by Kevin Carey

G21 Columnist Emeritus

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KEVIN CAREY says that in the wake of the Madrid atrocity it is time to change our vocabulary in the face of mass murder.

Kevin Carey

SUSSEX, ENGLAND, UK - For many years now I have been struggling with a moral dilemma; should America and its allies just let Israel and Palestine live in an uneasy truce which costs few lives or should they press for a lasting peace, triggering mass carnage? It looks like a very odd question but if you plot the rate of murder (known as 'suicide') bombings against the political situation you will see that the violence rises when politicians are busy with peace and it falls when they give up the attempt. This is the logic of pathological terrorism, far divorced from a logic of concession and agreement.

This is the 'logic' of terrorists in Iraq who want to keep American troops there as welcome targets and whom, therefore, against their rhetoric, do not want Iraq to be governed by its own people. That, too, is the position of the ETA/Al Qaida alliance in Spain which deliberately set off bombs to help the incumbent right wing government stay in power. Not for them a fresh, left leaning, pro-Basque government that might make such concessions as to render terrorism redundant. The fact that this strategy backfired spectacularly should not obscure the underlying perverse logic.

For what we have to remember is that terrorism is an occupation. It is not a makeshift, desperate strategy to obtain a political end. It might start that way but it inevitably takes on its own raison d'etre opposite from that which initially inspired it; so ETA does not want more political independence granted to the Basques by politicians, Iraqi terrorists do not want self rule, Palestinian terrorists do not want peaceful autonomy.

This presents politicians with a frightening dilemma, much worse than my theoretical problem at the head of this piece. How do you deal with irrational mass murderers? The classic liberal answer to this question is that it is futile to deprive society of those very liberties which terrorists threaten, that civil oppression plays into the hands of terrorists. The classic conservative answer to the question is that theoretical civil liberty is not much use when citizens are being blown up; the primary liberty is that of living and that a certain degree of utilitarianism (in its Benthamite sense) must be applied. As long as they are not taken to extremes there is a good deal of theoretical sense in both of these lines of argument but they do not meet the current situation in Israel, Iraq or Spain.

There is no algorithm between oppression and terrorism; it does not decrease with liberality nor with oppression. Terrorism is so asymmetric that a change of policy by a government will not, so to speak, wean away some people on the verge of terrorism. The sad answer is that evil and madness are endemic and only need to come in small packages nowadays to wreak great havoc.

All we have is fortitude and intelligence. The first we have in huge supply, in spite of what cynics say, because of our massive store of social capital; the second we lack. What self respecting liberal would vote for increased spending on intelligence services and allow them to operate more secretively than they do? Of course not; and this will turn out to be John Kerry's Achilles heel. He may advocate increased spending on intelligence services but enough Democrats will be squeamish enough to ruin the effect.

What we all need is to think of intelligence work as akin to policing and not as akin to military operations. This is not a 'war' against anything, it is patient investigation, the collection of evidence, the identification of patterns, the art of extrapolation. If Madrid teaches us one thing it should be that it is time to abandon the euphemisms; this issue is a global policing issue, faced with irrational mass murderers, it has nothing to do with politics or war.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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