No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century [Hardcover]

Walter Laqueur (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0826414354 | ISBN-13: 978-0826414359 | Publication Date: May 1, 2003

While the destruction of the World Trade Center and the strike against the Pentagon shocked the world at large, experts on terrorism like Walter Laqueur couldn't feign complete surprise. In No End to War, Laqueur, who has devoted three decades to the study of political violence, answers the most-often raised questions about terrorism in the light of 9/11 and the still unsolved Anthrax letters. First, what constitutes terrorism? What is new about the "new" terrorism? Why is the Muslim world the most potent breeding ground of this new terrorism? To what extent is religion itself a factor? Is there a clash of civilizations between the Muslim world and the largely Christian or post-Christian West? Is America at fault? Israel? Did European nations turn a blind eye to terrorists and their sympathizers in their midst? To what extent are poverty and oppression the causes of terrorism? What is the likelihood that terrorists will obtain weapons of mass destruction-chemical, biological, or nuclear? Why was the United States unprepared for 9/11? Why the intelligence failure? Are Islamic terrorists the only terrorists we need to fear? What about other terrorists from the right of the left, ecoterrorists or anti-globalization terrorists? And finally, what is the best defense against terrorism?>

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

One of the West's leading scholars of terrorism, author of The New Terrorism and other titles, takes on the vexing questions about its origins and manifestations and provides a lot to chew on along the way. Laqueur, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., is at his strongest in relating the history of terrorism and how the motivations underlying such violence have changed. At the end of the 19th century, he writes, secular leftists in Russia aimed at overthrowing that regime and their targets were limited in number; the range of victims became much wider beginning in the 1970s. Laqueur also emphasizes a range of causes of terror, such as the incompetence of Arab governments and a desire to use Israel as a scapegoat for Arab problems. (Israel, he thinks, should give back the West Bank and Gaza Strip to help its own democracy, not because it would eliminate one excuse for Arab and Muslim fury.) Laqueur also ridicules some media outlets for refusing to call a spade a spade, referring to terrorists as militants or using other euphemisms. Unfortunately, his reasoning can sometimes be hard to follow. On the one hand, he argues that poverty and Western policies do not cause terrorism, but elsewhere he says that if the world were less economically inequitable, there would likely be less terrorism. In an appendix, the author states that while a definition of terrorism is impossible, the vast majority of us know it when we see it. Some may find it difficult to share his certainty.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Laqueur is with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a D.C. foreign-policy think-tank, and he was a well-published authority on "postmodern" terrorism long before September 11. In his first major work since then, the author discusses what is (and what isn't) new about international terrorism, and predicts a long road ahead in dealing with aggressive fanaticism. Taking particular issue with the notion that terrorism can be dealt with by alleviating global economic disparity, Laqueur argues that the "drain the swamp and the mosquitoes will disappear" strategy does not apply to wealthy internationally focused groups like al-Qaeda, whose ideological roots more closely resemble nineteenth-century anarchism than social-justice-minded class struggle. We would do better, he argues, to invoke psychopathology rather than economics in analyzing suicidal terrorism, and blame, in part, the increasingly radical rhetoric of mainstream Islam. Edward Said fans, take note: Laqueur's unabashedly conservative argument--ultimately based on the notion that being hated is a natural consequence of being great and powerful--is at heart a pointed critique of the postcolonialist sympathy for radicalism, made all the more compelling by the author's extensive background in terrorism studies. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Continuum (May 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826414354
• ISBN-13: 978-0826414359
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,099,799 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Scholarly Look at an Elusive Topic, July 18, 2003

By 

Jeffery Steele (Taipei, Taiwan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (Hardcover)

Academicians still struggle to define terrorism even after more than a hundred years of case studies to draw upon. The main problem, Walter Laqueur contends, is that terrorism is always evolving outside of the conceptual frameworks developed for it. Where once terrorism was thought to be mainly targeted attacks on political targets for symbolic value to highlight a particular political problem, it now has changed to include mass attacks on civilians as a tactic in low-level guerrilla warfare.

While Laqueur's account focuses mainly on the present-day phenomenon of Islamist-inspired terrorism, it also spends time on other terror groups with other agendas, and it's always informed by the general history of terrorism. In his chapter on suicide, for example, he not only writes about the obvious acts like 9-11 and the Palestinian attacks on Israel, but also mentions the Japanese kamikaze attacks during WW2 and the European idea of noble sacrifice in the Middle Ages. Laqueur's purpose in providing this context is to show that while the potential devastation by terror attacks has increased, the essential motivations triggering them still have historical precedents.

