Something Wicked
This Way Comes

The attacks of Sept. 11 were unprecedented in scale and magnitude anywhere in the world, says political science professor Stephen Bowers. Even Israel, which has always been "faced with the threat of annihilation, has never had to deal with the reality of over 5,000 dead."

And, Bowers warns, that's just a taste of the "complete destruction of the United States" that bin Laden's cohorts have vowed.

Sept. 11's colossal devastation has intensified the demands on Bowers, who, as head of JMU's William R. Nelson Institute for Public Affairs, has long been orienting scholars and international decision makers to the landscape of global terror.

His office is littered with the rubble of someone hounded by deadlines. Samples from his massive collection of Russian military hats and helmets are stacked in tipsy towers, while piles of papers and reference material line the office perimeter. On the wall above his desk hangs a poster of Vladimir Lenin and another of Stephen the Great, the founder of modern Moldova. Pausing in his analysis underneath the latter, Bowers beams long enough to underscore the lack of resemblance. Sharing the same name and nation will have to do. Never mind either the country's lack of modernity, Moldova is Bowers' specialty, and where, in

the Caucasus of Central Asia, JMU maintains a headquarters for conducting research and faculty and student exchange visits and partnerships with Romanian and Moldo-van universities.

Bowers coordinates the analysis of the festering tensions and terrorism among the ethnic peoples of the former Soviet territories and presents them to international opinion leaders. By obtaining and publishing the views of central Asian scholars and presenting them to the wider world through white papers and conferences, Bowers says he hopes his work will "propose some suggestions for conflict resolution. Some of the nongovernmental organizations with which we work stress conflict resolution as their overall goal. It's looking at terrorism not in terms of how to make a military response, but rather how to do the sort of long-term response that alleviates the tensions that are brought about by terrorist activities."

In other words, Bowers says, solve the conflict before it erupts into violence. "Its benefit for the United States is in recognizing that the need for conflict resolution is not really between the United States and Country X, but between Country X and Country Y," he explains. "It is much better to look at those countries and find some venue in which they can try to alleviate their disputes so it doesn't drag us into it."

That's possible with the republics of the Caucasus, where disputes smoldered under 70 years of Soviet suppression and where violence is not yet a way of life.

But there's no reasoning with the fanatics who struck the United States on Sept. 11. "They have declared total war," Bowers warns, "and it presents us, for the first time as westerners, with a real clear choice. ... It has given us occasion to think about the absolute necessity of doing things to save American lives," he says. "It's not like the Gulf War, when what was at stake was our access to Middle Eastern oil or our protection of an ally. These are concepts. What we're looking at is not a concept. The reality is massive destruction and massive loss of life, and the threat is of even greater loss of life. There's nothing in our experience, at least for the past 60 years [since World War II], that's comparable to the magnitude of that threat.

"The campaign here is much more hysterical than anything we've seen," says the political science professor. "This is not like the IRA saying, 'let us sit at the table and let's come to terms about this.'"

What we have is a frightening arrangement that's not centralized or controlled by bin Laden, but inspired by him. Bowers says that's a powerful distinction to draw, because"it means that once Osama bin Laden is captured or killed that things will continue to happen."

"And the word today is clear: Just kill as many Americans as possible," Bowers says. The agenda is simply American death and destruction.

"These people don't want to come to the table," he says. "You don't so much hear them say, 'Quit your evil ways and become Muslims' as much as you hear them say, 'You reject all tenets of Islam and therefore you should be destroyed.'"

And, yes, they would use biological, chemical and nuclear weapons to do that, says Bowers, who is long accustomed to weighing terrorist threats. "If you don't hesitate at killing 5,000 people just going about their work," he asks, "then why would you hesitate at killing 50,000?"

Pam Brock