Terrorism and Legitimacy: A Response to Virginia Held

Richard W. Miller

One of the most fertile sources of violence in the world today is this cycle of repression: engage in brutal counter-insurgency, justied by the refusal to negotiate with terrorists; in this way, create rage, humiliation, despair over peaceful options and fragmentation of coherent political leadership among the oppressed; use the consequent strong impetus to terrorism to gain support among those frightened by terrorism for yet more brutal repression, justied by the same refusal to negotiate. Acceptance of Virginia Helds main thesis in Legitimate Authority in Non-state Groups Using Violence, that non-state groups resorting to terrorism can be legitimate representatives of their peoples, would break this cycle. Considerations that she offers are, I think, adequate support for this important claim. So it is in a spirit of basic alliance that I will raise questions about whether the framework in which she develops her arguments is sufciently sensitive to facts of politics and power. These questions concern the characterization of terrorism, the characterization of legitimacy and the assessment of the effectiveness of brutal counter-terrorism. In the current stage of her penetrating, inuential and courageous writings on terrorism, Held denies that it must target people in any morally protected category, say, civilians, non-combatants or innocents. This is certainly one basis for denying that terrorism differs from war in being fated by its nature always to be unjustiable. But I wonder whether it is the best way to reach this conclusion. In sorting out usage in a controversy burdened by confusion, exaggeration and bad faith, we should seek clarications that advance the task of mutual persuasion among people of good will. Many people of good will are non-pacists who begin with a strong inclination to condemn terrorism, even in a just cause, as always or almost always wrong, or much more deeply suspect than most acts of war in which modern governments openly and unashamedly participate. These general inclinations to condemn terrorism reect concerns for the moral status of certain kinds of targets of violence. They lead, in turn, to condemnations of the characteristic stance toward violence of certain leaders and movements. Admittedly, the term terrorism currently has diverse usages. But this diversity is no less a feature of legitimacy, Helds other major label. Conversation would be advanced by specifying different senses and scrutinizing generic condemnation in each sense, rather than cutting the link between terrorism and morally troubling kinds of targets.

JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 36 No. 2, Summer 2005, 194201. 2005 Blackwell Publishing, Inc.

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One alternative specication might be that terrorism is political violence deliberately targeting those who are not active members of a hostile armed force. Anyone who properly values peace will regard the entry into terrorism in this sense as a morally signicant step. Another, stronger alternative would characterize terrorism as political violence deliberately targeting those who are not actively taking part in a coercive effort promoting the order that is opposed as unjust. This reects the usage of the African National Congress when it denied it engaged in terrorism, and issued bomb-making manuals that said, The action can be directed against government personnel, police and soldiers, spies, agents, stooges and informers, but not innocent bystanders of any description.1 Each sense of terrorism (and there may well be others) corresponds to a distinction in the moral status of targets that is a cause for serious concern, regardless of whether it is absolutely decisive or utterly different from other reasons to reject violence. Held offers a variety of reasons why it would be arbitrary or inimical to justice for a non-pacist to condemn all actions tting such target-specifying characterizations while refusing to condemn certain acts of war that do not target in these ways, acts that have been committed by governments now urging such blanket condemnation; indeed, she notes that it would be arbitrary not to condemn certain acts of violence by which such governments ght terrorism. These are cogent arguments for equity in condemnation. But rather than supporting a targetneutral denition of terrorism, the considerations that Held powerfully deploys are, I think, best used as means of assessing terrorism in various senses of the term that do depend on targeting. Ceteris paribus, participants in a conict should uphold norms that would narrow the circle of violent disorder. But, as Helds arguments often remind us, the fact that a restriction would put those who combat injustice at a serious disadvantage in seeking to overcome their oppressors is a serious pro tanto reason to reject the restrictionthe more serious the graver the injustice, the more burdensome the disadvantage, and the more likely the other side is to resort to violent measures analogous to those the norm forbids. In recent times in Iraq and Israel, these might be adequate reasons to reject a prohibition against deliberate killing of political leaders, day laborers working for the occupying army, and adult settlers in the West Bank or Gazathough other norms would certainly regulate the incidence of this killing as well as requiring concern for side effects. If violent interference with everyday life among the dominant people has a reasonable prospect of sustaining a rebellion against grave injustice that will otherwise be stied by the contentment of the dominant people, the inattention of the world at large, and pervasive, violent repression, this is a serious pro tanto reason to deliberately target those who are not even active participants in an unjust coercive project. In South Africa in the mid-80s, there were incidents of terrorism in this stronger sense, by ANC militants who, Steven Mufson reports: believed that only white casualties would awaken whites, who had spent . . . [the previous years in which anti-apartheid violence had been constrained by ofcial ANC norms]

