Approach the Russians

APPROACH THE RUSSIANS

BUT WILL THERE, post Libya, be less terrorism they are asking? This is the point the Europeans are dwelling on. If there is a remote complication in the library stacks, our European critics will find it, and enter it into the argument to reinforce their objections to Mr. Reagan's having taken, finally, some concrete steps to persuade one terrorist ringmaster that killing Americans here & there is not a Good Housekeeping guaranteed safe activity.

Now, on one or two points there can be little argument. Terrorists flow in and out of other countries than Libya. Notably Syria, and Iran. But attacking Syria and Iran is more difficult than attacking Libya, which is relatively exposed. Moreover, ties between the Soviet Union and Syria are pretty intimate, and the seduction of Iran by the Soviet Union proceeds with some diligence. Europeans wonder about the risk of provoking the Soviet Union if we were to universalize our Libyan response. And even some Americans wonder whether the Soviet Union, in protest against our Libyan foray, might not take the excuse to cancel the Summit meeting.

The missing ingredient, at most of our Summit meetings over the past generation, has been a common purpose. When we sit across the table from the Soviets, we are looking for one thing primarily, they for another. We want peace and security, they want advantage. The time surely has come to flush out the official Soviet position on terrorism, and there has never been a brighter moment for just this.

Thirteen years ago, serving in the United Nations, it fell to me to give a couple of speeches in the Third Committee (trained to explore human rights) on the subject of terrorism. The U.S. goal was to bring about universal declarations against terrorism. The trouble would always come when Third World nations would seek to exclude from the category of "terrorism" any move designed to liberate a country from "colonialism" or "neocolonialism." What these countries desired was de jure immunity from prosecution for terrorism if the objective of the terrorist in question was whatever was popular in the Third World. For instance, any act against any Israeli would not, by that reasoning, count as terrorism, because it would be classified as an act against the neocolonialism of Zionism. Any act aimed at any South African, or for that matter at anyone dealing with South Africa, would not be counted as terrorism. By the same line of argument, IRA members would be free to blow up more Mountbattens, and it would not take too much of a historical memory to authorize Mexicans to blow up Californians, or Iroquois to blow up New Yorkers. In short, at the 28th General Assembly of the United Nations, the anti-terrorism movement came down to nothing.

Now, the Soviet Union is always interested in making life complicated for the West, and terrorism does exactly that, estranging us as it has most recently done from even moderates in the Arab world, whose tribal solidarity lines them up with Qaddafi, even as African tribal solidarity lines most of Africa up with Colonel Idi Amin. But the Soviet Union does not believe in free-enterprise terrorism--it is frowned on by Leninist ideology, which classifies it as infantilism. The Narodniki who blew up Czarists on a catch-as-catch-can basis before the Russian Revolution were denounced by the Bolsheviks as undisciplined.

Surely the time has come for the United States to demand that the Soviet Union lay on the table its position on terrorism. How? By agreeing to cooperate in boycotts against any nations that give sanctuary to terrorists. Specifically, Iran, Syria, and Libya.

Why not make this our precondition to a Summit meeting? Summit meetings are designed to enhance the prospects of peace. There is no peace for individuals so long as terrorism is tolerated. Why not stick it to the Soviets and ask them to declare their policy on terrorism, and explore the question whether we can make common cause respecting petit terrorism, before we address the question whether we can make common cause respecting terrorism on a grand, nuclear, saber-rattling scale?

We would have a useful initiative here. And it would be difficult for the Soviets to take a position that backs anarchical terrorism. Or, put the other way, if that is the position they want to take, let's make them take it publicly.

COPYRIGHT 1986 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning