Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 2, Summer 2003 | Page 98

94 Popular Culture Review some suggestions as to how they might be addressed beyond military reprisal. Nevertheless, the novelist remains pessimistic as to whether the cycle of violence may be broken. He observes that a Palestinian firebrand, referring to the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1976 Munich Olympics, told him in a 1982 Beirut interview that “terror is theater.” Certainly, the attacks upon the Pentagon and World Trade Center fit this definition of what the anarchist Bakunin termed “the propaganda of the act.” While this scenario has played out on the streets of New York City, Wash ington, D. C., Kabul, and Baghdad, scenes of violence between Israelis and Pales tinians accelerated in 2001-2003. The breakdown of negotiations between Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000 led to the Second Infatada, Israeli military reprisals, suicide bombers, Israeli reoccupation of West Bank cit ies, and increasing violence on both sides. In the ensuing carnage, the economic and political origins of this conflict are all too often ignored by pundits and the media. In his 1983 novel The Little Drummer Girl, le Carre, however, sought to examine the causes for the Israeli-Palestinian clash, representing a rare Western popular culture effort to portray the Palestinian cause and people in addition to the Israeli perspective. While The Little Drummer Girl and its 1984 film adaptation provoked controversy, the root causes of the conflict, which le Carre attempted to incorporate into his popular fiction, have remained off the radar screen for most Americans. The events of September 11th, the war on terrorism, the U.S. military invasion of Iraq, and escalating Israeli-Palestinian violence remind us that these root causes may be ignored at our own peril. Accordingly, a reexamination of what le Carre had to say about terrorism in 1983 may shed some light on where we have been and where we are going in our efforts to understand the phenomenon of ter rorism. In the 1960s and 1970s, le Carre published such popular espionage fiction as The Looking Glass War (1965); A Small Town in Germany (1968); Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy (1974); The Honourable Schoolboy (1977); and Smiley's People (1980). Le Carre’s spy fiction is characterized by an ambiguity regarding what the author considers the moral bankruptcy of the Cold War. In a world where treachery, de ceit, and betrayal are the norm, the author fears that the means used to defend Western society may produce a society not worth defending. Espionage becomes a metaphor for both personal and political betrayal. In summarizing the espionage novelist’s career, literary scholar Peter Lewis writes, “For le Carre, human life is irreducibly paradoxical: victory at one level requires defeat at another; success is inevitably characterized by failure; to achieve a desirable objective, something else of value must be sacrificed; good ends may well demand unpleasant means, and good means are likely to produce the wrong ends. Above power struggles, whether between nations, groups, or even individuals.”2