fundamentalists whose aim is to drive the USA out of all influence and
presence in the Muslim world. Even terrorist leaders like the Saudi Arabian
Islamist leader Osama bin Laden, who openly calls for aJihadagainst the USA
because of a detestation of all of secular Western culture, do not expect actually
to kill enough Americans to reduce their potential world power. Rather they
hope to make the projection of such power and influence something the
American voter will not risk. It must be admitted, however, that analyses like
these probably over-rationalize the actual thought processes of terrorists,
certainly of the lower ranks, if not of the leadership. Frustration, hatred and
despair probably lead to terrorism, from a simple desire for revenge against
wrongs, imagined or otherwise.
In practice, terrorists often seem to combine a massively exaggerated
estimate of how easy it is to change public support for a government with a
very considerable desire to hurt for its own sake. A secondary motivation for
terrorism has been said to be that of drawing world attention to the plight and
cause of the terrorists’ community; as such it again largely underestimates the
reaction of the public when attacked by terrorist campaigns. The problem for
terrorism is the same as that faced by orthodox military strategy when it
attempts to destroy civilian morale by, for example, mass bombing raids on
cities. Most historical evidence suggests that such attacks are counter-produc-
tive—populations refuse to be cowed, and actually become more supportive of
the governments the terrorists are trying to undermine.
Finally, it must be stressed that terrorism is not a product of late 20th century
society. At the very least, organized political groups using terrorists techniques
to attack civilian morale, go back to the 19th century, becoming more
widespread in the early 20th century. The IRA, for example, ran a bombing
campaign in mainland Britain in the 1920s. For that matter, the assassination of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which triggered the First World War,
was only one of a series of terrorist attacks by independence movements in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. What has changed is that the nature of 21st-
century society and the easy availability of technological means of killing,
has enormously increased the scale at which terrorists can destroy life.
Thatcherism
Margaret Thatcher became leader of the BritishConservative Partyin 1975,
and prime minister in 1979, holding both positions until 1990. It was after the
Conservative defeat in 1974 that she rose to prominence as the standard bearer
of the right wing of the party, which accused their former leader Edward
Heath of causing the electoral failure by taking the party too much into a
centrist position. Thatcher, advocating what she described as ‘the politics of
conviction’, quite deliberately broke theconsensualapproach which had
Thatcherism