WHAT DO TERRORISTS WANT?

What do terrorists want? Sure, in the long run they want an Islamo-fascist state, but why pursue that through the specific tactics they choose in the specific moments they choose? Why, in other words, do terrorists seek to terrorize? Terrorism is, and I don't mean to sound to flippant or glib here, so bear with me, essentially an evil form of performance art. It isn't real military activity, because real military behavior has some kind of material objective in mind (I'm overgeneralizing here, but not by alot.) What possible objective is achieved by blowing up the Red Cross? They didn't try and blow up that building so they could take control of the ground the building was sitting on. It's all purely communicative, mental, psychological. And there's a reason why people study the interaction between terrorism and the media. While it is still the case that terrorism would have local effects without media coverage -- obviously people living in Baghdad know what happened today, and so the terrorists effectively communicated a great deal to them -- the effects of terrorism are massively amplified in a media age. In particular terrorism now when things are going better in Iraq, and when so much of the administration's ability to persuade the American people to continue supporting the mission in Iraq depends on convincing them that there is hope, that the mission is gaining traction, the terrorism today put that message at risk. Why today? What was General Dempsey's argument on Sunday, the President's argument today? That the better things go, the more desperate the terrorists get, because their window of opportunity is closing. They have to act with ever greater intensity to destabilize Iraq, to try and persuade the people there that in fact the situation on the ground is not going well, or at least cannot be trusted, so that at a minimum they'll sit on their hands. When looked at in that way, in the context of what terrorists want, the idea that in fact increased terrorism can be evidence that things in Iraq are going better makes sense. When not seen in that context, when instead viewed as against a series of evidently increasing terrorist spectaculars, then it isn't as clear, then the president seems to be giving just more and more spin, in fact spin that just seems to be more laughably disconnected from reality. And so reporters have a choice -- they can do a bit of work, and put it all in context, and explain it, and give long quotes from the General's press conference, complete with his insistence that overall crime in Baghdad is down -- or they can not do the work for the president, on the pretty on-the-surface reasonable contention that it isn't their job to "do the work" of making the president "seem reasonable," at which point they can make the president's position just look like absurdly trying to spin the bad into the good. But you can easily quote quotes that are entirely accurate and still end up with a story that doesn't quite get at the real truth of the matter, and you can hide behind what is or is not "really" a reporter's job, and you can choose soundbites with great care. But what does a terrorist really want?