Terror Now

RALPH PETERS

The probability of future Islamist-terrorist attacks on the American homeland verges

Military History

A HOOVER INSTITUTION ESSAY ON TERRORIST THREATS IN AMERICA POST-9/11

on inevitability, but has decreased, for now, as regards the possibility of effecting
destruction on the scale of September 11, 2001. Jihadis have maintained their strength
of will, increased dramatically in number, and expanded their ambitions, but the threat
they pose to the Islamic world is orders of magnitude greater than the threat to the
United States (or to Europe). They hate us from a distance but kill their neighbors.
With heightened awareness and enriched preparedness, the terror-proofing of
the homeland has made it more difficult for complex strategic strikes, such as the
remarkable aerial ballet of 9/11, to be carried to fruition. So we experience repeated
attempts, but suffer few terrorist successesand those successes, such as the Ft. Hood
massacre or the Boston Marathon bombing, have been conducted by lone-wolf terrorists
or by small, self-radicalized groups embedded within American society: the selfpromoting violence of the disgruntled. We are not victorious, but we have achieved,
fornow, a stalemate as regards major threats to our territory.
The acquisition of and ability to wield a weapon of mass destruction would be themost
obvious means for terrorists to upend this stalemate. For now, however, the primary
terror threat to the homeland is one of disruption, rather than destruction, the
self-inflicted pain of an emotional and structural over-reaction to (relatively) minor
terrorist successes that raise the cost to ourselves and inflate the image of those who
claimresponsibility.
It is a measure of the disproportionate psychological impact of Islamist terror that the
phrase attacks on the homeland has become a routine part of our strategic vocabulary,
conjuring a dread last seen in the depths of the Cold War era of Mutual Assured
Destruction (MAD)a far graver threat than the (again, relatively) minor physical
destruction achieved to date by terrorists (losing the Twin Towers was a humiliation, but
losing the five boroughs of New York would have been a cataclysm: post-modern media
aggrandize every menace).
Terrorism creates an illusion of helplessness and shames established authority.
Butterrorism cannot destroy healthy states: Terrors true domain lies in the realms
of failure, and even dramatic strikes against the West serve primarily to increase a
terroristmovements perceived potency back in its spawning ground of poorly governed
and ungoverned spaces.

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Foreign Islamist movements will not relax their efforts to stage an ambitious attack on
U.S. soilthe great propaganda prize in global-jihad competitionbut they have found
it impossible to replicate the scale and impact of the 9/11 attacks. Terrorists will not
stop targeting us, but they now have to climb much higher fortress walls to get at us.
Although the Islamist-terror threat has broadened spatially and demographically, our
capabilities to parry it (and our vigilance) have increased proportionately, as far as the
homeland is concerned. The cleverest among the terrorists will eventually find a way
to tunnel under those fortress walls, of course: Its a matter of probabilities, time, and
Fortuna. But we have not done badly on our home ground (our strategic incompetence
abroad is a different matter).
As for a relatively small group of terrorists posing a real threat to the homeland of
a great power, the obvious predecessor would be the anarchist/nihilist movements
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, on the basis of effect
measured against the number of committed members, the anarchists/nihilists were
considerably more effective than jihadis have been thus far (and that before the age
ofomnipresent media, those great allies of extremists of every ilk). The list of headsof
state, ministers, and royal-family members assassinated was international in scope
and long. Even the hard-left terrorists who diseased the European bodies politic in the
1970s came nowhere near the scale of successful attacks of the anarchists/nihilists.
Most remarkably, the anarchists/nihilists were politically minded, secular terrorists, not
faith-fueled insurgents, and, historically, the latter have posed the grimmest threats.
One may argue that the anarchists/nihilists were nonetheless fanatical and that their
philosophies amounted to faiths with all but gods, yet secular fanaticism rarely rises to
the propulsive level of a perceived divine mission. Islamic States caliphate ultimately
trumps Narodnaya Volya.
In the long sweep of history, the Assassins of the Levant come closest to modern
jihadisin their level of commitment and enthusiasm for death while targeting
emblematic figures and symbols of establishment power. The Assassins were able to strike
fear into rulers and their ministers for generations. But, unlike the anarchist/nihilists
or todays jihadis, the Assassins did not have global ambitions: The Assassins were an
ailment endemic to a specific region.
There is, however, a salient similarity between those long-vanished Assassins and the
buried-by-history anarchists/nihilists: Their movements lacked mass appeal, the ability
to rally millions in their support. In current parlance, they never succeeded in going
mainstream (and, of course, the Assassins had little interest in doing so).
The numbers game is whats alarming today. As you read this, we witness the
wildfire spread of Islamist militancy across a vast region, from the savannahs of West
Africa to the subcontinent (and beyond). Over the centuries, there have been other