This is not another book on terrorism by someone who discovered the subject only after the attacks on 9-11. Laqueur has been studying the issue for more than three decades and his bibliography reveals sources taken from at least six different languages, including Russian, German and Arabic. What mars an otherwise great book are the author's clunky style and his sometimes questionable use of historical examples that he compares to modern terrorism.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great detail but disorganized, December 18, 2003

By 

C. Brown (Evanston, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (Hardcover)

For facts and details this book is a marvel. You will not only learn about the situation regarding terrorism in different parts of the world but about groups and splinter groups and how they differ on their philosophy toward terror. The author's knowledge of the field is truly encyclopedic. The book is not tightly organized and several times I wondered where the author was going with his line of thought and how, exactly, it tied in to the chapter title. Laqueur doesn't like to leave an issue without a thorough examination and more than once he would pull himself back to the topic after a discourse. I got the impression that this book may have been hurried to publication. However, his thought is so interesting that I was willing to hear him out. Loaded with details, this book might be a bit hard to digest for someone looking for a good, easily readable overview of the field and recent history of terrorism. A better book for that is Jonathan White's "Terrorism: An Introduction". I finished Laqueur's book thinking what a complicated and dangerous political situation exists in so many parts of the world and how "progress" is a fragile thing, mostly a matter of people having money and lots of goodies to spend it on instead of raging at each other. You don't get overly irritated with others if you have enough money to be preoccupied with your own comfort and possessions in a place of your own. Americans such as I are truly clueless about the depth of turmoil and resentment that roils the world. Laqueur lets us see how there are many fanatics that can loosely organize for a cause, and quite a few mentally disturbed individuals who have a cause all their own. Both the groups and the individuals are using more powerful means to terrorize. The future has always been unpredictable, but now it will be more explosive than ever.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Well written but not very thoughtful, November 21, 2004

By 

Jill Malter ([e-mail]) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (Hardcover)

The more I thought about this book, the less I liked it.

Oh, there is plenty to like about the book. It discusses roots of terrorism, jihad, suicide missions, intelligence failures by the West, anti-Americanism, and future potential battlefields.

It defines terrorism as "the systematic use of murder, injury, and destruction, or threat of such acts, aimed at achieving political ends." And it mocks those who insist on calling terrorists "activists" as though they were merely devoting some time to a political party or local club. He asks if we then ought to call Jack the Ripper "an amateur abdominal surgeon."

Laqueur explains that the main threat now is the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. He also discusses the connection between terrorists and the drug trade but points out that these groups are not natural allies: criminals want to preserve the status quo that keeps them in business, while terrorists want to mess things up.

And the author points out that there is no end in sight to terror: the terrorists will go on fighting for a very long time whether we fight back or not. For example, many Islamists believe that it is a sin against nature to allow Jews to exist in Jerusalem or Israel. This is not conducive to peace.

Laqueur also points out cases in which media supporters of terror have gone way out of bounds, including the Guardian, in England.

But there was one thing about this book that got me thinking more than any other. Namely the claim that Israel was foolish not to have surrendered the entire West Bank to the Arabs - any Arabs - immediately after winning the six-day war, even without any truce or peace or anything. Was this just a slip on Laqueur's part, or a symptom of poor thinking about terrorism in general?

I think it is a symptom of a more serious problem in the author's thinking. After all, there are two errors we see here. First, we see the claim that it would have been moral and practical for a land-poor nation to give disputed land to an enemy that holds itself to be superior and holds you to be trash. Second, we see the claim that it would be possible to convince the majority of the people in a democracy to simply roll over and unilaterally surrender their rights to an annihilationist enemy, given the disastrous results they had doing just that in World War 2. And I think this is a symptom of a larger problem of blaming ourselves just a little too much for the sins of the criminals who attack us.

What I think Laqueur needs to do is adopt some moral standards. There is a difference between being just and unjust. One can try to pretend that one does not know who one is, a Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Christian, Chinese, Arab, American, man, woman, adult, child, or whatever. And then try to come up with a just solution, knowing that one would find out who one was only afterwards. That would help clarify blame a little better. Another question Laqueur ought to ask is this: is he refusing to demand rights for his "friends" that he routinely demands for his enemies? I think he fails both questions on this little test. There is no need to make matters worse by alienating people who have the option of supporting terrorism, but I think that outright appeasement is almost always terribly counterproductive, and tends to establish a right of the terrorists to attack and oppress others.

So I'll give this book three stars. I don't recommend it. I think you ought to go out and buy Sharansky's book (The Case for Democracy) instead. Or maybe Paul Berman's (Terror and Liberalism). What we all need is truth and moral clarity. And this book gives us quite a bit of it, but not enough.