ABSTRACT

An authoritarian regime willing to use all means at its disposal rarely has to suffer terrorist campaigns, at least not for very long. The fate of Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood during the early 1980s at the hands of the al-Asad dictatorship in Damascus is illustrative.1 As soon as the Muslim Brotherhood posed a serious challenge to the regime, the al-Asad government made membership in the Brotherhood a capital offense and thousands of members and suspected members (along with their friends, relatives and neighbors) were slaughtered in the city of Hama. Democratic governments cannot behave in this way without abandoning the rule of law on which their constitutions are based. Thus, terrorism often appears to be an intractable problem within the democracies. Once terrorist violence begins it seems virtually impossible to stop. In some cases the cost of ending terrorism is so high, involving the suspension of constitutional practices and personal liberties, that the cure may be worse than the disease.