'The Lessons of Terror': All War Against Civilians Is Equal

By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

    Caleb Carr, a popular novelist and a military historian, makes two arguments in ''The Lessons of
    Terror.'' The first is that punitive warfare by states against civilians amounts to terrorism. The second
is that terrorism never works. Both of these arguments strike me as wrong.

War against civilians has been a feature of the Western military tradition since the Romans razed Carthage.
Carr argues that indiscriminate war against the Carthaginians, and then against the barbarians, helped bring
about Rome's downfall. The slaughter of civilians, which was supposed to terrify and subdue, only incited
further rebellion and, besides, taught the barbarians to be indiscriminate in return. If Carr were saying only
that warfare against civilians has perverse consequences, he would be pointing out something worth
remembering. If he were saying only that when empires teach barbarians to be indiscriminate, they end up
being victims of barbarism themselves, no one could object.

The problem is that Carr persists in equating war against civilians with terrorism, and this leads to
absurdity. Sherman's march through Georgia during the Civil War becomes terrorism. So does Jimmy
Doolittle's raid on Tokyo and Nixon and Kissinger's bombing of Cambodia. The problem here is not to
absolve Sherman, Doolittle or Nixon of responsibility for wreaking havoc on civilians. The problem is that
it confuses everything to call them terrorists. Carr makes no distinction between conventional, if barbaric,
acts of war committed by a state army under regular command, as part of a formally declared campaign to
defeat another state, and violence against civilians by nonstate actors with the aim not of military victory
but of causing panic or inflicting revenge.

Carr has been misled, it seems to me, by what he calls ''Vattel's law.'' Emmerich de Vattel, a Swiss pastor
and jurist, published ''The Law of Nations'' in 1758. In it, he made the claim that in determining whether a
war is just, it is as important to assess how combatants are actually fighting as it is to assess what they are
fighting for. Just causes can be betrayed by unjust behavior on the battlefield, like killing civilians or
prisoners, or employing disproportionate force to attain an objective.

To use the terms of art, Vattel was distinguishing between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. The former refers
to the grounds that justify going to war, the latter to the rules that define just conduct of hostilities. But the
two, while distinct, need to be considered together. Intentions matter in judging consequences. Carr makes
the valid claim that good causes can be undermined by the use of barbarous means. He then goes on to
argue, mistakenly, that those who use such means are terrorists. But this ignores intentions and contexts.
Sherman used barbarous means in the context of a just intention, to bring the Civil War to a speedy
conclusion. He was a serving officer of the United States, not an irregular, like the abolitionist John Brown,
whose raids on slaveholders should properly be counted as acts of terror.

All the people slaughtered by Sherman and by Brown are dead, and aggrieved descendants may not care
whether they were killed by terrorists or armies pursuing a just cause by unjust means. Yet these
distinctions matter intensely. There are those who equate the civilians killed by American bombing in
Afghanistan with the civilians killed in the World Trade Center. All are dead, but death does not create any
moral equivalency among them. In one case, civilians were massacred deliberately, and without warning,
during a time of peace, by a nonuniformed group whose intention was to spread terror. In the other case,
civilians were killed during an exercise of legitimate self-defense by a state, in response to an act of war,
and were killed unintentionally despite good-faith efforts, by targeteers and weaponeers, to avoid doing so.

Carr's blurring of the distinction between terror and war against civilians works against his own intentions.
He is in favor of an ethically disciplined military response to the atrocities of Sept. 11. He makes a
convincing case that any indiscriminate response to terror only fosters additional terror. But by failing to
distinguish clearly between terrorism and acts of war, he plays into the hands of those who argue that since
America has been indiscriminate in the past -- for example, in its bombing of civilians in Tokyo, Nagasaki
and Hiroshima -- it is hypocritical for Americans to be shocked when indiscriminate means are used
against them. There are two errors here, the first being that past brutality by one state justifies retaliatory
brutality by others; the second, that American brutality in winning just wars is equivalent to terrorist
brutality in an unjust cause.

