An Explosion of Data on Terror

Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!

There are few terrorist attacks in the USA, and the frequency of such acts is at its lowest since 1970. What happened at the Boston Marathon on Monday was an anomaly. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 were an anomaly as well. Since then, aggressive counterterrorism measures — and probably luck — have accented the decline in attacks.

The fact that these barbarities are anomalous is no consolation for the victims, who cry: Long Live Civilization! However, I will quickly shoot off these data, courtesy of the Global Terrorism Database of the University of Maryland. These statistics are a warning: Half of all terrorist acts in the world have never been explained; the same is true of one third of attacks in the United States.

Again, this is not to minimize the tragedy in Boston — three dead and 180 injured — or discard the possibility that it will be rapidly explained. However, to put it in context, although the number of victims in this recent attack was high — surpassed only by 9/11, Oklahoma City in 1995 and the earlier attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 — there has been a systematic decline of terror in the U.S. since the ‘70s.

In that decade there were about 1,350 attacks in a spectrum that included extremists from the left and the right: white supremacists, militant blacks and Puerto Rican nationalists. The photo above shows a terrorist act performed by the Armed Forces of Puerto Rican National Liberation. The bomb exploded on Jan. 4, 1975 at the Fraunces Tavern (you should visit when you are here), resulting in four deaths and over 50 injuries.

Further context is offered by Max Boot, author of “Invisible Armies”; this recently published book follows the trajectory of guerrilla warfare and terrorism, which are generally interlaced, from ancient history to the present. Boot argues the futility of terrorism, stressing that terror rarely succeeds; when it does, the group has usually gone beyond pure terrorist attacks. A case in recent history is the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah.

The al-Qaida network, obviously, had an impact because the attacks of 9/11 triggered the invasion of Afghanistan and, by dubious extension, of Iraq. Boot points out that the evidence suggests that this was not Osama Bin Laden’s intention. He wanted to weaken the U.S. and overturn its allied regimes in the Middle East. This happened in some cases — Egypt, for example — but is not the reason for the atrocities committed by the al-Qaida network.

Explosions are the mark of modern-day terrorism, which, ironically, started around the same time that the noble Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1867. The invention of the telegraph and the triumph of mass media were equally instrumental to the rise of modern terrorism.

In the words of Max Boot, terrorism is above all an act of communication. Don’t even mention it these days! The newspaper and social network coverage is frantic! In Boston, since Monday, there has been a marathon of crazed competition, which brought forth an incredible surfeit of error and conflicting information; this included the announcement by television emissaries — and from the venerable AP news agency — that a suspect was already in prison.

Like the researchers at the University of Maryland, Max Boot warns that those responsible for terrorism are often not captured or killed. A clarification of what happened may take some time to reach. An example of this is the outcome of the crime of Eric Rudolph, the extremist directly responsible for the Olympic attack in Atlanta in 1996 — a situation reminiscent of what happened in Boston. After that, he targeted abortion clinics. Rudolph was finally arrested in 2003; he is now in prison for life, with no chance of reduction.

Max Boot is an expert, but he says what laymen know: The purpose of terror is to terrorize us. With more or less heroism — with more or less fear — we must continue with our lives. Max Boot has done his part. On Tuesday, the day after the attack, he arrived in Boston to give a lecture about the history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.