Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Like many Americans, I'm searching for some explanation of the terrorism that has befallen us. Although I'm an avid reader of several good daily newspapers, no analysis found in those pages has provided me with any particular insight. What I was looking for, however, I found in Walter Laqueur's No End To War.

Laqueur is a scholar who has devoted much of his career to studying and writing about terrorism. His book provides an historical perspective to today's terrorism, which he demonstrates differs markedly and frighteningly from the terrorism of the past. He debunks many popular myths about today's terrorists, such as that terrorism is caused by poverty, or that the peaceful settlement of disputes, which necessarily involves compromises, will stop the terrorists from further atrocities. Laqueur admits that much is not known about terrorism, and he proposes no particular one course of action on how to stop terrorism, thereby thankfully rendering his book non-political. On the other hand, there is a great deal of knowledge on the subject and much of it is contained in these pages.

I read this book slowly and with a highlighter in hand. I have gained from it some understanding of terrorism, which I had previously lacked. The book is difficult reading in part because it is not elegantly written. However, what it lacks in style and organization, it more than makes up for in information and wisdom. I'm going to read many parts of it a second and third time. The one adjective that best describes my view of this is book is "important."

I have long been uncomfortable with the word "terrorist" -- it just seems too subjective and slippery. In a strict sense, of course, a terrorist is simply someone who uses terror to achieve his aims. But isn't that what armies do? Is someone on the ground during a bombing raid any less terrified than the people running around Manhattan on Sept. 11?

Most likely, the real definition is that a terrorist is someone who uses terror to achieve his aims *and* who has an opposing personal or political philosophy. But doesn't that depend on who is doing the talking?

In this book, Walter Laqueur takes a view on defining terrorism that the U.S. Supreme Court took a few years ago when trying to define pornography: a strict definition is impossible, he writes, but most of us recognize it when we see it.

Unlike most people, I am not convinced by that view. In fact, I think it is use of this imperfect word that makes understanding some of the complex issues in the world extremely difficult: Hamas, the PLO, and Israel, for example, all label their bloody clashes as a battle against terrorism. Ditto for the two sides involved in "the troubles" in Northern Ireland, and for the bitter standoffs between oppressive governments and student movements in Iran and China. Haven't U.S. and Western European militaries in recent years been labeled terrorists by local populations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Sudan, and Sierra Leone? If the word existed then, would 18th century revolutionaries in North America and France have been called terrorists as well?

A less central criticism: Mr. Laqueur is clearly more of a scholar than a stylist. Though that is what you'd want for a study of this kind, his writing style can seem plodding, unnecessarily dense and very often difficult to interpret, especially when putting issues into a historical context. Be prepared to read some passages more than once to get their meaning.

But while I cannot agree with Mr. Laqueur's popularly held view as to the definition of terrorism and I do not admire his writing skills, I cannot fault his in-depth and often counter-intuitive analysis as to the origins of what most of the western world sees as terrorism.

While most commentators see most guerilla movements as a product of poverty and the absence of democracy, Mr. Laqueur points out that the 20th century's most repressive regimes -- Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany -- did not suffer from significant grassroot insurgencies. In South America, he informs us, the first post-colonial guerilla organization bloomed in democratic Uruguay rather than under Pinochet in Chile or Peron in Argentina. In more recent years, he notes that all of them men involved in the Sept. 11 attacks -- including Osama bin Laden himself -- all came from the relative freedom of comfortable middle class upbringings and most were quite wealthy.

Mr. Laqueur's background as a historian is most evident in the way he dissects the differences between anarchists and radicals who flourished among European intellectuals in the 19th century, the freedom and liberation movements from the early 20th century, and more recent terror movements that are usually associated with religion or life philosophies. The first two, he writes, were limited by rationality, while the most recent incarnations are far less constrained and based more on a hatred of something than a desire for something.

Near the end, Mr. Laqueur predicts that it is modernity that will eventually transform the Arab world, not wealth or democracy. Although that may sound like an argument in semantics, it is different because modernity includes beliefs and philosophies rather than just external conditions -- a premise that is sure to spark howls of protest from thinkers who see the Arab world as different but not inferior or less evolved than the western world.

