Product Description

While the destruction of the World Trade Centre and the strike against the Pentagon shocked the world at large, experts on terrorism like Walter Laqueur couldn't feign complete surprise. In "War Without End", Laqueur draws on his many years of expertise to answer the most-often raised questions about terrorism in the light of 9/11 and the still unsolved anthrax letters.;First, what constitutes terrorism? (He notes that more than a hundred definitions have been advanced.) What is new about the "new" terrorism? Why is the Muslim world the most potent breeding ground of the 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? Or 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 was there such a failure of intelligence? Are Islamic terrorists the only terrorists we need fear?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1189110 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

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

Review
"'As an overview of many of the best-known terrorist campaigns of the last half-century it is detailed and clear and, more importantly, frank in demolishing some of the current misapprehensions about the causes and continuing popularity of terrorism. It is scholarly and unsensational.' Salisbury Review"

Customer Reviews

Scholarly Look at an Elusive Topic
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.

Great detail but disorganized
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.

An Important Book
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."