Attuned To Terror

The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians — Why it Has Always Failed, and Why it Will Fail Again
By Caleb Carr
Little, Brown
Price: £6.99

Sonia Trikha

The first reaction to this book is, finally there is a long-term perspective on the events of September 11. The view is really hypermetropic — it goes back over 2,000 years. (An advantage of taking on an age that large is that Carr is rarely repetitive.) And Carr makes each century count in his study. This is not a book for those seeking details of Osama’s eating habits and the insights that might explain his murderous instincts. Lessons of Terror examines terrorism throughout history and through that explores the roots of the present global crisis.

Carr, not a liberal, has got a few provocative suggestions in his book. But he’s applying to the new problem an old solution. The novelist and military historian is really saying that terrorism can only be destroyed the same way communism was devalued: discredit the idea. Carr’s alternative to the pop analysis of soundbite journalism is an idea that helped the West win the Cold War.

Carr’s conclusion is that the practice of targeting enemy civilians is as old as warfare itself and has always failed as a military and political tactic and will continue to do so. More importantly, the idea of terrorism can be defeated through a historical understanding by underlining the fact that it is an inferior method and brings nothing except defeat to its agents.

This argument is supported by an accessible tour of military annals that rescue the view through examples of beaten armies. The Roman adventure in Germania; in the Middle Ages evangelical Muslims and Christian crusaders spread their faiths by the sword; in the 17th and 18th centuries the rise of imperialism saw Europe’s disciplined armies commit wholesale slaughter of native American and South Asian civilians. His most scathing — and lengthy — criticism of a state using terror to counter terror is the US. He paces it with Civil War accounts of Union general William Tecumseh Sherman’s declaration of war on every man, woman, and child in the South; and includes nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam war and the CIA-led operations in Iran and Guatemala as examples of US terrorism.

The successful answer, Carr argues, lies not in repeated analyses of individual, contemporary terrorist movements or even the legalistic attempts to condemn their behaviour in international courts. For terrorists are as much soldiers, rather than criminals. The solution is in the formulation of ‘‘a comprehensive, progressive strategy’’. It lies in pre-emptive military offensives aimed at making the terrorists and states that harbour, supply and otherwise assist them experience the same perpetual insecurity that they attempt to make their victims feel. That’s the part that George W. Bush could clutch like a straw in the book.

What follows is a nightmare and counter to every US military strategist’s idea of solving the problem through strategic bombing. For Carr will not brook civilian casualties. His inspiration comes from the fifth century philosopher, Augustine of Hippo’s treatise on ‘‘just war’’.
Carr calls for a war on terror but says, ‘‘it is incumbent on us to devise a style of war more imaginative, more decisive, and yet more humane than anything terrorists can contrive.’’ Carr will tell you with commanding authority that such a strategy does indeed exist but first we must delve into military history to find those solutions. For that read Caleb Carr’s sometimes dry but always comprehensive account.