Because Carr blurs the distinction between terror and brutality, he also confuses two distinct ''lessons.'' The
first is that terror never pays. The second is that counterterrorist brutality never pays.

The second, it seems to me, is truer than the first. The experience of the French in Algeria illustrates both
cases. In their campaign to secure independence from France, the Algerian National Liberation Front
resorted to terror. The ensuing nightmare is memorably captured in Gillo Pontecorvo's great film ''The
Battle of Algiers.'' As cafes and bus stations were bombed in order to drive the French out of Algeria, the
French Army responded with raids, blanket arrests, bombing and torture. In this infernal cycle, the French
disgraced themselves and finally lost even the will to disgrace themselves further. The F.L.N., fighting for
their land, eventually triumphed. The message of Algeria hardly confirms that terror never works. It
supports the different point that indiscriminately brutal acts of counterterror rarely succeed.

As for the futility of terrorism itself, who could say with confidence that Jewish terrorism -- the
assassination of Lord Moyne and then of Count Bernadotte, the bombing of the King David Hotel, followed
by selective massacres in a few Palestinian villages in order to secure the flight of all Palestinians -- did
not succeed in dislodging the British and consolidating Jewish control of the new state? Though terror alone
did not create the state of Israel -- the moral legitimacy of the claim of the Holocaust survivors counted
even more -- terror was instrumental, and terror worked.

If terror works, then the question becomes: for how long? Carr rightly raises the question of whether the
Jewish success with terror did not provide Israel's enemies with a deadly example. ''Arab anger had bred
violence and murder in Palestine,'' Carr writes, ''but it was the Jews who brought organized, paramilitary
terror into the region.'' Carr adds that if Jews taught Palestinians the political uses of terror, they taught them
the wrong lesson. The right lesson is restraint. As long as the Palestinians confined themselves to civil
disobedience, strikes and throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, they steadily gained international support and
even begrudging Israeli willingness to enter into negotiations. When the struggle was taken over by suicide
bombers, and the targets changed from military command posts to Jerusalem discotheques, the Palestinian
cause lost internal support, international legitimacy and diplomatic traction.

The paradox Carr advances is that both sides -- insurgent groups and resisting states -- are more likely to
win when they exercise restraint, that is, when they battle each other directly rather than slaughtering the
civilians in between. Guerrilla groups, who depend for their food and shelter on their own civilians,
understand this paradox well. But, as Carr fails to see, when one side -- the state -- has all the power, and
the other side has only the shock value of violence to compensate for its military weakness, terror soon
begins to pay better than restraint.

Radical asymmetries of power, more than moral barbarity alone, are what make terror seem like a logical
strategy for the weak. The barbarians who attacked the World Trade Center knew, unfortunately, that
violence is the force multiplier of the weak. Now the challenge for the strong is to acknowledge that the
same is not true for them. The strong must understand -- and here Carr is surely right -- that for them
restraint is the precondition for victory.

Michael Ignatieff is the Carr professor of human rights practice at the Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University.

'The Lessons of Terror'

To the Editor:

As the executive director of Human Rights Watch, I would like to respond to Michael Ignatieff's review of
''The Lessons of Terror,'' by Caleb Carr (Feb. 17). Ignatieff enters dangerous territory in suggesting that
government armies are less culpable than terrorists when they resort to the barbaric treatment of civilians.
In his view, ''aggrieved descendants'' of the civilian victims ''may not care whether they were killed by
terrorists or armies pursuing a just cause by unjust means. Yet these distinctions matter intensely.''

They shouldn't. One need not embrace moral relativism to recognize that even many terrorists believe in
the justice of their cause. A rule that forbids attacks on civilians only when the cause is unjust is a thin
reed on which to build protection for civilians in time of war. Rather, as the Geneva Conventions
prescribe, intentional attacks on civilians should be prohibited regardless of the cause.

Ignatieff correctly notes that there is a moral difference between a government army inadvertently causing
civilian deaths and a terrorist deliberately killing civilians. But the difference is the intent, not the status,
of the actor.

Kenneth Roth
New York   NYT Book Review March 10, 2002