Terrifying the Cat

There is a quote that keeps me up at night. When it comes to mind, sends me into a spiral of thought that is impossible to shut down.

That quote, "The mouse dreams dreams that would terrify the cat."

I read this in a Tom Clancy book at least 15 years ago. I can't tell you what book it was in, but the simplicity, elegance, and imagery of this quote has stuck with me all of my adult life.

I think that I have remembered this quote because I remember the Achille Lauro. I was ten years old when an offshoot of the PLO raided that cruise ship, and killed an American tourist. He was an older man, although his exact age and name escapes me right now. What I can never forget, is that they shot him in the head, and threw that old man overboard. The PLO gunmen simply wheeled him right off the ship. More than almost any event in my childhood, I think about the Achille Lauro. At the age of ten, in 1985, I learned from those PLO gunmen that there is true evil in the world, and that we have a true enemy.

Over my lifetime, I have seen a rise in the callousness and brazenness of terrorists. The tactics the terrorists use have become increasingly disconnected to the norms of society. What was a despicable and tragic event two decades ago is tame by current comparisons.

Though I have gotten older and do not have the fears of a ten year old, I am more concerned and distressed over the course that the world of terrorism has taken. My hatred, too, of those who pursue an agenda of terrorism has grown.

While fighting against terror movements, I detest the capitulation that is second hand to any policy argument. Namely, that there are social ills that we may or may not be responsible for, but that we must address before terrorism stops. Yes, poverty and other social ills may contribute to some terrorist movements. However, the poor are not the terrorists we must eliminate. There are the poor foot soldiers in some movements who blow themselves up and train in militant madrassas. The overwhelming evidence, however, is that the modern terrorist (leader) is educated and has a decent to very high standard of living.

So the question is this, what does the 'intelligentsia' of the modern terrorist movement want? In a word, power.

The terrorists know that they will never win militarily by attacking Mumbai, New York, Lahore, or Nairobi. With very few exceptions, terrorists never even look for a military win. Rather, they hope for a disproportionate and inhuman response from their targets. Why? Usually it's because the terrorist's own people, or those he views as his people, do not support him.

In Israel, Sri Lanka, India, Kenya, or the United States, we are targets because our response, if broadly targeted against the "people" rather than the actual terrorist, will foster support for the terrorist at home.

Time and again, one can look at the history of striking back against terrorists and see that there is a marked difference in the popular response when a terrorist leader is attacked rather than a large civilian population. When the leaders of a terrorist organization is killed, without retaliating against the civilian population, little or no sympathy is garnered by the terrorist. After all, the acts of a terrorist are often, if not always, disgusting even to his own people. On the other hand, if the response to terrorism is a large-scale retaliation against a large population, they will hate the terror victim who becomes the aggressor.

The solution to all of this is terrible, though no more so than our current policies of over blow reactionary tactics. We, the nation-states who are the victims of modern terrorism, must increase the active operations against the leadership of terrorist movements. We must refocus our power to pinpoint operations that are small, quick, and lethal. We need feet on the ground in fifty countries worldwide. We need to track every lead to the top, and stop focusing on passive tactics to fight terrorists. Most important, wherever the evidence of involvement in terrorism may lead, we need to act with unwavering resolution.

The thought that keeps me up at night is the belief that no terrorist movement today shows an inkling of restraint. I believe that any terrorist organization with access to biological, chemical, or nuclear capabilities will use those capabilities. Nowhere do I see any sign of restraint or introspection that would lead me to conclude that any modern terrorist movement would restrain itself from releasing a catastrophic attack.

I heard a joke once, "How do you get a nuclear bomb into the United States? Disguise it as a ton of cocaine." The moral, if after three decades of a war of drugs, how can we reasonably expect to stop a smuggled weapon of mass destruction?

So yes, the mouse dreams dreams that would terrify the cat. And yes, we are the cat. However, in the ever more dangerous world of brazen terrorist attacks, we must remember that cats kill and eat mice.