I don’t think anyone here is saying that totalitarian movements don’t exploit, or have within them, some potentially legitimate issues. Obviously that is why they are so attractive to so many people. But this attraction is directly connected to the believers’ rejection of human life as it exists in our human condition.

You ask: “Did David Horowitz yearn to ‘extinguish human life’ when he was a communist and backed the terrorist Panthers?”

Well, the answer to that question is not a simple one.

Let me begin by saying that, first and foremost, the Panthers and al-Qaeda are not the same kind of terrorists. In his memoir, Radical Son, David Horowitz made it clear that he was unaware that the Panthers killed anyone. He was in denial, as so many radicals are.

On the other hand, Horowitz has cited Marx's quote from Faust in The Eighteenth Brumaire in which Mephistopheles says "Everything that exists deserves to perish" and he has referred to this as the essence of the totalitarian idea which all of you supported when you were on the Left.

In other words, there is a direct connection between the terrorist actions of utopia builders and the dreams that inspire them. As Horowitz has said elsewhere, the idea of socialism or social justice, the perfect world which is made possible by the death of the imperfect one, is an analogue of the 72 virgins which is the Islamists’ reward for destroying the non-Islamic world and preparing the reign of God's law on earth.

Naturally Horowitz, like many other leftists, was not walking around consciously -- and with calculation - dreaming of mass slaughter, though they were all creating the framework which would justify such slaughter by hailing the kingdom of freedom as a real possibility -- if only all those who opposed it, or would not go along with it, could be cleared out of the way. When you reject human beings for what and who they are, guess what your plans for building earthly paradise will do to them?

In any case, I am not sure if David Horowitz is really the best example for this discussion because, in my study of his life and ideas, I don't really think he was ever a true leftist. In his early work, even as a leftist, there was always a voice calling within him to examine, with a morally critical eye, the consequences of his ideology’s ideas. That is why he broke from the Panthers after they killed his friend, Betty Van Patter and revealed to him who they actually were. But the entire leftist community that cherished romantic ideas of earthly paradise ignored her death, or justified it, precisely because, in my view, in certain realms of their psyches, they yearned for it. The rejection of human life as it exists in our human condition is directly linked to the desire to extinguish it.

Once David Horowitz accepted the reality of human mortality and the flawed nature of human beings, he could no longer hold to any tenets of the leftist faith. And he lost the impulses to sacrifice human beings on the altar of utopian ideals.

Laqueur: I speak and write with reluctance about counterterrorism for two reasons.

[1] I know a bit about terrorism but  counterterrorism is not the same thing. I don’t believe this differentiation is pedantic -- it reflects the situation in the real world. To speak with authority about counterterrorism one has to know a great deal not only about the other side but also about our own capacities.--something akin to Andy Marshall's office in the Pentagon. I am not in the loop, I do not know enough about our own capacities. I suspect they are deficient and I do not know how quickly they could be improved given the bureaucracies’ hurdles and restraints.

[2] In the context of terrorism, I find it next to impossible to say something new about the subject. The issues involved are straightforward and relatively easy--yet there is considerable resistance accepting the basic insights concerning terrorism.  The task ahead is really one of education and I am not a good teacher. Furthermore, experience teaches me that this reluctance which I mentioned will hardly be overcome by arguments however obvious and however often repeated.  People learn from experience, especially bitter experience, not from speeches and articles -- however brilliant..

In the short term perspective, I am quite optimistic. The terrorists who are most dangerous have been hit by our countermeasures. Bin Laden and Zawahiri have threatened countless times that horrible things would happen within days, if not hours. But nothing on the scale of 9/11 did happen, either in the U.S. or anywhere else.

In the medium perspective, say the next 5-10 years, I am pessimistic because, as I said earlier on, the vigilance of the West will decline, especially if there will be no major attacks. At the same time, terrorists will continue their preparations--and we shall enter the age of megaterrorism. Four times out of five they will fail, but even if they will have only one success, this could be traumatic -- especially as far as panic is concerned.

As for the long term perspective--who knows? I see a chance that once a major disaster will have happened the great powers and most of the lesser powers will get together and decide to do something. But not before. 

Pacepa: In my other life, I was responsible for supervising both Romania’s share of the Soviet bloc effort to generate anti-American terrorism around the world, and Romania’s own counter-terrorism operations at home. This gives me a different prospective.

Terrorism and counter-terrorism would seem to be as different as day and night, but they are in fact tightly interconnected. The best way to combat terrorism is to reverse the process of its creation, i.e., get rid of the terrorist leaders and educate their adherents. At one time Ceausescu’s Romania was even more famous than the Spanish Inquisition for its domestic terror, indiscriminately killing off its faithful, its unfaithful, and its priests. But within days of Ceausescu’s execution for genocide, his terrorism vanished as if it had never existed.