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carrying on business as usual, sipping drinks by the pool, stroking tennis balls and cooking sausages in their gardens.2 However, in addition to these considerations of injustice and disadvantage, there are also (as Held recognizes) independently important considerations of moral standing, which provide reasons against proposals to target certain types of victims. Those who take part in a coercive effort promoting a profoundly unjust order but are not active members of a hostile armed forcesuch as the government personnel on the ANCs list who were not police or soldiershave special moral standing requiring special reasons for targeting them. This violence departs from normal appeals to self-defense, widens the circle of enmity, and makes it harder to institute peace at the end of violence. Still, even though specially powerful reasons to cross this line are required, the need to displace a government bent on injustice might justify attacks against those who choose to take part in this project of injustice, if the chance of change through more restricted violence is sufciently small and the injustice is sufciently great. As Held emphasizes, obdurately unjust governments themselves create these justications. Crossing the other line and targeting those who are not actively taking part in an unjust coercive effort is much harder to justify, simply because of the nature of the target. Perhaps al-Fatahs blowing up of airplanes kept the world from forgetting the Palestinian cause, doing more to advance it than suicide bombing of soldiers at checkpoints. Still, one could hardly properly value human choice without severely disvaluing the killing of people who did nothing to expose themselves to violent death apart from their unlucky choice of aircraft. Not caring about whether ones victim had chosen to take part in a project of coercive injustice would be especially inappropriate in a ght for national self-determination, which is, after all, a ght to enable people to choose their shared destiny on the basis of their own cultural and historical identity. Held is certainly right to suggest that use of the label terrorism currently scares most people away from seriously entertaining reasons in favor of what receives the label. This fact could shape a denition of the term writing wrongness into its very meaning, so that it becomes a contradiction in terms to say that the suicide bombing of a cafe in Tel Aviv is justied under the circumstances and to add that it is an act of terrorism. Held rejects such moralizing denitions of terrorism, and so do I. Unless widespread linguistic intuitions are gravely offended, we ought to avoid denitions whose acceptance would make it harder to engage in moral discussions that responsible political judgment requires. Whether acts relevantly similar to the suicide bombing of the cafe are ever justiable is such a discussion; there is a current usage of terrorism that could organize the discussion by carving out the relevant similarities; so, in the absence of a special linguistic rationale, one should use the term in a way that creates an open question for discussion. But the same consideration, of facilitating necessary discussions, counts against the other extreme of denying that terrorism necessarily has a target of a distinctly morally troubling kind. This makes it harder to engage with the worries on the minds of reective people of good will who say that terrorism is always or almost always wrong.

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Admittedly, some uses of the label terrorism are hard to t into a targetspecifying characterization. Was the attack on the USS Cole terrorist? If the U.S. Navy is seen as already constituting a hostile armed force, with a goal of hunting down al-Qaeda, this attack does not t either of my specications: it was guerilla warfare by stealthy, suicidal means. No doubt, U.S. presidents and many newspapers will call this act terrorist nonetheless. But why should manipulators of language and their willing dupes be treated as decisive in specifying proper usages? Look at how they use democracy (as in Israels thriving democracy) and sovereignty (as in the handing over of sovereignty to Iraq). Was the attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, terrorist, or just an atrocity? Perhaps one should say it was an atrocity that was terrorist in guiding intention, since the twin attack showed that any emblem of the power of a hated country would do. In any case, precise t with all uses that seem initially all right is less important, in these matters, than facilitation of needed discussions among people of good will. Nearly all of Helds examination of the nature of terrorism consists of arguments that terrorism does not necessarily target victims of particular kinds. She also presents a brief positive proposal. As I use the term, she explains, terrorism is political violence that usually involves sudden attacks to spread fear to a wider group than those attacked, often doing so by targeting civilians. If all of this is meant as a denition (moving her approach closer to my own), the proposal has to be reconciled with Helds repeated insistence that someone using the term terrorism should not, as part of its denition, stipulate that its violence attacks civilians. One strategy of reconciliation would construe the proposal as specifying the proper sense of terrorism when used as a label for a whole campaign or course of conduct: her insistence that the targeting of civilians is not necessary could still apply to some of the acts that are part of the whole. But there would still be a need to sustain characterizations of individual acts as terrorist or not, judgments that Held frequently advances in her critique of standard accounts. The characterization of the whole only yields targeting-independent ascriptions of terrorism to individual acts if we count any act of political violence as terrorist if it plays a role in a larger endeavor, terrorist according to Helds criterion. This yields strange judgments, especially given her highly plausible thesis that governments are appropriate agents of terrorism. Suppose one governments conduct of a war against another usually involves sudden attacks to spread fear to a larger group, attacks which often target active units of the opposed armed forces but often target civilians, as well. (The U.S. war in Vietnam, as a whole, might be terrorist on this construal of Helds proposal; so might the rst Gulf War, with its reliance on shock-and-awe tactics combined with precision targeting of all those things that allow a nation to sustain itself.3) Every violent engagement that was part of the whole would, then, count as terrorist, including set-piece military engagements without ambushing and on roughly even terms. There are other construals of Helds proposal which would not include civilian targeting in a denition at any level. But no construal seems to do better as a basis for characterizing individual military engagements.4

