Understanding the roots of terrorism

By Werner Fornos
UMUC alumnus

Since the September 11 hijackings and suicide air assaults in New York and Washington, there has been an entirely understandable focus in the United States on effective responses.

Werner Fornos

What has transpired is the quintessential contemporary manhunt, employing a vast and formidable high-tech arsenal to flush out the diabolic mastermind of these horrific acts of carnage, while simultaneously conducting bombing raids meant to punish the government that protects him and his followers.

During these turbulent times the leader of the free world, who is the president of the United States and a former governor of Texas, sometimes appears to be reading aloud from the script of an old John Wayne western. Eschewing the opportunity to assume a Churchillian demeanor with rhetoric both reassuring and inspiring, President Bush slips into the role of the sheriff of Tombstone. He wants Osama bin Laden "dead or alive." Nations in the world community are "either with us or they're against us." One keeps waiting for the president to don a 10-gallon hat, pin a silver star to his chest and, astride a snorting, gravel-scratching stallion, tell us that a man's got to do what a man's got to do.

Where millions of lives may be at stake, many would prefer to be led by Wyatt Earp rather than by Winston Churchill. It is comforting to feel that the old homestead is safe and secure because the local lawman has dispatched the posse, equipped with sufficient firepower and whatever else it takes to give the evil-doers their just desert.

Analyze and philosophize to your heart's content, but there comes a time when you've got to back up your words with something stronger. And when you're dealing with bloodthirsty fanatics convinced that dying while taking the lives of perceived enemies is a shortcut to greater glory, it's time to reach for something much stronger.

But, while dragging back the bad guys "dead or alive" may curtail terrorism, it is a short-term response at best. Poverty and social disintegration, spawned by rapid population growth, lead to the potential atrocities that threaten the world today. High fertility rates in desperately impoverished countries, where hunger, illiteracy, and unemployment prevail and each day is a struggle for survival, increase the probability of further alienation and disaffection that have resulted in the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people.

Yes, we must protect our families, our friends, all of our citizens with all means at our disposal. Yes, we must make terrorists understand that there will be severe consequences for their despicable exploits. Yes, we absolutely must root out terrorism wherever it lives, wherever it hides.

But bullets and bombs can provoke as well as prevent. Although there are, arguably, times when deadly force may indeed constitute an appropriate response, the acrid ashes of death and destruction have been known to breed renewed purposefulness, martyrdom, and a legacy of bitterness, hatred, and violence.

While military action abroad and heightened vigilance and security at home, combined with cutting off the financial resources of fanatical organizations, may temporarily thwart acts of deliberate butchery, they will not provide a lasting solution to this grave threat to modern civilization. To effectively combat terrorism, the United States, in concert with the international alliance it has wisely constructed to overcome this pervasive menace, must attack its very roots: poverty, hunger, unemployment, and illiteracy, as well as the population pressures in the world's poorest countries.

Following World War II, the United States might have emulated conquerors from time immemorial and turned its back on the ruins and rubble of the vanquished, leaving war-torn Germany and Japan to fend for themselves. But the U.S. government chose another path by helping its former enemies to restore and rebuild, demonstrating that a country with the courage to take the risks of war was now willing to take perhaps the even greater risks of peace. It is a path that revealed to the global community just who the United States is and what we are all about. Today Germany and Japan are among our most reliable friends.

This conclusion might not have provided a boffo closing reel for "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral," but it has brought about peace and trust between the great adversaries of World War II perhaps beyond all reasonable expectations. That is a lesson worth heeding for those determined to achieve results more productive and enduring than the quick-fix gratification of transitory revenge.

Werner Fornos is the president of the Population Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based non-governmental organization seeking a more equitable balance between the world's population, environment and resources. A 1965 graduate of UMUC, he is an honoris causa member of Omicron Delta Kappa and was the 1996 UMUC Distinguished Alumnus of theYear.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily the opinions of UMUC, the University System of Maryland, or the state of Maryland.