Richard Bernstein International Herald Tribune
FRIDAY, JULY 15, 2005
BERLIN As everyone knows, and to the widespread skepticism of Europeans, it is the United States that has been fighting what it calls a "war" on terrorism, while Europeans are only waging a "struggle," seeing it more as a political problem whose deep causes need to be addressed than one susceptible to solution by military force.
And perhaps the Europeans are right; nothing about the two major terrorist attacks in Europe - Madrid last year, London last week - suggests that the deployment of troops outside Europe's borders would have enhanced European security.
But of course the word war in the mouth of George W. Bush means not just troop deployments; it is also a metaphor for the gravity of the situation, for the notion that the entire society and all its resources need to be mobilized against what it has become fashionable to call an existential threat, a menace to the fundamental well-being of the open society itself.
And, if it is confirmed, as the British police have indicated, that the London bombers were suicide terrorists of British nationality, then, as Alan Cowell and Don Van Natta of The New York Times reported this week, something very new has hit Europe, the sort of suicide attack heretofore believed to be a problem for Israel and Iraq, and, in one spectacular instance, on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States.
Moreover, the tentative conclusions of the investigation so far indicate at least two other conclusions that can be drawn about the nature of the potential terrorist threat against Europe.
One is that more and more it comes as an unprecedented combination of dangers from outside and from within, from a sort of demographic fifth column already well established inside the European population that is not exactly controlled from outside but gets its inspiration from there, notably from Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
And two, what the London attacks seem to show is that the potential threat against Europe is in its way more complicated and more insidious than the one against the United States, even if terrorism has so far taken far fewer lives here than on the other side of the Atlantic. To be sure, the United States, as the world's imperial power and deeply enmeshed in Middle Eastern politics, is clearly No. 1 on the terrorist hit list, ever the Great Satan.
But so far, at least, the United States has only been targeted by outsiders - like the Al Qaeda-trained group that carried out the Sept. 11 operation, or the suicide bombers that are hitting American troops, and many others, in Iraq. Despite the presence of many millions of Muslims in the United States, there is no sign of any threat coming from within.
Europe is different; it is ever more clear that Europe is what terrorist experts like to call both a terror base and a terror target. The leaders of the 9/11 commando team were long-term residents of Hamburg before they set off on their mission in the United States. The two so-called shoe-bombers caught plotting to blow up planes in midair are British citizens. The man in the Netherlands who confessed to the assassination of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh is a Dutch national of Moroccan origin.
"There is strong evidence that Al Qaeda operatives in Europe are, increasingly, local citizens, rather than non-EU nationals," Daniel Keohane, a terrorism expert at the Center for European Reform, observed in an article published two months before the London bombings.
One piece of evidence cited by Keohane is a study by the Nixon Center in Washington (first reported in Newsweek) showing that of 373 Muslim terrorists arrested in Europe and the United States from 1993 to 2004, 41 percent were Western nationals, either naturalized citizens, second-generation immigrants or converts. There were more French nationals among them than Pakistanis or Yemenis.
"What you've got is a combination of second- and third-generation immigrants and one or two external elements, from Syria, or Saudi Arabia, or Morocco, and this combination is very dangerous," said Jean-Yves Hain, a security expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
"And there is one added danger to this combination, which is the flow back from Iraq," Hain said. "These Europeans go to Iraq to be part of the insurgency, and the risk is that when they come back, they will have an expertise and a status as fighters that will make them a great danger."
What this means in the first instance is that the struggle against terrorism is going to be very different for Europe and the United States. For Americans, it makes sense to see the fight against terrorism as a war, directed, as wars always are, against an external enemy. The Europeans, from their standpoint, are right not to see the same struggle as a war, but as a question of police work, intelligence and coordination.
But either way, there is an emerging similarity in the gravity of the situation. Call it what you will, terrorism after the London bombings ought to lead to a new level of awareness, an enhanced appreciation of the extent of the danger.
Will Europe, after the EU constitution disaster and the fiasco over the Union's budget, respond by enhancing its coordination? Clearly one of bin Laden's aims is to prevent just that. The Al Qaeda strategy is to concentrate attacks on countries that have (or, in the Spanish case, had) troops in Iraq, thereby dividing Europe into those countries with an interest in fighting back and those with an interest in not provoking even greater Muslim anger.
So far the strategy has not worked, at least not at the level of the European political leadership, which has put European solidarity ahead of differences in the assessment of risk. We can hope things stay that way, because, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin when America was facing a very different sort of danger, it would seem that Europe has a choice: either to hang together in an hour of danger or to allow its member countries to get picked off separately.
