WASHINGTON — President Bush’s declaration of war accords Osama bin Laden’s terror gang "a status and a dignity" it does not deserve, British historian Michael Howard observed in London this week. War is too good for this sick bunch. They must be hounded to earth by police methods, Howard suggested, and defeated in a contest for hearts and minds.
I differ on the second point, and will explain. But Howard, in his biting critique of Bush’s war policies, raised the essential question of this campaign: How do civilized societies stop terrorism and meaningfully punish its chiefs? The question is not new, as Israelis, Lebanese, Turks, Palestinians and others rightly remind us. But since Sept. 11 it has acquired an overwhelming urgency and magnitude for Americans, who must now provide their own answers.
I had put the question and its variants to terrorist chieftains in Baghdad, Damascus, Tunis and other Middle Eastern capitals over the years. But one particularly clear outline of the agenda of political terrorism came in the mid-1980s in a cozy northwest Washington dining room, where Nizar Hamdoon, Saddam Hussein’s brilliant propagandist and diplomat, held court for a few American journalists and foreign policy experts.
Iraq was then embarked on a successful effort to ingratiate itself with the Reagan administration. One thing Baghdad could do, I suggested in response to a Hamdoon question, was to turn over Palestinian terrorist leader Abu Nidal, who was busily killing Americans, Israelis and Palestinian moderates. Or perhaps Abu Nidal might have an unfortunate accident? I had interviewed the diminutive, flaky guerrilla in Baghdad a few years earlier and knew that he was still sheltered there.
Hamdoon blanched. Abu Nidal was a hero to the Palestinian cause, the Iraqi said. No Arab government could give him up for trial, even to gain Washington’s favor. The subtitles playing across Hamdoon’s forehead as he spoke were clear to read: Not even a feared dictator like Saddam would take that risk. Besides, Abu Nidal may still be useful to the Iraqis.
This was at a time when other Palestinian terror gangs were gradually abandoning international terrorism as a major weapon. George Habash, a pioneer in the field, told me in Damascus in 1987 that he stopped when he concluded that assassinations and hijackings over the previous two decades had turned world opinion against the Palestinian cause. The world had shown that indiscriminate killing did not pay. Salah Khalaf, known as Abu Iyad and head of Fatah’s Black September terror wing, gave me the same analysis in Tunis in 1989 to explain his renunciation of the slaughter of innocents for political gain. A year later Khalaf broke with Yasser Arafat over Arafat’s support for Iraq and was then gunned down by operatives of none other than Abu Nidal.
Abu Nidal has been variously reported since as having died, having "retired" from terrorism or having moved from Baghdad. I know no one who really knows. But the talks with him and with Hamdoon resonate anew for me as America combats global terrorism.
Talking to Abu Nidal in no way resembled talking to Habash and Khalaf. They saw killing as a means to a focused political end — the destruction of Israel. For Abu Nidal, killing was part and parcel of his identity. He would not exist without political murders to commit. The politics, in fact, counted little for him; murder was all.
So it is with bin Laden. He finds an identity otherwise denied him in the death and destruction of others, on a massive scale. He ties it all together in a package of religious fantasy, vengeful politics and local grudges that has gathered a cult of killers around him, just as Abu Nidal concocted a half-baked Marxist spiel to cover his blood lust. It is the destruction that is attractive to bin Laden’s followers and useful to his official sponsors. He too is embedded in a system that judges him neither morally nor rationally — neither with heart, nor with mind — but fearfully and in sick anticipation, as the Iraqis did by harboring Abu Nidal so long. That is why strategies based on buying bin Laden with reward money — or on bagging him by turning the hearts and minds of the Muslim world, as Michael Howard suggested in his seminal lecture to the Royal United Services Institute — are such long shots.
Doing better at telling America’s story to Arabs and Muslims is fine. But it should not be overemphasized as an essential answer to terrorism. Infinite patience at home and relentless pursuit abroad are the essential steps in beating terror. The hearts and minds that count foremost in this war are those on the home front.
Jim Hoagland can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or hoaglandj@washpost.com.
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