Three Principles for Victory 

Binyamin Netanyahu 
January, 04 2002

The United States will complete its victory over terrorism if it
continues to adhere to the three principles it has established to 
win this war. 

First is moral clarity. 

In his historic speech before the US Congress, President George W. 
Bush boldly declared that nothing justifies terrorism. No grievance, 
whether real or imagined, can ever justify terror. Terrorism - the 
deliberate and systematic targeting of civilians, as opposed to the 
unintentional civilian casualties that are the tragic consequences 
of justified warfare - must be seen, like Nazism, as an unmitigated 
evil. This clarity is essential in fighting terror because it denies 
the terrorists their main weapon: the moral equivocation of many of 
their victims who, facing an unremitting propaganda campaign aimed 
at justifying terrorism, are duped into believing that there is some 
justice behind terrorist demands and that therefore these demands 
must be at least partially met. 

Second is strategic clarity. 

Today, the US understands that the best way to defeat terror is not 
to concentrate on bringing individual terrorists to justice, but 
rather, to destroy the regimes that support terror. Terrorist 
organizations are not suspended in mid-air. They train their 
operatives, indoctrinate their recruits, and hatch their plots from 
territory sheltered by certain regimes. Take away the support of 
sovereign states, and the entire scaffolding of international terror 
collapses into the dust. American power topples the Taliban regime 
in Afghanistan, and the al-Qaida network there crumbles on its own. 
The United States must now act similarly against the other terror
regimes - Iran, Iraq, Arafat's dictatorship, Syria, and a few others.
Some of these regimes will have to be toppled, some of them punished 
and deterred. But all must be made to understand a simple message: 
surrender terrorism or surrender power. 

Third, the imperative of victory. 

The United States understands that the best way to defeat international
terror is to defeat it. This is no trivial statement, for there are
those who believe that the root cause of terror is despair, and that 
the best way to fight terror is to replace this despair with hope. 
But the United States has now taken a completely opposite view. The 
best way to eradicate terror is to sow despair among its adherents, 
and to destroy all hope that the terrorists will achieve their 
objectives by resorting to terror. Just as any victory for terror 
emboldens the entire terror network, the defeat of terror in any part 
of the network devastates the confidence of potential terrorists
everywhere and diminishes their ranks. 

Indeed, the root cause of terror is not despair, but a totalitarian
mindset that believes that anything is justified to achieve its 
ideological ends. Worse, the more brutal the means that must be 
employed to achieve those ends - blowing up children, destroying 
skyscrapers and, if necessary, annihilating entire cities - the more 
glorious those ends become in the twisted minds of these fanatics. 
This is why from Lenin to Hitler to the ayatollahs, terrorism has 
been indispensable to totalitarianism. That is also why, in countless 
struggles for liberation carried out by people with a democratic 
mindset, such as the French resistance against the Nazis or the
struggle for civil rights in the United States, terror was never used. 
But a totalitarian mindset is only a necessary condition for the 
practice of terror. What must also be present is hope. The more that 
hope grows, the more emboldened the terrorists become and the more 
new recruits will flock to join them. This is why the sense of 
inevitable victory over terrorism is so crucial to this struggle. 

The effect of these three principles has fundamentally changed the
geopolitical reality in Israel's favor. Moral clarity will make it
increasingly difficult for our enemies to justify the terror 
unleashed against us in the courts of public opinion. Strategic 
clarity has given us a freer hand to dismantle Arafat's terrorist 
regime. While the threat of his regime's collapse has forced Arafat 
to take steps to escape imminent danger, this is only a temporary, 
tactical measure. To fully restore our deterrence and pave a road 
toward a peaceful future, we must make any potential Palestinian 
leadership understand that they will pay the heaviest price for 
waging a terrorist war against Israel. The imperative of victory 
must teach us that the way to reverse the tide of terror that has
engulfed our country is to defeat it decisively. The notion that
Israel's war on terror will be served by offering Arafat a state is 
absurd. Such a step will only create a sovereign terrorist fortress 
in the heart of the Middle East. 

All free societies must continue to adhere to these three principles 
if we are to prevent the demons that lurk in the dark recesses of 
mankind from obtaining the power to destroy our civilization.