The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians (Paperback)

Carr uses historical precedents that aim at showing that terrorism is a spectacularly failed tactic, what is not always true or proves to be correct only a few centuries after the facts. Some victimized civilian populations such as the survivors of Carthage after the Third Punic War, the Amerindians at the end of the 19th century or the civilians of the Axis Powers after WWII had no longer the capacity and/or willingness to retaliate. Other victimized civilian populations such as the direct witnesses of the atrocities of the Roman Empire or Crusaders were long dead before their nemeses were finally defeated. Furthermore, the victors could have shielded their own terrorists from justice because they were perceived as patriots and heroes, not as criminals. In these circumstances, perpetrators of these atrocities against civilians have been answerable for their crimes only after their own death.

Unlike Carr, Victor Hanson in Carnage and Culture clearly shows that the real atrocity for the Westerner is not the number of corps, but the manner in which soldiers and civilians died and the protocols under which they were killed. The West believes that only war waged through open and direct assault is fair, regardless of the frightful losses inflicted on the adversary. The West has never accepted the logic of far fewer killed through ambush, terrorism, or the execution of prisoners and noncombatants as the current situation in Iraq convincingly demonstrates. However, Carr has a point that the West has not always practiced what it has been preaching on this subject. The Nazis and their allies come prominently to mind in their systematic disregard of the rules of Western civilization that did not save them from ultimate defeat.

Although Carr praises the military campaign that the U.S. launched against Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11, he is very negative in his appraisal of domestic efforts to prevent a repetition of this tragedy. Carr also harshly criticizes the Bush Junior administration for asking Americans to go about their lives and business as usual. Carr apparently does not want to acknowledge that a capitalist, democratic society is by definition an open society that thrives on exchanges within its borders and with the rest of the world. Vigilance and awareness rather than paranoia are required. Otherwise, one plays the game of terrorists and turn one's life into a prison.

Interestingly, Carr wrote his book before the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Carr states that fighting terrorism requires at times force against terrorists and the states protecting them, at other times diplomacy conducted with the states that are willing to mend their ways. Ultimately, Carr correctly pushes for the adoption of an international convention that should outlaw terrorism after the model of previous conventions banning for example piracy, slavery and genocide. Carr, however, wrongly downplays the importance of the political dimension of terrorism. No one can vanquish terrorism as long as its breeding ground is not drained. Bombarding a swamp can kill a few mosquitoes, but not their capacity to be born again and haunt their future victims.

Although Carr scores some points in describing some shortcomings of the DOD, the CIA and the NSC, he does not seem to acknowledge the difficulty of their task. Whoever has ever been involved in intelligence gathering and assessment knows that sometimes it can be extremely difficult to get a complete picture of an existing or potential threat. Intelligence is both an art and a science that is just as good as its imperfect human practitioners. Furthermore, the choice of allies sometimes requires association with dirty friends in order to fight dirty enemies. A carrot and stick certification policy is in place to minimize the risk that these dirty friends metamorphose into dirty enemies. In addition, waging war has never been a clean business because of inevitable civilian casualties that are sometimes euphemistically referred as collateral damage. Finally, as Max Boot reminds his readers in Savage Wars of Peace Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, the U.S. military should continue to nurture its different branches with the same care so that it can fight any type of war, including terror against civilians, with equal efficiency.

First off, the book is *mostly* about how terrorism or scorched earth tactics are not a good idea for states. I agree. However, the book completely misses the point on how effective terrorist attacks are as a means of causing great economic and social pain to industrial era states that persist in pursuing unilateralist Christian crusades as well as immoral capitalism that enriches micro-elites while disenfranchising the bulk of foreign populations. Do the math: for $500 *thousand*, Bin Laden got roughly $500 *billion* in costs to the U.S. taxpayer. He (and his thousands of successors) can keep this up forever, we cannot.

There is major aspect of this book that I applaud, and it takes it from 3 to 4 stars: it is the single most effective statement I have seen that denounces U.S. "precision" warfare as not so precision afterall, because of the pre-planned (i.e. pre-meditated and culpable) deaths of tens of thousands of civilians as acceptable "collateral damage." Although "total war" certainly applies to state on state warfare, the author correctly notes that killing civilians is neither beneficial nor acceptable when making war on dictators or terrorists. That has to be "man on man" and America is simply not capable of doing that--the military-industrial complex would cease to exist as we know it if we actually focused on funding ground truth intelligence at the neighborhood level, and the ability to send invisible snake-eater in and out to do justice on the basis of "one man, one bullet," something I have long advocated.

The author is conventionally leftist and in harmony with Chalmer Johnson's and other critiques of the misadventures of the Central Intelligence Agency, but I find his critiques uninformed and sophomoric. Although I certainly agree with the author's short listing of CIA's analytical and operational failures over time, as someone who actually understands CIA and the US military better than the author, I have to wave the "CRAP" flag on several of this author's pages as they pertain to intelligence, pages 204 and 260 in particular.

The book ends with the observation that terrorism is like slavery, piracy, and genocide in that sufficient action must be taken to stop individual behavior along those lines, and the sensible suggestion that "evangelical Western capitalism must learn greater restraint and respect for other cultures" and that Western governments must eschew "gunboat diplomacy as self-defeating. Golly. The author may understand but does not demonstrate substantive understanding of the degree to which slavery, piracy, and genocide (18 active campaigns right now, a great deal more than the author's "still attempted in some corners of the world") continue to be tolerated by Western governments.

There is nothing in this book helpful to crafting a new grand strategy balancing military, diplomatic, intelligence, cultural, and economic initiatives to "close the gap" (see my review of Thomas Barnett on "The Pentagon's New Map."

Overall this double-spaced essay with no footnotes strikes me as gross misrepresentation. The bibliography is marginal, especially with respect to both modern terrorism and U.S. intelligence. The author took something he knows about--the history of conventional state military warfare--and dressed it up as being relevant to the Global War on Terror. Yes, but it could have been done in one page. This is a very labor intensive way to get to the obvious point, made much more intelligently by Jonathan Schell in "Unconquerable World": there are not enough guns in the world to quell instability stemming from abusive government rule and immoral capitalism. Tony Zinni sums it up in one line: the faster you introduce food into an area, the more quickly the violence ends.