunships -- has been a televised news event more than once.

Following Tuesday's devastating terrorist attack in New York and Washington, Western countries are taking a second look at counterterrorist procedures. They include measures previously disdained, such as targeted assassination. Although they're now on the table, these measures are hotly debated in Western intelligence communities. Some experts doubt not only their legality or morality, but their efficacy as well.

The debate isn't new. The utility of counterterrorism has always been questioned. The suggestion is that extrajudicial measures against terrorists, such as shooting them, solve nothing. They exacerbate rather than reduce tensions; they increase rather than decrease terrorist incidents.

Such objections are valid enough, as far as they go. The series of Israeli counterterrorist actions that followed the 1972 Munich massacre certainly didn't put an end to terrorist attacks. Far from it. Between August, 1980, and November, 1981, for instance, at least 20 acts of terrorism were recorded in Rome, Paris, Beirut, Nairobi, Cairo, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Vienna, Athens and Antwerp. These attacks, committed by such groups as Saiqua, Abu Nidal's Black June, George Habash's Popular Front and the then current "15 of May Movement for the Liberation of Palestine," killed 36 people and wounded hundreds.

If anything, Mideast terrorist groups have since proliferated. Experts estimate that today they include Hamas, Saiqa Ba'ath, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fatah Intifadah, the PNC (Palestinian National Council led by Khaled Fahoom), the old PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), the PDFLP (Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine), the PLF (Palestinian Liberation Front, led by Abu Abaas) and the Palestinian Struggle Front, which includes supporters of Yasser Arafat. These are groups that enjoy Syrian support, while the Arab Liberation Front is based in Iraq as well as in Syria. Nor is this a complete list; there are other groups supported directly or indirectly by other Mideast states, from Iran to Libya.

Yet, as it seemed to me 17 years ago, and still seems today, the utility of counterterrorism cannot be decided on the basis of what it solves or fails to solve. Shooting Osama bin Laden probably wouldn't eliminate terrorism. It would, though, eliminate Osama bin Laden.

Counterterrorism may not "solve" the terrorist dilemma, but a refusal to face reality solves it even less. Pretending that terrorism is merely "mindless" or "futile," or that it can be tamed with a mixture of concessions, goodwill and the application of the criminal justice system -- i.e., the very methods employed by democracies, other than Israel, in the past 30 years -- have equally failed. Far from eliminating terrorism, we see their results today in the ruins of lower Manhattan.

Neither resistance nor restraint -- to say nothing of appeasement -- guarantees a solution in the fight against terrorism. In fact, looking for a "solution" is the wrong test in such matters. The police, the courts or the jails are no "solution" to crime; the schools, the libraries, the universities are no "solution" to ignorance, but this doesn't mean that the justice system or the education system has no utility. There are battles that need to be fought every day, not necessarily to make the world a better place, but to prevent it from becoming worse.

In Vengeance, I took the view that in terms of moral justification one distinguishes between acts of counterterrorism and terrorism in the same way one distinguishes between acts of war and war crimes. There are standards in warfare; terrorism is on the wrong side of them; counterterrorism is not.

This isn't a matter of political sympathies. It's possible to say that the Palestinian cause is as honourable as the Israeli cause; it's not possible to say that terror is as honourable as resisting terror. Crashing a planeload of civilians into an office building is wrong in a way shooting a known terrorist is not.

Fighting terror can take many forms, including economic sanctions and state-to-state military action. Counterterrorism measures are neither the only nor the most important ones. But America is finally at war with terrorism. "Ultimately," I wrote in Vengeance, "both the morality and usefulness of resisting terror are contained in the uselessness and immorality of not resisting it."

-- Anonymous, September 14, 2001