With Arafat’s having recently been hors de combat, Palestinian terrorism has noticeably tapered off. Now we should remove Osama bin Laden & Co. and help their, and Arafat’s, terrorists realize that there is more to life than blowing themselves up in the hope of being rewarded with 72 virgins. The Middle East has a storied history of remarkable civilizations, and its peoples should be receptive to thoughts of returning to their glorious past and building upon it. The faster we succeed in helping Iraq—and others—to re-civilize their societies, the sooner we will neutralize anti-American terrorism.

Peters: There is a great danger of over-intellectualizing all of this.  Each participant has had stimulating and worthy things to say (although not necessarily correct).  Whether or not we wish to believe we're at war with the terrorists, they certainly believe that they are at war with us.  Warfare isn't just shooting at one another or hurling spears.  Especially today, it's a "small c" catholic endeavor.  Every action I take is an act of war against competitors in other culture.  But as for the violent, organized side of the war with terror, well, the silliest thing I've heard over the past several years goes to the effect of, "Killing terrorists doesn't help...we can't kill our way out of this."  Friends and neighbors, whether or not we can kill our way out of the terrorist problem, killing enough of the right people makes the problem considerably smaller.

Stand back.  Look afresh.  We are, indeed, experiencing one of humanity's intermittent waves of fanaticism, which are invariably associated with cultures and societies in crisis.  But what the "experts" miss is that, in a bizarre fashion, President Bush is correct when he declares that we are not at war with Islam (although a significant portion of the Islamic world believes itself to be at war with us).  The various terrorist groups affiliated with or aping al-Qaeda aren't really Islamic at their core.  They're pre-Islamic.  They're blood cults that practice human sacrifice.  Mohammed would be horrified.  This is just the sort of primitive desert religion against which he rebelled, spiritually and practically.  The videotaped beheadings, complete with high priests, liturgy and sermons, hark back to the earliest Middle-Eastern civilizations, to the days of winged devils thirsty for blood.  Human sacrifice to appease a vindictive god is deeply rooted in the human psyche--certainly, more deeply so than we wish to acknowledge.  Every continent witnessed it.  Looking at the wave of beheadings, bombings and assassinations for "Allah" in the Middle East, one might declare that "The Aztecs are back."  And, of course, transplanted to new turf--the only difference being that the Aztecs had art, which Arab fanatics do not.

Seriously, I view 9/11, the ceremonial beheadings, the volunteers for self-immolation and the lust to kill the innocent (all forbidden by the Koran) as the resurgence of the most primitive human religious impulses.  These are blood offerings--whether or not the terrorists are cognizant of the meaning of their actions (self-awareness is hardly the foremost human trait).  The terrorists are not only blasphemers, but terrible enemies of Koranic Islam (as opposed to the various syncretic variants, some of which have a peculiar trend toward feigned or actual self-annihilation, from certain Sufi sects to Shi'a flagellants).

Yes, we should do what we can to facilitate the progress toward justice, the rule-of-law and, where feasible, democracy in the Middle East.  But we also must be realistic and recognize that we can only play on the margins (though it's still necessary to play).  We can force Arabs and their neighbors to do many things, but we cannot force them to succeed.  I fear that we're see the explosive growth of a nihilistic, "apres nous, le deluge" culture among the young males of the Middle East.  And if Arabs and other regional peoples do not choose to embrace the possibility of constructive change (which involves rather more of the Protestant work ethic than I've encountered anywhere in the region), all we can do is to limit their capability to do us harm.

I am, of course, a great believer in attempting to understand the cultures that spawn terrorism.  After all, it's far easier to kill someone you understand.  And as far as the hard-core "pre-Islamic" terrorists go, I see no alternative whatsoever to killing them for as many years, decades or generations as it takes.  After all, it took the civilized world from 1866 to 1945 to get the Germans under control, and that was much tougher than hunting down and killing terrorists.  Oh, in case anyone has forgotten:  We had to kill quite a lot of Germans and the world has not missed them.

Therapeutic violence is greatly underrated.  We're in an age of civilizational Darwinism.  As every age is.

FP: Our final round has begun. Mr. Leiken go ahead. Feel free to respond to what has been said. And kindly include in your answer what you think of Bush’s victory and whether or not it is a positive development for our terror war.

Leiken: The Bush doctrine states accurately that terrorism means pre-emption. Pre-emption demands intelligence. Intelligence requires surveillance. But that is difficult when the enemy is foreign and refrains from using means liable to interception. So intelligence also requires infiltration. Infiltration, if you are not Arabic or Muslim, means alliances with countries that are (e.g. Pakistan, Arabs, Africa, Central Asia), or who know how to (Israel, France) or can support in other ways (everyone else).

