Avoiding the downfall into terrorists' trap

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The initial response of the U.S. government to the immensely destructive terrorist attacks in New York and Washington has been remarkably responsible. No rush to judgment, as in the hasty and mistaken attribution of the Oklahoma City bomb to "Middle Eastern" terrorists; just an assurance that when they identify who committed these crimes, they and those who harbor them will be punished severely. But what if a week passes, and they still haven't identified them?

It's not likely that the perpetrators left no clues: the sheer scale of the operation must have left some evidence of who they were. For example, it's clear that no commercial airline pilot would fly his aircraft, laden with passengers, into a building full of people. Even the threat of death has no effect when the consequence of obeying the person who threatens you is also your death, plus the deaths of those whose lives you are responsible for.

So the terrorists had their own pilots at the controls of those aircraft when they struck the Pentagon and the twin towers of the World Trade Center -- and to train four people willing to commit suicide up to the point where they could fly commercial airliners cannot have occurred in some isolated terrorist camp.

Granted, they may not have been able to take off and land, but they could at least keep the planes in the air and steer them into the buildings, which means they must have had access at least to simulators, if not actual aircraft.

In the long run, therefore, there will almost certainly be clues pointing in the direction of those who planned the attacks. But there is absolutely no guarantee that this evidence will come to light in a week, and that is a big problem for the U.S. government. What happens if a week passes, and they still don't have enough evidence to carry out retaliation on a scale that satisfies the understandable anger of the American public?

You can win a couple of days while the media crucify those responsible for airport security, and they will richly deserve their fate. One successful hijacking you might forgive -- even the best system breaks down occasionally if human beings are running it -- but four hijackings within the same hour, in three different airports?

The government can probably win another couple of days while the media go after the "failures" in the intelligence services that gave Washington no advance warning of these attacks. That will be less justifiable, for the intelligence game almost never deals in certainties. It deals with hints that may be true, buried amidst a deluge of other bits of information that look equally plausible but are actually false or irrelevant. Once you know what has happened, you can go back into the data and see the bits that pointed in the right direction, but hindsight is always 20-20. Foresight is a lot harder.

Nevertheless, there will be another media lynching for the intelligence services, and that will also win the Bush administration a couple of days. But no more. If it hasn't got hard evidence of who planned and carried out the attacks by next week-end, say, the pressure to act on whatever indications it does have, however soft, will become well nigh irresistible. Bush practically has to bomb somebody by next Monday.

And the harshest truth is this: that's probably what the terrorists want.

One of the stock phrases in situations like this is "mindless terrorism", but of course it's not mindless at all. The people who showed such determination and organizational skill in planning these attacks clearly had some specific goal in mind, and that was almost certainly the goal of goading the U.S. government into some ill-considered response that would hurt its own interests.

Nobody yet knows who the terrorists are, but if the Bush administration does have to act on inadequate information, the odds are very high that its chosen target will be some group in the Arab, or at least the Muslim world. That is where most of its leading suspects live. And whether the terrorists are themselves Muslim or not, that is where a massive U.S. attack will do the most harm to American's own long-term interests.

You don't think the people who planned this extremely complex operation could have such subtle motives? Of course they can. They aren't lunatics. They are chess players, long-range planners, people whose strategies need to taken as seriously as their tactics.