Sanctions and terrorists

"You cannot do business with countries that practice commerce with you by day while funding or protecting the terrorists who kill you and your innocent civilians by night."

So declared U.S. President Bill Clinton in a speech at George Washington University on Aug. 5, the day he signed the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act into law. The eminently quotable statement expresses the core logic of U.S. strategy for fighting terrorism with commercial sanctions. It also contains the strategy's central flaw.

Iran and Libya are unstable and menacing nations, to be sure. Their internal tensions spill across international borders in dangerous ways. The same can be said of the other countries whose governments Clinton chose to identify as sponsoring international terrorism, Iraq and Sudan.

Fear and desperation

But these are not nations full of terrorists. For the most part, they are nations of frightened and desperate people among whom reside small minorities of fanatics willing to commit indiscriminate murder. The defining characteristic of such fanatics is not their national identities but their utter ruthlessness. In places where fear is strong and law enforcement weak, the ruthless can indeed build support out of proportion to their numbers. The challenge of the civilized world should be to distinguish between viciousness and fearful complicity and to punish viciousness.

Clinton and the U.S. Congress refuse to make any such distinctions. Their sanctions hurt U.S. business interests and alienate trading partners while attempting to starve whole populations into submission to U.S. demands. The strategy is coarse, hopeless, and cruel.

Worse than that, it encourages terrorism.

To a human being that has bombed a public place once, signing of the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act is an invitation to do so again. It is a signal that the U.S. does not intend to respond seriously to the threat.

People who plant bombs in public places traffic in fear. They commit their outrages in order to frighten people. Fear is what motivates them, and fear is what they understand. To be discouraged from their misdeeds, they must fear the consequences of their brutal behavior.

Trade sanctions don't deter terrorism because they don't scare terrorists. Commercial response to violence just comforts the violent. That the U.S. can claim to be acting tough on terrorism by enacting a self-sacrificial law its allies hate should frighten innocent people everywhere.

The U.S., as the economic and military leader of the civilized world, must bear up to the proposition that effective response to terrorism probably involves violence. And it may have to be preemptive.

Determining where terrorists train and live is easier than bringing individual terrorists to justice for specific crimes. At some point, if terrorism doesn't subside, self-defense will come to matter more to the civilized world than do inflexible and often-conflicting legal systems. At that point, the world will be at war.

Hasty resort to violence is always wrong. The question of the moment is how many outrages the civilized world will endure before it begins strafing terrorist training camps and making known airplane bombers disappear in the night. No easy answers are in sight. But while the civilized world ponders the options, its leader should quit assuring terrorists that they have nothing to fear.

Security failures

For the oil and gas industry, sanctions raise some of the toughest issues of the day. No oil company wants to alienate the U.S. government. But now, U.S. companies face reprisals from appropriately angry European governments with which they may be in accord on sanctions.

Oil companies should tread lightly on the commercial dimensions of the misguided legislation, significant though they be. Instead, they should address the law's security failures. Oil company workers routinely cross international borders in airplanes.