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Terrorism: The Low Frontier
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10021 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1986 |
2,834 Words |
| Author
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L. Francis Bouchey
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TERRORISM AS STATE-SPONSORED COVERT WARFARE
Ray S. Cline and Yonah Alexander
Hero Books,
118 pp.
FIGHTING BACK WINNING THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM
Neil Livingstone and Terrell E. Arnold
Lexington Books
268 pp., $12.95
HYDRA OF CARNAGE
Uri Ra'anan, Robert Pfaltzgraff, Jr., Richard Schultz, Ernst Halperin, Igor Lukes
Lexington Books
638 pp. $22.95
Politically motivated violence of a non-military character has a long and ignoble history reaching at least from Brutus murdering Julius Caesar in Rome to Lee Harvey Oswald killing President John F. Kennedy in Dallas twenty-three years ago. Indeed, these were acts of political terrorism: they altered the course of politics and they terrorized the political community causing widespread disorientation and anxiety. But they were of a different species than the variety of terrorism dealt with in these books because they were not sponsored by a foreign state that was pursuing a covert war against Rome or against the United States. At least not to the best of our knowledge.
State-Sponsored Terrorism
CIA Chief William Casey sums up the issue in the opening chapters of Hydra of Carnage:
Clearly, the Soviet Union and its allies all have
grasped the potential of terrorist movements for
disrupting societies, particularly in the so-called
Third World. Clearly, they have recognized that
throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America there
are weak governments with low levels of legitimacy and
high levels of instability. To a degree far greater
than is generally realized, these governments are
acutely vulnerable to terrorist disruptions, and are
therefore inviting targets to terrorist campaigns.
In providing terrorist movements with arms, training,
and political support, the Soviet Union and its allies
have thus discovered a highly "cost-effective" way of
making the point that in today's world it is not safe
to practice democracy.
The transnational political terrorism examined in these volumes is a new species which was conceived in Moscow and born in Havana twenty-two months after the Kennedy assassination. The Tricontinental Conference of January 1966 gave birth to a
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