Mass-Casualty Terrorism's Next Phase: Tool for Hidden State Actors in a Revised Version of Multipolar Covert War Gaming*

Abstract

Abstract This article recognizes the transformation that has occurred in the phenomenon of terrorism in recent years enabling the “street-theater” proselytizing modality of the 1960s through the 1980s to metamorphose into a twenty-first-century state-sponsored internecine form of covert warfare. The operative methodology in this case is the clandestine transfer of WMD materials, hardware, and expertise from U.S. opponents such as Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia to anti-U.S. terror organizations such as Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Jemaah Islamiya, and Al Ikhwan (the [Muslim] Brotherhood). This necessitates a new terror-fighting paradigm: Withstand high casualties and provide a meaningful U.S. government response to each mass-casualty incident, or invite disarray in the social and political nexus supporting the administration. To do otherwise would likely compromise the government's counterterrorism programs and result in highly unpopular, repressive social controls lasting for the duration of the battle; in this case a decade or more of prolonged, drawn-out struggles. Ultimately the stage will be set for a reversal of counterterrorism policy and regime change. Moreover, the U.S. public may prove unable to stomach the level of carnage and material loss resulting from devastating WMD attacks coupled with restricted safeguards of civil liberties during an extended fight for national survival. The United States will likely face its greatest challenges since the Civil War if Russia, China, and the Islamic nations conspire together to humble America through coordinated WMD strikes against Americans at home and abroad in an orchestrated campaign to end U.S. global hegemony.