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By specifying senses of terrorism connecting it with kinds of targets, one claries the questions that are on the minds of people of good will who wonder what impact the resort to terrorism should have on their assessments of groups and leaders. This interest in moral assessment is not satiated by the observation that acts of terrorism may be no more unjustiable than some acts of war. Everyone knows that acts of war can be atrocious. Productive discussion of those evaluative questions is important for reasons of political power, not just for reasons of moral edication. National movements against powerful oppressors often depend on international popular support, which will not be based on mere assurance that their terrorism is no worse than Nixon and Kissingers war-making. I do not mean to suggest that the identication of a terrorist group as a legitimate representative is precluded by the judgment that terrorism, in the relevant sense, is never justied. At the start of her essay, Held notes the attractiveness of such an inference: If terrorism can never be justied, those groups who use or condone it can perhaps never become the legitimate authorities of the people they claim to represent. But the inference is, in fact, quite invalid. Even if the terrorism in which a group engages is wrong, much will still depend on the reasons that support the wrong choice to engage in terrorism and the type, frequency and internal monitoring of wrongful terrorist acts. For example, during the intifada, reection on the considerations of injustice and disadvantage favoring PLO terrorism could have supported a positive assessment of the PLOs aptness to play a responsible role in constructing a new, peaceful political order, even if the considerations of moral status of targets were judged to be stronger and terrorism by PLO militants was condemned. The PLOs sensitivity to relevant moral reasons could be good enough for entry into that role, even if it leads to lethal moral misjudgment in uses of political violence. Helds specic interest is the bearing of terrorism on political legitimacy. Her tendency is to take popular support as the appropriate basis for legitimate representation, even if the group claiming such support resorts to terrorism. Short of abysses of utterly disproportionate terrorism (a proviso that Held, I am sure, would accept), popular support for a group resorting to terrorism does seem one appropriate basis for legitimacy. But in the real world of terrorism and rebellion, the irrelevance of terrorism may generally reect the moral modesty of the relevant claim of legitimacy, rather than the legitimating force of popular support. The central question of legitimacy for the purposes of Helds essay would seem to be whether a group should benet from international recognition and non-interference in presiding over the transition to a new regime. If this were a moral entitlement possessed in light of good relationships to the people of the relevant territory, terrorist activity (at least of the stronger kind) and conduct connected with it would tend to undermine the entitlement. Terrorist groups rely on small numbers of courageous ghters and dispense with contentious deliberations in the interest of secrecy, solidarity and fervor. Violence against normal life encourages the use of violence against political competitors. As in Algeria, acquiescence in the management of regime change by a particular terrorist group may