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death-cult explosions within Islam, especially after the rise of the Wahhabi cult in the
eighteenth century. During the Sepoy Mutiny (per Indian designation, the First War
of Independence) in the mid-nineteenth century, Wahhabis not only appeared on
thefront lines of the Siege of Delhi, but (previewing al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2006) behaved
so brutally that they drove out their Hindu allies and mortified the besieged population
of Delhi. The Mahdist rising in Sudan and various local insurrections, such as the
Naqshbandi resistance of the early Soviet period in Central Asia, also bore the spirochete
of Wahhabism.
Yet, these violent, even virulent, risings were contained (albeit only through a great deal
of exemplary bloodshed). Why, then, do todays jihadist movements threaten to become
uncontainable?
That discussion asks for entire books, not brief papers, but I believe the essential
differences are: post-modern media, modern transportation means, and guilt-ridden
political correctness as enablers and exacerbating factors, and, as the root cause, the
catastrophic collapse of the civilization of Middle Eastern Islam.
We need to get our timelines right: The rise of jihadi movements did not precipitate
thecollapse of Middle Eastern civilization; rather, the collapse of Middle Eastern
civilization ignited the Islamist blaze.
Of the points just raised, though, consider the effects of the post-modern media: Where
once word-of-mouth spread zealotry at the speed of a man on horseback, if not afoot,
today a beheading video (the delicious appeal of which we refuse to grasp) can span the
globe in an instant. Extremists can recruit more people because they can reach more
people. The math isnt hard. Furthermore, global awareness excites global ambitions.
Those mutinous Sepoys were content to stuff the dismembered bodies of memsahibs
down the Cawnpore well; they did not fantasize about traveling to London to blow up
the Houses of Parliament.
At the same time, global mobility has arrived. Instead of slogging along on foot or on
a donkeys back, proselytizers travel on international airlines. And political correctness
in the form of lax immigration policies and our inane cult of victimhood (conferring
refugee status on all who claim it) has pioneered a new form of unilateral disarmament.
A monstrous (but artful) video clip produced in Syria can incite a young male in
Minnesota, the child of Somali refugees, to fly to Turkey and make his way into Iraq.
Political correctness also prevents us from rigorously policing jihadi recruitment efforts
that hide behind the faade of religious freedom. Indeed, it is a marvelous situation
in which bigoted foreign regimes (such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates) are

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permitted to fund, directly and indirectly, North American mosques and religious
schools whose fundamental purpose is to discourage Muslims from integrating into
their host societies and which, as a bonus, foster hate-speech thats protected specifically
because it is Muslimwe cringe at any least prospect of being accused of anti-Muslim
prejudice. Our response to declarations of jihad is Oh, they dont really mean it....
Might we not reasonably legislate that no foreign party may fund religious institutions
on our soil unless full reciprocity applies? Should we permit intolerant Middle-Eastern
regimes and their citizens to fund hate here when they will not allow a single church
orsynagogue within their frontiers?
For all that, the core problem is the civilizational incompetence of the greater
MiddleEast (except, of course, Israel, a Western exclave that seems to have drifted
eastward from Floridas coast). I am compelled to repeat a basic point I have raised
in thepast:We are facing something new in modern experience: the implosion
of an ancient civilization that has aged beyond its abilities to control its corporate
bodyfunctions. It doesnt have mere arthritis, but paresis. From Rabat to Rawalpindi,
weface a web of morally, spiritually, and practically decayed cultures that, in the
twenty-first century, not only cannot produce a worthy automobile, but cannot
producea competitive bicycle.
And global communications, the advent of globalized media, means that the losers
are now aware that theyre losers and that the values they have cherished have led to
decline and failure. And when human beings face such grave embarrassment, they
do not ask, How have we failed? but Whos to blame? (Not Shto dyelat? but
Ktovinovat?) And you are assured that the answer will not be, Its my fault, its
ourfault, lets roll up our sleeves and fix it.
To be fair, the cultures of the Middle East and North Africa are so broken they cannot
befixed. We face a drooling old devil with a gun.
The Great Satan United States is as essential to Middle Eastern psychology as lesser
devils with cleft hooves were to our own ancestors. When the milk went sour, we
blamed the witch in the woodland; with their civilization collapsing, Middle Eastern
Muslims blame the wizardry of the West.
Until we are willing to face this comprehensive civilizational failure in all itsraw
menace and to study the particular appeal and virulence of Islam in such an
environment, we will be unable to contain the jihadi cancer. The dislocated souls
of the Middle East turn to Islam because its all they have left.

