U.S. stays relatively terrorist free

Press, 19 June 1986, Page 20

U.S. stays relatively terrorist free

By

JOHN KEEGAN,

defence correspondent of the “Daily

Telegraph,” London

The terrorist’s motto is “Kill one, frighten a thousand.” If the fall in transatlantic tourism this summer reflects the effect that the Rome and Vienna airport outrages have had on Americans’ willingness to vacation in Europe, terrorist philosophy is working. Airlines have reported 40 per cent fewer passengers flying from the United States to Europe and hoteliers a consonant drop in their business, which ramifies through the domestic economies. Terrorists can rub their hands over more than the economic harm they are causing. The illwill it arouses perfectly serves their purpose of dividing friend from friend and undermining confidence in the power of States to preserve the decencies of life. A particularly nasty form that ill-will has taken is the charge that Americans are showing cowardice by holidaying at home. Many of them simply cannot afford the trip at current dollar exchange rates. But what Americans are stating is that they do not choose to share a risk abroad that they do not run at home. That is a very interesting statement. If America is effectively free of domestic terrorism, there must be reasons. Those reasons are worth examining. America has not altogether 'escaped terrorist attack. Even excluding the assassination and attempted assassination of Presidents Kennedy and Reagan — acts of deranged individuals, not motivated groups — the country suffered a rash of minor outrages by millenarian bodies like the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army in the 70s. Puerto Rican nationalists are also occasionally active. Nevertheless, though American cities are afflicted by rates of criminal violence that have no counterpart in Europe, political violence is almost unknown. This is in spite of the fact that America is a soft terrorist target. European visitors to Washington

are astonished to discover that they are free to join daily tours of the White House, that American electors expect to be offered conducted tours of the State Department (which sits on top of an underground car park) and that until last month the concourse of the Pentagon, which connects directly with the Washington Metro, was lined with drug stores and barber shops. The United States, moreover, has two open frontiers. Passport control across that with Canada is notoriously lax and the Canadians are deliberately liberal in their immigration policy. Canada now contains several large Third World minorities, including the largest Sikh community outside the Punjab, members of which are suspected of having caused the destruction of the Air India jumbo jet above the Atlantic last year. Immigration control at the Mexican border is,' of course, merely token. Illegal immigrants unlucky enough to be intercepted at the Rio Grande often re-enter the United States the same day. Most avoid border controls altogether, gratefully disappearing into the prosperous anonymity of California, which promises to be Spanish-speaking by majority at the end of the century. Here is the first reason for America’s freedom from terrorism. People who succeed in entering the country ask, almost without exception, only to be allowed to enjoy the fabled freedom and riches of American life. Hardcore terrorists may not be deterred by the risk of expulsion, after imprisonment. But their potential softcore supporters, on whom all terrorist organisations depend, are likely to decide that the chance of citizenship weighs far more heavily than the appeal of the cause, if they have to balance the one against the other. The continuing power of the American dream is, in a sense, the most powerful of all antidotes to the terrorist manifesto.

The reality of the dream is the root explanation also of the otherwise puzzling rejection of the terrorist recourse by America’s black community. Still providing the nearest thing to an under-class in American society, its dissidents have nevertheless chosen to express their sense of alienation in quite different ways — religious sectarianism or, at worst, crime — while its leaders denounce alienation altogether. “We’re going up” was the messianic cry of Jesse Jackson in the last Presidential campaign and it was received with almost hysterical shouts of endorsement from his mass audiences. Able and energetic American blacks, moreover, are indeed going up. The expansion of the black middle class and its growing economic success have been among the most significant developments in American life over the last 25 years. It is not only black businessmen and professionals who succeed. Blacks eagerly enter public service. The Army was the pioneer of integration and many combat units are now 40 per cent black. More important for domestic' security, blacks show none of the reluctance to join the police that they do in this country. Black police chiefs are commonplace and their subordinates generally represent the ethnic spread in appropriate proportions. Foreign terrorists may, therefore, only be practising rational self-protection in shunning direct intervention in the United States. There is, of course, another explanation for America’s avodance of the terrorist scourge — one which helps to explain the outrage the American Government and people feel at the phenomenon itself. This is that terrorists who want to hit American targets do not have to journey to America, with all the risk that journey entails. The world is full of American targets. American embassies, American bases, American businesses and American overseas residents provide terrorists with all the victims, and opportunities for sensation, that they require. The profession of American diplomat,

for example, has become an appallingly high-risk way of life '— more have been killed abroad since the Second World War than American generals or admirals, despite the Korean and Vietnam wars. By staying at home, therefore, American private citizens may be doing no more than narrowing the terrorist’s target. In a way, they are sending Europeans

a message: Americans do run the same risk of terrorist attack as non-Americans, and may indeed run it in a more concentrated form. If Europeans, for economic reasons, wish to see American tourists back here in their customary mumbers, then they should redouble their anti-terror-ist efforts. The campaign against the terrorist is indivisible