From a counter-terrorist perspective Bush’s victory is good news and bad news. One plus is that he won’t brook repealing the Patriot Act and can retain tough guys like Ashcroft was. But Bush does not seem very interested in unifying the rest of the country against terrorism, a step that New Gingrich in a November 9 op-ed in the Washington Post said would be facilitated by recognition of mistakes in Iraq.

Abroad, the positive side is Bush’s resolute support of Israel’s security. He won’t sacrifice their safety to win over Europeans. The negative side is that we do need the Europeans if we’re to build global counter-terrorist unity.

Iraq is now the central front against terrorism, but can we win? If we can, Bush is our man. If we can’t (and the January elections may tell us), then we might have the wrong man.

The Bush administration has shown little strategic capacity -- to unite our friends against the main enemy and to divide our enemies. He’s achieved the opposite. A mistake Bush-Cheney will not acknowledge is stubbornly insisting on a Saddam-Osama “connection” (see my recent article “The Truth about the Saddam - al Qaeda Connection,” on InTheNationalInterest.com). On September 11^th we learned we faced an existential threat in the radical Islamist movement. And we knew that the two things we had to avoid in confronting it were a land war in Asia and urban warfare. Now we have both. 

Laqueur: This debate like most has been a bit chaotic. Not surprisingly because "terrorism" has many aspects and means different things and everyone talks about what is closest to his heart.--Iraq, jihad and so on.  And we tend to forget that while these are the most urgent problems and dangers the terrorist problem is a much wider one. For the first time in history, very small groups of people have access to weapons of mass destruction. In other words  terrorist attacks may come from all parts of the political spectrum, political, religious, social,  from small groups of fanatics and madmen (or women)   Terrorism will be the prevailing form of conflict. How to prevent this I do not know. Perhaps there is no answer.  This debate has not even started.

FP: Ok, I guess we have to have another symposium then. Mr. Peters go ahead.

Peters: Bush's victory simply means that the majority of Americans know we are in a war and must fight.  No matter how media sophisticates may parse voter motivations, Bush's re-election sent a message that we Americans have not wavered in our determination to defeat our most implacable, if not yet our most dangerous, enemies, the apocalyptic terrorists of the greater Middle East. 

As I articulate these concluding lines, news has been coming in from the Second Battle of Fallujah--our reduction of a city that had, for a few months, become the new world capital of terror.  The reports tell of hostage execution halls, of torture chambers and months of crusted blood on floors and courtyards where kidnap victims had been ceremoniously beheaded.  So I return to my theme that these terrorists are not Muslims, despite their recitations from the Koran.  They may think of themselves as Muslims, but they've strayed backward in time to primitive blood-cult behavior.  Those gory "altars" in Fallujah are closer to the altars atop the Aztec temples than to anything sanctioned by Mohammed.  We face a blood-cult of death whose hunger for victims is insatiable.  We have to kill the "high priests" and as many of their followers as it requires to bring the world a semblance of peace and security.  This isn't really a battle of ideas, but a contest of souls.

FP: Mr. Pacepa, last word goes to you.

Pacepa: My generation is still grateful to America’s leaders of the World War II era who, instead of containing Hitler, destroyed his regime and rebuilt Western Europe—and Japan—with strong democracies. This American determination changed the face of the world and brought about an unprecedented period of peace. Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi stated during a 2003 visit to Washington: “Every time I see the U.S. flag, I don’t see the flag only as representative of a country, but I see it as a symbol of democracy and of freedom.”

Now America is also in a position to help the Islamic world normalize its society. In order to do that, we should get rid of the Hitlers of the Arab and Islamic world, and help their downtrodden slaves see the light of democracy—Arafat’s death can only move this process forward. Our recent elections overwhelmingly showed that Americans are ready. Let’s forget “sensitive” wars—like the one in Vietnam, where we lost over 50,000 soldiers and a good part of America’s international prestige. Let’s return to the traditions of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who accepted nothing short of unconditional surrender from our enemies. Let’s try to make Iraq into a kind of Germany of the Islamic world.

FP: Thank you Mr. Pacepa. Mihai Pacepa, Ralph Peters, Walter Laueur and Robert Leiken, it was an honor to be in your company. We’ll see you again soon.

Previous Symposiums:

Iraq: Fight or Flight? Greg Bates, David Lindorff, Clifford D. May and Jed Babbin.

Terror and Poverty: A Connection? Salim Mansur, Mustafa Akyol and John Loftus.

The Left's Hatred of Bush: Robert Jensen, Joshua Frank, Elinor Burkett and Daniel Flynn.

Chechnya: Russia's Palestine? Ariel Cohen, David Satter and John Loftus.

Palestinians on Palestine: Walid Shoebat, Kamal Nawash and Ray Hanania.

Why the Mullahs Murdered Atefeh Rajabi: Donna Hughes, Nancy Kobrin and Banfsheh Zand-Bonazzi.