The book's conclusion is its most chilling point: the path to modernity is really a race against religious fanatics' quest to obtain biological or nuclear weapons. The winner of that race, the book says, will decide what kind of world coming generations will inhabit.

This new book on terrorism is quick to be honest in showing that while Islamic terrorism is by no means the only terrorism, it is in fact the greatest threat to the world today. This book builds on other books on the topic of terrorism focusing mostly on the second half of the 20th century. Here we learn also about the `battlefields' of the future where terrorism will certainly bring new conflicts to China and India and Southeast Asia. Already one sees this books predictions proving themselves in Thailand and the Phillipines. A good study and a great edition to the post 9/11 terrorist literature.

Laqueur's book is an excellent source of background information for those interested in approaching the issue of terrorism as objectively as possible. For those lacking the time to read this work in its entirety, the conclusion is a must-read. It is hoped that Bush, Powell and Rice, and their advisors, have the opportunity to share Laqueur's views as they develop foreign policy for our nation.

This book was for a homeland security class I'm enrolled in. I find myself reading more page than needed for assignments. Super book.

I have long been uncomfortable with the word "terrorist" -- it just seems too subjective and slippery. In a strict sense, of course, a terrorist is simply someone who uses terror to achieve his aims. But isn't that what armies do? Is someone on the ground during a bombing raid any less terrified than the people running around Manhattan on Sept. 11?

Most likely, the real definition is that a terrorist is someone who uses terror to achieve his aims *and* who has an opposing personal or political philosophy. But doesn't that depend on who is doing the talking?

In this book, Walter Laqueur takes a view on defining terrorism that the U.S. Supreme Court took a few years ago when trying to define pornography: a strict definition is impossible, he writes, but most of us recognize it when we see it.

Unlike most people, I am not convinced by that view. In fact, I think it is use of this imperfect word that makes understanding some of the complex issues in the world extremely difficult: Hamas, the PLO, and Israel, for example, all label their bloody clashes as a battle against terrorism. Ditto for the two sides involved in "the troubles" in Northern Ireland, and for the bitter standoffs between oppressive governments and student movements in Iran and China. Haven't U.S. and Western European militaries in recent years been labeled terrorists by local populations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Sudan, and Sierra Leone? If the word existed then, would 18th century revolutionaries in North America and France have been called terrorists as well?

A less central criticism: Mr. Laqueur is clearly more of a scholar than a stylist. Though that is what you'd want for a study of this kind, his writing style can seem plodding, unnecessarily dense and very often difficult to interpret, especially when putting issues into a historical context. Be prepared to read some passages more than once to get their meaning.

But while I cannot agree with Mr. Laqueur's popularly held view as to the definition of terrorism and I do not admire his writing skills, I cannot fault his in-depth and often counter-intuitive analysis as to the origins of what most of the western world sees as terrorism.

While most commentators see most guerilla movements as a product of poverty and the absence of democracy, Mr. Laqueur points out that the 20th century's most repressive regimes -- Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany -- did not suffer from significant grassroot insurgencies. In South America, he informs us, the first post-colonial guerilla organization bloomed in democratic Uruguay rather than under Pinochet in Chile or Peron in Argentina. In more recent years, he notes that all of them men involved in the Sept. 11 attacks -- including Osama bin Laden himself -- all came from the relative freedom of comfortable middle class upbringings and most were quite wealthy.

Mr. Laqueur's background as a historian is most evident in the way he dissects the differences between anarchists and radicals who flourished among European intellectuals in the 19th century, the freedom and liberation movements from the early 20th century, and more recent terror movements that are usually associated with religion or life philosophies. The first two, he writes, were limited by rationality, while the most recent incarnations are far less constrained and based more on a hatred of something than a desire for something.

Near the end, Mr. Laqueur predicts that it is modernity that will eventually transform the Arab world, not wealth or democracy. Although that may sound like an argument in semantics, it is different because modernity includes beliefs and philosophies rather than just external conditions -- a premise that is sure to spark howls of protest from thinkers who see the Arab world as different but not inferior or less evolved than the western world.

The book's conclusion is its most chilling point: the path to modernity is really a race against religious fanatics' quest to obtain biological or nuclear weapons. The winner of that race, the book says, will decide what kind of world coming generations will inhabit.