James Carafano:
Read it all.Terrorists win by just being there. It's the kind of sound-bite interviewers love. Short. Pithy. Seemingly profound. And, best of all, arresting: It paints terrorism as a frightening, irresistible force.
There's no shortage of freshly minted "terrorism experts" spouting lines like this on the talk shows, but there's a problem. This view of terrorism is rubbish.
Fact is, terrorists rarely win. True, they succeed at killing people -- murdering innocents, destroying property and creating misery -- but that's not their intended goal. Terrorism by definition is violence with a political purpose. And terrorists are terrorists not by choice, but by desperation. They kill men, women and children indiscriminately because they think there's no other way to advance their cause. Propaganda and politics have failed them. They lack armies or economic power.
There have been many terrorist campaigns throughout history. But most have failed to achieve their goals. Slaughtering civilians rarely advances political causes.
Iraq is a case in point. The Associated Press reports that since April 28, insurgents have killed more than 1,100 people in Iraq. In all likelihood, the toll will continue to mount for the foreseeable future. But the notion that rising civilian casualties will lead inevitably to the collapse of Iraq's fledgling democracy is utterly wrongheaded.
As a rule, terrorism fails in the long run. It fails because, as a strategy, it lacks a theory of victory, a means to convert the desire to change the political order into reality. The only terrorist campaigns in history that ultimately succeeded first had to transform into something else -- something more than a terrorist movement. History indicates that movements launched by political violence can achieve victory only by switching to one of four alternative tracks. None of these redirections appears likely to occur in Iraq.
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