To kill the man widely associated with al-Qaeda’s most spectacular operations may satisfy desires for vengeance, but it will not weaken the “movement”
ASIDE FROM its cowardly and inhuman aspects, the most striking thing about the assassination of Osama bin Laden was its pointlessness. The “message” – something like, “We, the good guys, remain in control; our enemies will find no hiding place” – betrays a dangerous delusion. The premise of the hit – to kill the evil “mastermind” whose elimination will weaken the enemy and make the world safer – involves a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Islamism.
Al-Qaeda is not a hierarchical movement, more a viral thought-process based on intense hatreds that drifts over and underneath borders. To call bin Laden its “leader” is like suggesting that the internet has a leader.
To kill the man widely associated with al-Qaeda’s most spectacular operations may satisfy desires for vengeance and retribution, but it will not weaken the “movement”, which moves without central guidance. On the contrary, it risks offering an untimely and gratuitous provocation that may spark a global reignition of anti-western sentiment.
Islamists do not attack places where westerners gather in order to make some political point: they do it to express their alienation from a way of life that both fascinates and repels them.
The point of their violence is its pointlessness, the capacity of its random, arbitrary unpredictability to rattle one of the core sustaining ideas of the West: that progress can overcome anything if reason is brought to bear.
We, in our recidivist reasonableness, seek sense in what is senseless, adopting the logic of those who claim ownership of the act of terror: a “reprisal”, a “warning”. Sometimes, the rationalisation is attributed not to the immediate perpetrators, who are indeed deemed to be “mindless”, but to the mastermind who controls everything.
In truth, the “mastermind” is master only of a mindlessness not his own.
This modern phenomenon of pointless terror is not a monopoly of Islamists. Observing some so-called Real IRA goon on TV, dressed in balaclava and sunglasses, “explaining” his organisation’s murder of a police officer, we hear nothing that we do not expect. His delivery is littered with cliches about crown forces and securocrats. We know that he and his fellow-travellers are capable of inflicting great damage and grief, but we cannot shake off the awareness of his comical resemblance to a terrorist from a low-budget made-for-TV thriller.
We take his utterances at face value, not because they make sense of the carnage he refers to, but because we naturally tend to believe that actions of man are in some sense explicable, even if only by the “unbalanced” logic of those we recognise as “terrorists”.
This familiarity with the form may cause us to overlook that, rather than expressing some intensely-held perspective on politics or ideology, the spokesman is merely repeating a ritual he has inherited from his antecedents.
The words are similar, the grievances unchanged, but something in the demeanour of the masked man hints at a hollowness in the proffered justification.
What if the “point” of all such acts of terror now has nothing to do with what the spokesman says – that they are more like a tic, a twitch, than a conscious political intervention?
Far more terrifying than strategic terrorism is the idea that terrorism is a way of life in which ideology and thought are irrelevant.
In a world where inhumanity will always gain attention, terrorism is a way for certain categories of human beings to assert themselves, to proffer “explanations” for their existences, and to avenge their own marginalisation by a world that refused to embrace them.
They are actors, playing their own neurotic selves, and they know not what they do.
They may ultimately bomb their way to some negotiation table, but when they get there they will have nothing to offer except their cliches. In the end, they will settle for an office and a pay-off, to be replaced by another generation of goons.
The “Real IRA” parrots mantras that have been around since the time of Brian Boru, but is incapable of outlining any coherent plan for the realisation of its own agenda.
What shape, for example, would a united Ireland take? Who would run it and from where? Would armed, masked thugs be an everyday feature?
Luckily for its spokesmen, interviewers are usually satisfied to milk such situations for their tuppenceworth of sensationalism, and never get around to any interesting questions.
The justifications offered by such spokesmen can sometimes be chilling but perhaps are far less so than the alternative: that their actions have no meanings.
Their subsequent TV appearances are rituals which serve to alarm us while simultaneously reassuring us that the world still makes sense in the way we “remember”.
Indeed, the media appetite for such rituals ensures that the purpose of violent terror is nowadays inextricably bound up with the occasion of its explication.
The real “event” involves not just the bomb but also the interview, which is only “terrifying” because of the implicit reminder that further atrocities must occur if there are to be further interviews with the man in the balaclava.
And so the future of terrorism is assured. It cannot be eradicated, either by politics or assassinations.
Such interventions merely split the root, provoking new growth.