Terrorism over Tripoli

Terrorism over Tripoli by Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn's "Terrorism over Tripoli" is a short polemical essay, collected in *Howard Zinn on War* (with an introduction by Marilyn B. Young), that dismantles the moral distinction Americans habitually draw between "terrorism" and "retaliation" or "war." Zinn opens from the April 1986 bombing of a West Berlin discotheque, an attack that killed two people, including one American soldier, and that the Reagan administration attributed to Libyan-sponsored terrorism. In response, Reagan ordered U.S. F-111 bombers to strike Tripoli, an operation that killed roughly a hundred people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, among them members of Muammar Qaddafi's own family. Zinn's essay is built around the plain moral symmetry between these two acts: if terrorism is defined, as it commonly is, as the deliberate killing of innocent people in order to make a political point, then the American bombing of a crowded Libyan city meets that definition exactly as much as the bombing of a crowded European nightclub does. The nationality of the bomber, the uniform worn, or the legal apparatus invoked to authorize the strike does not, in Zinn's argument, change the nature of the act for the people who are killed. The piece proceeds less as a chronological narrative than as a sustained argument, characteristic of Zinn's style, stripping away the euphemisms that surround state violence: words like "retaliation," "deterrence," "surgical strike," and "sending a message" are treated as rhetorical devices that launder killing into policy. Zinn interrogates the asymmetry of moral judgment by which a government can label an act terrorism when committed by an enemy and call the identical act justice, self-defense, or a legitimate military operation when committed by itself or an ally. He points to the civilian toll in Tripoli, stressing that the great majority of the dead were ordinary residents rather than combatants or terrorists, and uses this fact to puncture the claim that the American raid was a precise punishment of the guilty. He is equally skeptical of the evidentiary basis offered for the strike, questioning how confidently Libyan responsibility for the discotheque bombing had actually been established and noting the speed with which retaliation followed suspicion, rather than proof. Zinn extends the argument beyond the single incident to a broader critique of American exceptionalism in matters of violence: the tendency of U.S. political culture and media to treat "our" bombs as inherently different in kind from "their" bombs, and to measure outrage selectively according to the nationality of the victims and the nationality of the perpetrators. He situates the Tripoli raid within a longer pattern of U.S. military interventions, in which the killing of civilians is treated as regrettable but incidental "collateral damage," never as terrorism itself, regardless of the death toll or of the absence of any genuine military necessity. The essay's most quoted line, "There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people," crystallizes this argument: patriotic justification, in Zinn's reading, functions to hide moral responsibility rather than to dissolve it, and no invocation of national security, retaliation, or the fight against terrorism converts the killing of civilians into something other than what it is. As with much of Zinn's political writing, the essay is unapologetically argumentative rather than descriptive; it does not attempt journalistic balance between the U.S. government's justification and its critics, but instead marshals the facts of the bombing to serve a single thesis about the hypocrisy embedded in official definitions of terrorism. Marilyn B. Young's introduction to the collection situates this and Zinn's other war-related essays within his lifelong project of historical revisionism from below, reading American military history through the experience of its civilian victims rather than through the strategic or diplomatic frameworks that usually organize such accounts. "Terrorism over Tripoli" thus functions both as a specific indictment of the 1986 Libya raid and as a compact statement of Zinn's general moral philosophy regarding state violence: that the ethical weight of killing does not change according to who orders it, what uniform is worn, or what word is used to describe it afterward. Sources: - [Howard Zinn on War - Howard Zinn](https://www.howardzinn.org/collection/zinn-on-war/) - [Howard Zinn on War - Zinn Education Project](https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/howard-zinn-on-war/) - [Howard Zinn on War by Howard Zinn: 9781609801335 | PenguinRandomHouse.com](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/213058/howard-zinn-on-war-by-howard-zinn-introduction-by-marilyn-b-young/) - [1986 United States bombing of Libya - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_United_States_bombing_of_Libya) - [There Is No Flag Large Enough… - Portland Flag Association](https://portlandflag.org/2016/02/20/there-is-no-flag-large-enough/)

By Howard Zinn · First published 1993 · Genre: Political Essay, Social Criticism, Polemical Writing · 1,514 words

First lines

In April of 1986, a bomb exploded in a discotheque in West Berlin, killing two people, one an American soldier. It was unquestionably an act of terrorism. Libya's tyrannical leader, Muommar Khadafi, had a record of involvement in terrorism, although in this case there seemed to be no clear evidence of who was responsible. Nevertheless, President Reagan ordered that bombers be sent over Libya's capital of Tripoli, killing perhaps a hundred people, almost all civilians. I wrote this piece, which could not find publication in the press, to argue against the principle of retaliation. I am always furious at the killing of innocent people for some political cause, but I wanted to broaden the definition of terrorism to include governments, which are guilty of terrorism far more often, and on an infinitely larger scale, than bands of revolutionaries or nationalists. The essay became part of a collection of my writings entitled Failure to Quit (Common Courage Press, 1993).

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U.S. foreign policy · Libya · bombing campaign · civilian casualties · retaliation · Reagan administration · international relations · ethics of war · terrorism definition · military intervention · Middle East · Cold War

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