The Pensacola Shooting and the Misconceiving of Terrorism

Paul R. Pillar

Security, Americas

Most anti-U.S. terrorism today is not likely to be state-directed but instead will involve the kind of initiative by angry individuals that probably were involved in the Pensacola attack.

The shooting at the Pensacola naval air station and the Trump administration’s reaction to it illustrate much of what is wrong with how international terrorism is discussed in public discourse today. This includes a fixation on the question of whether there are “links” between the perpetrator and known groups as if the answer to that question determines whether we should worry about the incident or not. That focus follows from thinking about terrorism in terms of evil designs by certain groups or states and their leaders and not in terms of how individuals can become so angry over conditions or causes important to them that they resort to terrorist violence.

Such a perspective tends to overlook the ways in which U.S. policies stimulate anti-U.S. terrorism. The suspect in the Pensacola attack probably was the author of earlier messages on Twitter complaining about U.S. support to Israel and “crimes against Muslims”—familiar themes in terrorism against American targets, including prior jihadist terrorism within the United States.  Such attacks are still dastardly crimes, and the guilty party is the person wielding the gun or knife, but that does not erase the fact that U.S. policies have much to do with how many such crimes occur and how many Americans fall victim to terrorism.

Another major distortion is to bend treatment of the incident according to policy preferences regarding certain Middle Eastern states. The Trump administration’s immediate response to the attack was to bend over backward to try to keep it from upsetting relations with Saudi Arabia, the homeland of the attacker. President Donald Trump passed along a thoughts-and-prayers message from King Salman, without passing along any assurances about Saudi investigative help. This evokes memories of past terrorist attacks in which Saudis were involved, Americans were victims, and the Saudi regime was of little help in the subsequent investigation and actually impeded the investigators. Such incidents included the 1995 bombing of a compound in Riyadh housing managers of a U.S. military assistance program and the bombing of a U.S. military barracks at Khobar Towers in eastern Saudi Arabia.