Why Nobodies Are the Real Terrorist Threat

As I write this, the British news media are reporting that at least three of the four suicide bombers, who killed more than 50 Londoners and wounded scores more, were born in Britain and lived in the English Midlands. They are described as “British nationals of Pakistani origin” by Fox News. One was only 19, another was aged 30 with an 8-month-old baby at home. The third, aged 22, loved cricket, according to an uncle, who added that his nephew had gone to Pakistan earlier this year to study religion. A London-based intelligence analyst was quoted by Fox as concluding, “One of these men reportedly was 19, which is way too young to be training in a [terrorist] camp in Afghanistan.”

These facts inject new urgency into the debate about whether we are fighting an organization or an idea. Last year, Jessica Stern observed in an Op-Ed published by USA Today that “we are continuing to swat at yesterday’s threats with yesterday’s tools and, in the process, aiding the terrorists’ cause. If the United States continues to prosecute a war on terrorism without thinking about what motivates new recruits, we, as a country, will lose.”

Many Americans find the concept of suicide bombing not only repulsive, but baffling. That’s because few of us can conceive of any idea or ideal so dear to us that we would wake up one morning, strap on explosives and walk out of the house to our self-inflicted deaths, as the four London bombers did. Our revulsion and confusion are functions of our time and place in human history. Anonymous nobodies, leading lives of quiet desperation until moved by the power of a radical idea to act, fill the pages of modern Western history.

In The Proud Tower, the late Barbara Tuchman’s 1966 history of the West just prior to World War I, the best-selling historian wrote of Anarchism (with a capital “A”) during the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. “So enchanting was the vision of a stateless society… that six heads of state were assassinated for its sake in the twenty years before 1914.” Her list included President McKinley, shot by a lone assassin. Following the murder of the Spanish premiere in 1897, a British magazine opined, “The mad dog is the closest parallel in nature to the Anarchist,” while another writer wondered how you could protect civilized society from “a combination of crazy people and criminals.”

Whether you believe that Lee Harvey Oswald also was a lone assassin or the patsy of a broader conspiracy, read Norman Mailer’s book Oswald’s Tale. In it you’ll meet a lonely young man who yearned to make his mark, and who was drawn first to Soviet-style communism and then to Castro’s Cuba, as sources for his half-baked ideas. That he first took a pot-shot at a right-wing general, before being caught up in the Kennedy assassination, suggests that his choice of victims was as much a matter of opportunity as it was the selection of specific targets.

Just as 19 th Century lone killers were motivated by the writings of Anarchist intellectuals whom they’d never met, Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh is said to have been heavily influenced by Leaderless Resistance, a 1962 book by one Ulius Louis Amoss. A former U.S. intelligence officer and Cold Warrior, Amoss founded the Baltimore-based International Service of Information, Inc. When McVeigh and Terry Nichols, apparently aided and abetted by one or two other home-grown radicals, did their dirty deed in 1995, Amoss was already nearly two decades in his grave. His ideas had been kept alive primarily by an apostle named Louis Beam. McVeigh and Nichols never knew Beam either.

The Amoss/Beam idea is chillingly simple. In the words of one scholar, Simson Garfinkel, “Leaderless Resistance is a strategy in which small groups (cells) and individuals fight an entrenched power through independent acts of violence and mayhem.”

This sounds a lot like what happened in London two weeks ago. In the words of one Fox News commentator, recalling the Madrid train bombing of a year ago, “both point to an al-Quaida evolving into a movement whose isolated leaders offer video or Internet inspiration --- but little more --- to local ‘jihadists’ who carry out the strikes.”

If this is how it is… then all of America’s expenditures of lives and treasure and Afghanistan and Iraq are so many wasted soldiers and dollars. In some sense we actually are repeating the mistakes of Vietnam, even though our modern Armed Forces were designed never to repeat our errors in Southeast Asia. As we tried for a decade to fight a conventional war against what was essentially a guerilla force in Asia, now we once again are deploying our military might against far-flung nations.

Meanwhile, the real terrorist threat turns out to be anonymous nobodies lurking right next door.