Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [188]
This difficulty is reflected in the question of intelligence priorities. How does one make resource allocations among issues that have interdependencies but may not have the same priority individually? It is important to make some distinctions or one is left in the situation where there are, in effect, no priorities. When everything is important, nothing is important. For example, terrorism is a very high-priority issue. Should narcotics be given an equally high priority because of its relationship to terrorism, or can it be dealt with at a lower level and not lose the importance of the connection? This problem recurs across the spectrum of transnational issues.
TERRORISM
The September 2001 attacks led to a greatly increased U.S. emphasis on terrorism, which became the primary national security issue, although not necessarily dominating intelligence activities in the same way as did the Soviet issue during the Cold War.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT. The intelligence community’s interest in terrorism pre-dates the 2001 attacks. First, there had been a series of earlier attacks by al Qaeda on U.S. interests, beginning with the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York in February 1993. Second, it is also important to remember that terrorism is a recurring phenomenon in international politics. In the late 1890s there was a series of anarchist assassinations, killing President Sadi Carnot of France (1894), Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary (1898), and President William McKinley of the United States (1901). In the United States from 1917-1920 there was the Red Scare, largely a series of bombings by anarchists, labor radicals, and pro-Soviet individuals. In the 1970s and 1980s there were several strands of terrorism: European and Japanese radicals (West Germany’s Baader Meinhoff Gang or Red Army Faction; Italy’s Red Brigades; Japan’s Japanese Red Army); various Middle East terrorist groups (Black September, the Abu Nidal Organization, and others); and state-based terrorism (including Libya, Iran, North Korea). These strands sometimes came together in cooperative terrorist attacks. Thus, one can argue that the U.S. intelligence community has had more than thirty years of experience with terrorism.
However, unlike the consistency of the Soviet target, terrorism has been a shifting target as groups rise and fall or are defeated, and as the locus of terrorism changes. Therefore, it may be fair to say that there is more generic experience with terrorism than specific experience. Moreover, the earlier terrorist campaigns all were political in nature. The current terrorist threat has a self-selected religious basis, which makes it much more difficult to discuss as a policy issue because of our concerns about religious freedom and our understandable desire not to blame an entire religion because of the acts of a faction within that religion. The religious aspect of modern terrorism also poses an analytic challenge in that western states (with the exception of Northern Ireland) largely stopped fighting about religion in the seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries. Ironically, the next “-ism” that some assumed would come about to replace communism as a foe—religious fanaticism—may actually be a historical throwback, at least in terms of western experience.
LESSONS FROM THE COLD WAR. To understand the difficulties inherent in tracking and forestalling terrorism, one must recall the intelligence legacies of