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mostly reect a desire to end mayhem, among those the group claims to represent. We dont call this popular support when it leads people to acquiesce in colonial dominance, as in Iraq after the defeat of the 1920 uprising against Britain. Why call it popular support of non-colonial dominators? Nor does the expectation of genuine future popular support seem essential to justied recognition. A friend of a people may hope that the terrorist group that legitimately represents it now in virtue of sufcient power in its territory will soon be replaced on account of the discontent of its people. Terrorism and what typically goes with it are typically irrelevant in seeking the right end to a struggle over national selfdetermination because what counts is reducing violence while establishing a framework in which people can eventually work out terms of collective self-rule that most can willingly embrace and the rest can peaceably accept. This criterion can favor a terrorist group because of its superior capacity to raise hell, a capacity different from, sometimes in tension, with the achievement of genuine support by the people as a whole. In singling out aptness for international recognition as the relevant sort of legitimacy, I have emphasized one sense of a term at least as polymorphous as terrorism. Perhaps this external-recognition sense is not as central to Helds essay as I have assumed. She begins her discussion of political legitimacy with an allusion to Allen Buchanans dictum that an entity has political legitimacy if and only if it is morally justied in wielding political power. Given this construal and the emphasis on democracy that she shares with Buchanan, the Polish state would seem to have been politically illegitimate throughout the era of Soviet domination, and the Saudi kleptocracy would seem to be politically illegitimate today. Yet even if these regimes lacked sufcient popular support for such internal legitimacy, these regimes have rightly been admitted as representatives in negotiations concerning the fate of the people in their parts of the planet. They are legitimate representatives in the way the FLN was when other contestants for supremacy in Algeria had fallen by the wayside, thrown there by the often unjust violence of the FLN. Elsewhere, Held speaks of legitimate authority in using terrorist violence, and alludes to a similar component in traditional criteria for just war. This strikes me as yet another form of legitimacy, governed by distinctive criteria. Among a generally terried people, rightly worried about retribution, a small organized group might launch an attack, perhaps a terrorist attack, when the majority are too concerned with the inevitable reprisals to lend the group their support. Virtually all ultimately successful rebellions seem to start this way. It seems perfectly possible that such a group could legitimately engage in such political violence while lacking the popular support that would give it moral legitimacy in wielding power over the territory of its people. It might also lack the capacity to maintain an enduring good-enough peace that is the core of political legitimacy in the external-recognition sense. If Held is insisting that a group engaging in terrorism could, in principle, be politically legitimate in all of these senses, I would agree. However, it seems

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important to distinguish these senses, as well. Otherwise, inappropriate exports of criteria for legitimacy are encouraged. Having concluded that the widespread and willing support epitomized by the ANC is a prerequisite for morally justied power within a territory, people will be tempted to regard it as a prerequisite for a duty of other powers to recognize a group as manager of regime change. Or, exporting in the other direction, people who appreciate the capacity of brute facts of order and disorder to create a duty of recognition may be led to regard mere acquiescence as making the wielding of power morally justied. In any case, the conation of legitimacies would obscure real damage that the resort to terrorism can do to democratic values. Better to distinguish the external-recognition sense and acknowledge that brute facts of power can sustain this sort of legitimacy. Helds sympathy, in her nal discussion, for the European view that stern, Israeli and American style counter-terrorism is counter-productive may also dismiss hard facts of power. The brutal counter-insurgency in the Kurdish parts of Turkey succeeded in ending the terrorism that was fought, so has Syrian repression of Islamicist terrorists, and so, eventually, may Israeli repression. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has been a great boon to global terrorism. But the underlying goals had nothing to do with counter-terrorism. And there was no way that the U.S. could have pursued its actual goals in Iraq without inspiring insurgency that could only be put down, if at all, by appalling carnage, as in Falluja. Perhaps the resort to terrorism in Iraq will eventually be ended by these brutal means. The claim that harsh counter-terrorism is generally counter-productive may be overly optimistic. It ought to be distinguished from these less optimistic theses: justice would be at least as effective as the imposition of injustice through brutal counter-terrorism in reducing terrorist violence; U.S.-led violence now advertised as part of the War on Terrorism creates more terrorism than it snuffs out. Still, the less optimistic theses are also part of Helds position, and they are vitally important. As a whole, Helds essay is highly relevant to brutal counterinsurgency in the Middle East. The demonization of the Iraqi and Palestinian insurgencies has played a large role in getting Americans to ignore carnage inicted and facilitated by our government. Virginia Helds critique of absolutism concerning terrorism has a large role to play in repelling attacks on moral reection and human life. Notes
1

See Steven Mufson, Fighting Years: Black Resistance and the Struggle for a New South Africa (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 200. 2 Ibid., 199. 3 The characterization of a goal of the bombing of Iraq by an ofcer who played a central role in the air campaign but declined to be named, as reported by Barton Gellman, Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq, Washington Post (June 23, 1991): A1. Gellman reports further characterizations by Air Force planners such as this, Big picture, we wanted to let people know, Get rid of this guy and we will be more than happy to assist in rebuilding . . . Fix that and well x

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your electricity. As part of this initiative, precision-guided weapons destroyed the power stations on which refrigeration, water supply and sewage treatment depend, and bombs destroyed the main Baghdad sewage treatment plant. See Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), 4, 131. 4 Initiatives in political violence tting Helds characterization can be big wars, which has to be reconciled with her comment that terrorism most resembles small war. In a parallel passage in a recent essay, she notes that terrorism can consist of single events such as . . . the Oklahoma City bombing, whereas war is composed of a series of violent events (Terrorism and War, Journal of Ethics 8 (2004): 68). Perhaps the present comment conveys the similar observation that typical endeavors tting the general proposal are smaller than typical wars, even though wars, including big ones, could t, as well.