for every season
ARE TERRORISTS ABNORMAL?
by
LOUIS RENÉ BERES
___________________________
Louis
René Beres is Emeritus Professor of Political Science
and International Law (Purdue University). He is author of many
books and articles dealing with international politics. His
columns have appeared in the New York Times, Washington
Post, The Jerusalem Post and OUPblog
(Oxford University Press).
While
the consciously self-destructive behavior sometimes characteristic
of terrorism is out of synch with what most would regard as
“normal behavior,” it is more-or-less consistent
with the discernible hierarchies of jihadist fighters whether
in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen or beyond. In this regard,
Donald Trump’s announced defeat of the Islamic State was
premature. After all, in the still-dissembling Middle East,
agile recruiters are assembling thousands of disbanded ISIS
terrorist fighters.
In
the end, basic queries for an engaged military should include
the following: Is it plausible to assume that most terrorists
are “abnormal,” and how should affirmative response
be incorporated into tangible counterterrorism strategies? Does
the assumption of abnormality reflect meaningful research, data
and analyses, or must it represent little more than long-ritualized
and self-serving political obligations? Would specific criteria
applied in any required analysis be consistent with ubiquitous
or even universal standards of normalcy, or instead, merely
represent the predictable result of narrow ideology or “cultural
relativism?”
Traditional
rulebooks on war do not address terror per se. Traditionally,
a “formal” war was said to exist only after a state
issued formal declaration. The Hague Convention III codified
this position in 1907, providing that hostilities must not commence
without “previous and explicit warning” in the form
of a declaration of war or an ultimatum. Because international
law prohibits aggression, a state could compromise its own legal
position by announcing formal declarations of war. In law and
practice, terror is a derivative form of aggression, and counterterrorism-focused
conflicts, perhaps even by definition, should be fashioned with
explicit regard to calculable differences between “normal”
and “abnormal” opponents. These presumed differences
should be applied to adversarial means and also to adversarial
ends – a pragmatic application to pertinent operational
methods of conducting anti-terror conflict and acknowledged
objectives of any such conflict.
Until
recently, the US core posture on counterterrorism conflicts
expressed the curiously reassuring idea that insurgent enemies
can’t be normal, a posture with principal legal justification
rooted in the peremptory national right to “self-defense.”
After all, the most prominent of virulent enemies have generally
exhibited a willful indifference to personal safety, an indifference
that goes beyond established definitions of heroism. Some accept
great personal suffering, even death, while others display profoundly
unheroic kinds of behavior, generally identified in law as “perfidious,”
such as placement of military assets or personnel in populated
civilian areas, as codified by the Hague Regulations and Geneva
Conventions of 1949.
In
forging operationally useful policies, US government planners
should dispense with extraneous ideological or “common
sense” presumptions. By itself, prima facie, choosing
to attack the United States or American assets abroad is not
evidence of psychological abnormality – true even as the
attackers opt for lawlessly indiscriminate forms of terrorism.
To routinely assume otherwise would be to confuse our required
science-based analytic judgments with partisan or self-delusionary
kinds of national chauvinism. At the same time, nations must
accept that certain identifiable terrorist foes will become
willing “martyrs.” It follows that the available
arsenal of deterrent remedies must be constructed accordingly.
Going
forward, US counterterrorist strategies may need to be reconfigured
and reimagined. Even if particular terrorist enemies should
on occasion be willing to die for their cause, they could nonetheless
remain subject to alternative iterations of retaliatory threats.
While expressly willing to die, they may be unwilling to accept
reprisals launched against certain cherished religious institutions.
In the end, to be both effective and lawful, US counterterrorism
strategies must dispense with stark differentiations between
normal and abnormal behaviors. To suitably understand and combat
terrorist enemies, we must acknowledge that “normal”
individuals could sometimes pose significantly even greater
threat.
At
first glance, designations of “normal” and “abnormal”
would appear to be mutually exclusive. A nuanced examination,
however, suggests these designations may be more correctly thought
of as points along a continuum of “civilized” human
judgment. As noted by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Notes From Underground,
“What is it in us that is mellowed by civilization? .
. . Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty,
at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.”
And Sigmund Freud, in Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
traced intriguing connections between the “abnormal”
and the “normal,” ultimately finding the relevant
line of demarcation to be faint.
After
the Holocaust, American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton interviewed
Nazi doctors, perplexed that such monstrous crimes had been
committed in the name of “hygiene” and labeled as
“therapeutic.” Lifton was determined to understand
how doctors could rationalize such abuses. Some of his findings
were counterintuitive. Trained doctors, capable of supervising
systematic mass murders six days a week, still thought of themselves
as good if not exemplary, citizens. Lifton, a Yale professor
and fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Research in Psychopathology
and Psychotherapy, discovered that most Nazi doctors saw no
contradiction between their work and the Oath of Hippocrates.
In essence, they regarded ridding society of Jews as “anti-infective,”
as an “obligation” of “healing.” Holocaust
murders offer irrefutable evidence of just how easy it can be
to subordinate science and reason to the most preposterous doggerel.
With willful subordination, otherwise normal behavior can give
way to egregious levels of predation that must be countered
not only at tactical or operational levels, but also at legal
or jurisprudential ones. After the post-war judgments at the
Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, this means peremptory obligations
of both national and international law.
The
duality of good and evil is an old idea in western thought,
and in this remarkable literature, we learn that the critical
boundaries of caring and compassion are not fundamentally between
normal and abnormal persons, but rather within each individual
person. Conceivably, every single individual can oscillate between
altruism and cruelty. From our current standpoint of counterterrorism,
this understanding points to the sheer futility of proceeding
according to the most usual and simplifying polarities. Going
forward, our operational plans – whether tightly held
or markedly conspicuous – ought not be based upon narrow
bifurcations that distinguish “good guys” from “bad
guys,” but upon sober awareness that our most menacing
foes could come from any national, cultural, political, racial
or religious backgrounds.
US
counterterrorism authorities should not look for one particular
kind of group, but virtually any group that is expressly oriented
to violent action based upon preferentially hierarchic notions
of “us versus them.” This search should include
proliferating white supremacist organizations, especially after
FBI Director Christopher Wray recently pointed out that such
organizations account for most documented instances of US domestic
terrorism. Regrettably, US President Donald Trump firmly resists
such an imperative conclusion.
At
one level, the most relevant aspect of any threatening patterns
of “groupthink” concern the primal human need to
belong, and we must accept that the most threatening terrorist
killers could be clinically “normal.” This concept
must become an integral element of US counterterrorism policies.
This is especially the case for policies concerning possible
mass-destruction attacks on US populations, including nuclear
terrorism. This requires a heightened willingness 1) to consider
“normalcy” as an elucidating variable and nonetheless
2) acknowledge that credible and consequential terror harms
could originate with “normal” or “abnormal”
populations. In certain complex but foreseeable circumstances,
tactically useful linkages between abnormal psychology and terrorism
are difficult to establish. Such difficulty would be most apparent
in dealing with terror groups that promise “martyrs”
a gloriously liberating freedom from death.
In
dealing with the most perplexing terror organizations, the core
security task is not to determine particular levels of emotional
health, but to calculate the most effective means required to
blunt any “sacred” violence. For now, this imperative
points to jihadist groups scattered around the world while pertinent
targets could still emerge at any moment. Informed by sound
intellect, suitable levels of vigilance should be quickly and
comprehensively implemented.
"I
am one, my liege,
Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world,
Hath so incensed, that I am reckless what
I do to spite the world."
– William Shakespeare, Macbeth
