Terrorists have favourite in U.S. election campaign

“Hillary Clinton’s weakness while she was secretary of state has emboldened terrorists all over the world to attack the U.S., even on our own soil,” wrote Donald Trump on Facebook after the bombing in New York on Saturday. “They are hoping and praying that Hillary Clinton becomes president, that they can continue their savagery and murder.”

Clinton replied on Monday by branding the Republican presidential candidate a “recruiting sergeant for the terrorists.” Indeed, in an interview on Israeli television this month, Clinton said Islamic State was praying for a Trump victory.

For whose victory are the jihadi fanatics really praying?

This is not very hard to figure out. Their weapon is terrorism, and there is a clear, universally acknowledged doctrine on how that weapon works.

Well, it was universally acknowledged in the 1970s and the 1980s, when the world was littered with revolutionary movements using terrorist methods. The leaders themselves wrote about how terrorism served their goals, and a generation of Western military leaders studied how best to combat it. They came to the same conclusions about how terrorism worked and that it didn’t work very well.

Some truly stupid things were said and done in the first years after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

But a new generation of Western soldiers has finally grasped how terrorism works.

The terrorists, of course, knew it all along.

First, it is the weapon of choice for the weak, because it does not require a large army, sophisticated weapons or a lot of money.

Second, without a large army, sophisticated weapons or a lot of money, terrorists must not engage in frontal assaults and standup battles against powerful opponents (usually governments) who do have them.

Terrorism, therefore, can succeed only by tricking those more powerful forces into doing things that really serve the terrorists’ purposes.

What is the ultimate goal of Islamic State and similar jihadi groups? Obviously, it is to come to power in various parts of the Muslim world. If they ever manage to become a government they may develop further ambitions, but taking power is the crucial first step.

The terrorists do not have mass support in their own countries, or they would already be in power. In order to build that mass support — it doesn’t have to be majority support, but they do need a lot of people behind them — they need a villain that will push people into their arms.

That villain can be either the government that rules the country, or a foreign power that invades, but in either case it must be provoked into behaving very badly. Only torture chambers or cluster bombs will make the mass of the population so desperate that they turn to the revolutionaries for help.

To get the torture and the bombing going, the target government must become so frightened and enraged that it starts using them on a large scale. That’s what the terrorism is for, to make governments overreact and behave very badly.

Terrorism is a technique used by ruthless but intelligent leaders with coherent strategies and clear political goals, and the violence is never “senseless.” Bin Laden’s strategy in carrying out the 9/11 attacks, for example, was to provoke the United States into invading Muslim countries. The invasions gave a huge boost to the popularity of the jihadi movement.

Terrorism cannot succeed without overreaction. So ask yourself which of the American presidential candidates is more likely to overreact to a terrorist provocation? Now you know for whose victory the terrorists are praying. Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.