ABSTRACT
The nature of modern terrorism Before September 11, 2001, awareness of terrorist movements around the world was peripheral at best in Western consciousness. Terrorist groups were small and diffuse. No longer sheltered (and rather carefully managed) by one or the other of the Cold War superpowers, Western terrorist groups were forced to live on their own resources as underground opposition movements or, on a larger scale, to retreat to marginal areas of the world that have come to be known as ‘failed states’ as a base from which to launch sporadic attacks on targets of opportunity.1 In the closing decades of the twentieth century, mass casualty events resulting from terrorist strikes were rare, and in North America they were almost unknown. In the United States, the April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing resulted in the deaths of 168 people, with another 850 injured.2 Although the US government does not gather statistics for domestic terrorism incidents, the number of casualties from domestic terrorism in the US since then were miniscule until the September 11, 2001 attacks when 2,752 people died.3 Since September 11, perhaps five people in the US were victims of terrorism as a result of the mailing of letters containing anthrax spores.4 Looking at North America more generally, the bombing of Air India flight 182 on June 22, 1985 resulted in the deaths of 329 people, becoming Canada’s worst case of mass murder and its only mass casualty terrorist incident.5 Few terrorism-related casualties were recorded before or since in that country. Before September 11, 2001, the bloodiest of conflicts were those associated with ethnic violence in Europe, Africa, and Asia. In such conflicts, terrorism was employed as a tactic of choice, either when the means to mount a successful insurgency were lacking or as one instrument in a multifaceted insurgent struggle. The number of casualties in these conflicts is staggering. The war in former Yugoslavia, for example, which raged from 1992-1995, resulted in the deaths of an estimated 100,000 people. Rape as a weapon of war has for the first time been listed as a war crime, punishable under international law as a result of its widespread use during ethnic conflicts.6 The genocidal Hutu/Tutsi conflict in Rwanda in 1994 resulted in an estimated 800,000 casualties, and again sexual violence against women and young girls, even when not resulting in death, has left scars
that will take generations to heal.7 As this is being written, the ongoing violence in the Darfur region of the Sudan may have resulted in as many as 400,000 deaths (though this number seems excessive), either directly or through starvation, with sexual violence again a chronic feature of the conflict.8 The number of casualties generated by terrorist actions, even in the most violent of theaters, is miniscule by comparison. Save for the September 11, 2001 attacks, terrorism rarely touches Americans, as the following graph taken from the revised 2003 US State Department Patterns of Global Terrorism report demonstrates.9 The number of people killed in acts of international terrorism (in which Americans are rarely the targets)10 is certainly greater than the US body count stemming from domestic terrorism, but these numbers pale in comparison to the bloodletting of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or Darfur. If measured by the yardstick of ethnic and tribal conflicts, international terrorism too would seem a marginal phenomenon. Indeed, even the 2,689 fatalities from 9/11 would seem small if compared to 42,643 people killed on American roadways in 2003, 40 percent of whom (17,013) were killed as a result of drunkdriving.11 If one were to approach the subject of public safety in a detached way, it would make economic and political sense to direct the greatest available domestic resources toward the prevention of driving fatalities and to place foreign policy resources in the service of addressing the root causes of ethnic and tribal conflict in the developing world rather than in measures to protect the
Figure 1.1 US casualty figures, from Patterns of Global Terrorism (US State Department, revised 2003).
