LEADING ARTICLE: Keeping calm after the bomb

FOR a day or two, Oklahoma City 1995 looked like one of the watersheds of 20th-century history, an event that would rank alongside Pearl Harbor 1941 or Dallas 1963. The symbolism was profound: international terrorism had come to the epitome of Middle America, a Bible Belt city, packed with churches, built on oil, fed on corn. "The age of innocence is ending," declared the Los Angeles Times while President Clinton spoke of "an attack on the United States, our way of life". "This doesn't happen here," said the New York Times. "It happens in countries so far away, so different, they might as well be on the dark side of the moon."

Now, all that has changed. Symbolism was still there but it was entirely different. Far from being the result of some alien infection, the bombing of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building represents a disease that sprang from America's own heartland. The chief suspects, we know now, are not peripatetic brown men, but all-American white boys, extreme manifestations of exactly the culture that had been supposedly violated - members of the Michigan Militia which reveres the Second Amendment, guaranteeing "the right of the people to bear and keep arms". It does happen there, and it happens every day. The US has nearly 25,000 murders a year, a figure which will be fractionally increased by the appalling casualties in Oklahoma. Many of them are carried out with guns, which remain largely uncontrolled. That is the American way of life; only the use of more than 1,000lbs of explosives makes the Oklahoma City outrage somehow un-American.

It is as easy to get carried away with this second set of symbols as it was with the first. The FBI may yet prove to have arrested the wrong people. But terrorism, by its nature, deals in symbols. It is not, as people sometimes imply, a purely 20th-century phenomenon. Terrorism was familiar even to the first-century Palestinians. The Sicarri, a small religious sect, destroyed the houses of high priests, burnt public archives and granaries, stabbed their enemies among the Jerusalem holiday crowds, even, according to one account, tried to sabotage the water supplies. Many modern terrorist groups echo this kind of random fanaticism. What is puzzling to the 20th-century mind is the lack of any coherent aim. The demand for a united Ireland, an independent Kenya, a separate Tamil state, a Jewish or a Palestinian homeland - these at least are comprehensible. Sometimes, as with the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, terrorism is almost respectable: it has often been said that one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. But many modern terrorist groups scarcely bother to articulate even a short-term demand. Their actions seem like cries of rage, more psychic than political in their function. They wish merely to destabilise, to spread fear and uncertainty, to undermine confidence in institutions. This is why symbols such as federal buildings are so important. And this is why it is equally important for the media and politicians to remain calm, to keep a sense of proportion, to avoid jumping to conclusions.

Terrorism is far more of a threat to liberal and democratic societies than it has ever been to a full-blooded dictatorship. As Professor Walter Laqueur pointed out in his magisterial study of the subject, even third- rate dictatorships can put down terrorism with great ease. This is because they can dispense with the niceties of liberal traditions: easy public access to government buildings, freedom from arbitrary arrest, trial by jury, respect for the rights of ethnic and other minorities. Britain and other countries have accepted small erosions of these traditions to meet terrorist threats. They have reduced but not eliminated incidents, and the truth is that no society calling itself democratic can ever do so.

A bombing, like an earthquake, can cause terrible loss of life. But, as both Japan and America have learnt, no city can be made earthquake- proof. They must also learn that no democratic society can be made terrorism- proof. Take reasonable precautions, hunt down the culprits, let the law take its course. But do not talk about threats to a way of life or an end of innocence. That way lies the totalitarian state. Democracies need to keep their nerve.