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The Road to Retaliation
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11277 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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5 / 1986 |
2,670 Words |
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Neil C. Livingstone
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The April 14, 1986, U.S. air strikes against Libya marked a significant watershed in U.S. efforts to control and suppress terrorism. Gone was the equivocation and vacillation that had for so long characterized U.S. policy dealing with terrorism. Despite the fact that President Reagan had come to power on the heels of Jimmy Carter's humiliation over the Iranian hostage crisis, the administration's terrorism policy to date had been one of caution and restraint. Although Reagan had decried terrorism and called for "swift and effective retribution," there had been a lot of tough talk but precious little action. As the months slipped by, the war on terrorism promised by Reagan seemed to be one of the greatest non-events of his administration.
The Reagan administration inherited only the vaguest outlines of a comprehensive anti-terrorism policy. Moreover, many of the military and intelligence tools needed to combat terrorism had been dismantled or disgraced in the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Church and Rockefeller Committee hearings into the conduct of the American intelligence community.
Following Reagan's inauguration it did not take administration officials long to discover that the resources available to them for addressing the terrorism problem did not match the president's rhetoric. Equally serious was the fact that there was little consensus, either within the administration or in the Congress, as to what should be done.
Dirty kind of warfare
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, for one, maintained that efforts to rebuild U.S. defense forces and to fund the president's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) could be jeopardized by employing the military in the fight against terrorism, which was a "dirty" and "politicized" kind of warfare. In November 1984, Weinberger enunciated six tests for the use of military force, which one critic called "six tests for never using force." He opposed the interception of the Achille Lauro hijackers over the Mediterranean and repeatedly cautioned against U.S. retaliation for terrorist attacks, fearful of the negative impact it would have on U.S. relations with the Arab world.
Weinberger initially found support from some in the American intelligence community who viewed efforts to enlist the CIA in the fight against terrorism as a return to "the bad old days" when the agency was vilified in the Congress and in the media.
The new Reagan-appointed director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Casey, an unreconstructed former OSS officer, did not like what he found upon assuming his new responsibilities. He moved rapidly and deliberately to restore the agency's human intelligence and paramilitary capabilities and became a leading advocate of tough action against international terrorism. "The reality--the bottom line--is that terrorism aims at the very heart of civilization," observed Casey. "We have no realistic choice but to meet it, and that means head on. Nothing else will work."
Prophet of retaliation
Ironically, it fell to Reagan's second secretary of state, George Shultz, to become the prophet of retaliation within the
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