October 7, 2006
The Achille Lauro Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:25 PM EST Jon Grinspan’s excellent AmericanHeritage.com piece on the twentieth anniversary of the Achiile Lauro affair makes for interesting reading. Some may find it somber reading, although I think either enraging or grimly instructive would be better modifiers for the most appropriate response. One American ally refused to detain a terrorist who had committed piracy and the heinous murder of an American citizen—killing a stroke victim in a wheelchair, then ordering the body heaved overboard—and a NATO ally subsequently released the captured terrorist responsible for the murder and piracy, after which the courts of that NATO ally sentenced with admitted leniency the direct murderers and pirates, because they were “soldiers fighting for ideals”. Mr. Grinspan writes, with judicious neutrality, that “the event perfectly portrays an earlier era of terrorism”. It does indeed. It is nowadays fashionable, and to some degree reasonable, to criticize what the administration calls the war on terror as a policy suffering from an ill-chosen metaphor, because war, a measure taken against states, only occurs between states, whereas terrorist groups are not states. The Achille Lauro incident is a maddening reminder that while terrorists are not states, and so the use of the word war can be grossly misleading for actions taken against them, most groups of terrorists have pretty cozy relationships with one or more states. The particular group of terrorists who committed murder and piracy aboard the Achille Lauro lived under the protection of one state, Tunisia, and enjoyed the protection of another in the immediate aftermath of this particular crime, Egypt, which annually received truly vast sums in U.S. military aid. The leader of this terrorist group enjoyed the protection of a third state, Italy, for which the U.S. was pledged to sacrifice its own cities in the event of any attack on this NATO ally by a member of the Warsaw Pact. This same leader subsequently lived in peace and quiet on the soil of a fourth state, Iraq, which the United States was at that time covertly aiding in its war with Iran, and which desperately needed that covert assistance if it was to survive. While the case against going to war with Italy, Tunisia, Iraq, and Egypt in 1985 was pretty strong, the case for very painful American sanctions against some or all of those states was also pretty strong. As far as I know, none of those states suffered any sanctions of any kind for their despicable behavior during the Achille Lauro incident, yet all of them were, to one degree or another, vulnerable to U.S. sanctions. That very vulnerability may have created a paradox, one which the post-2003 collapse of the Iraqi state makes visible. The U.S. had to worry about the survival of some of these states. American security was seen to depend on the survival of the Egyptian and Iraqi regimes, and American security would not have obviously increased if we had significantly weakened the government of Tunisia. Weak or failed states are the environment in which terrorists groups generally thrive most freely, and so there is a painful dilemma: Sanctions or wars that risk collapsing a state can be a perverse response to states that are insufficiently aggressive against terrorists. But the Achille Lauro incident reminds us that allowing one’s allies to abet terrorists who murder wheelchair-bound fellow citizens is utterly contemptible, grossly offends something deep within us, and is not a policy likely to deter future derelictions, or further murders. The “war on terror” may be a dangerous metaphor, but the policy the war on terror replaced was a disgraceful policy that had itself failed for decades, and out of which emerged the forces that murdered 3,000 people on September, 11, 2001.
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