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To return to the matter of a relatively small group of terrorists posing a real threatto
the homeland of a great power, two further matters demand brief discussion: The
achievements of jihadi movements so far in punishing us, and the transition
wellunderwayfrom small tribes of terrorists to a regional mass movement of
globaleffect.
When we recall 9/11, we think, first, of the 3,000 dead. Yet, as a statistic, the number
was relatively small compared to single battles in our major wars. It was a lopsided
victory for the jihadis, but hardly a fatal one. It was, however, a fateful one. While
9/11 humiliated and outraged us, the real terrorist success in damaging the state
has been economic and perceptual. We cannot calculate with full accuracy how
much our multiplicity of reactions, from law-enforcement measures, through market
turbulence, to ill-designed military occupations (I do not fault the wars, but our lunatic
extravagance in their aftermath). Certainly, 9/11s financial costs for the United States
have passed into the trillions.
In that sense, at least, neither the anarchists/nihilists nor the Assassins achieved
as much as our jihadi enemies already have: disruption disproportionate to the
destruction. Only Gavrilo Princip did more with less (As a sidenote: The bugbear of
nationalism is back, too, in the person of Russias brilliant, oafish new czar.).
As for those small groups of terrorists, they are, increasingly, becoming terrorist armies
(if still irregular in their organization) backed by large populations and forming, in the
ruins of Syria and Iraq, in northeastern Nigeria, and perhaps in Libya, and other nascent
states. The Assassins had a refuge; Islamic State has a country.
And this transition from furtive zealotry to transnational rebellion reduces the value
of every mode of international response save military force. Sanctions are meaningless
(especially, when our supposed allies continue to fund the jihadis, hedging their bets).
Diplomacy is useless. Dialogue is impossible. Reason and logic lie beheaded.
Two thousand years of the history of messianic rebellions across every major religion
yield not a single example of a murderous chiliastic movement quelled by anything save
ferocious and uncompromising violence.
Examples as diverse as the Zealots Revolt in ancient Palestine (in the course of which
extremist factions established the template of killing more of their own less-committed
kind than of the external enemy); Thomas Mntzers End-of-Days insurgency in the
mid-1520s in Germany (a fanatical uprising the DDR entertainingly attempted to claim
as proto-Marxist); that aforementioned Sepoy Mutiny; the still too-little-understood
Taiping Rebellion (the bloodiest event of the nineteenth century); and many a lesser

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jihad.... All of these have in common that mass murder had to be answered by mass
murder, in Jerusalem, at Frankenhausen, in the streets of Delhi, along the Yangtze, at
Omdurman, on the Amu Darya....
I have strayed from the topic of threats against the homeland, but, ultimately, jihad is,
ifnot the destroyer of worlds, certainly the annihilator of frontiers.
Conclusion? A one-off event could strike the American homeland between the writing
of this paper and the reading of it, but the gravest physical dangers appear to arise in
the longer term, with the proliferation, distribution, and capture of weapons of mass
destruction and their delivery means. Meanwhile, we must try to better calibrate our
response to minor terrorist attacks on our soil, to avoid expensive over-reactions. This
has become much more difficult, of course, because of the advent of 24/7 media and
the race between media outlets to top one another in exciting hysteria: What the public
demands and politicians enthusiastically demagogue is apt to cost far more than the
challenge requires.
On the broader canvas, we must stop pretending that a global jihad can be countered
with intermittent, reluctant local responses. The Koran has not been nearly as effective
in the spread of jihad as our fecklessness, cowardice, and fantasies have proven.

Ralph Peters Terror Now

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Working Group on the Role of Military History

inContemporary Conflict

About the Author

RALPH PETERS
Ralph Peters is a retired U.S. Army
officer and former enlisted man
with experience in over seventy
countries. As a journalist and
researcher, he has covered multiple
conflict zones. The author of
thirty-one books, including
influential works on strategy and
security as well as prize-winning,
best-selling novels, he currently
serves as Fox News Strategic
Analyst.

Hoover Institution, Stanford University

434 Galvez Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
650-723-1754

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The Working Group on the Role of Military History in

Contemporary Conflict examines how knowledge of past
military operations can influence contemporary public
policy decisions concerning current conflicts. The careful
study of military history offers a way of analyzing modern
war and peace that is often underappreciated in this age of
technological determinism. Yet the result leads to a more
in-depth and dispassionate understanding of contemporary
wars, one that explains how particular military successes
and failures of the past can be often germane, sometimes
misunderstood, or occasionally irrelevant in the context
ofthe present.
The core membership of this working group includes David
Berkey, Peter Berkowitz, Max Boot,Josiah Bunting III, Angelo
M.Codevilla, Thomas Donnelly, Admiral James O. Ellis Jr.,
ColonelJoseph Felter, Victor Davis Hanson (chair), Josef Joffe,
Frederick W. Kagan, Kimberly Kagan, Edward N. Luttwak,
Peter Mansoor, General Jim Mattis, Walter Russell Mead, Mark
Moyar, Williamson Murray, Ralph Peters, Andrew Roberts,
Admiral Gary Roughead, Kori Schake, Kiron K. Skinner, Barry
Strauss, Bruce Thornton, Bing West, Miles Maochun Yu, and
Amy Zegart.
For more information about this Hoover Institution Working Group
visit us online at www.hoover.org/research-topic/military.

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