What Terrorists Want

"What I love about this book is that first of all she makes clear that you can’t fight a war on terrorism any more than you can fight a war on dynamite – that terrorism is a technique. I would define terrorism as deliberately targeting innocent non-combatants with the aim of influencing an audience. The goal might be ‘freedom’. But terrorists slip over the moral line when they deliberately target the innocent. “You can’t fight a war on terrorism any more than you can fight a war on dynamite” Deliberately targeting non-combatants is forbidden by all three monotheistic religions. It is also forbidden by the Judeo-Christian Just War tradition and the Islamic Just War tradition. I think she simplifies what terrorists are after, which is, in her view, revenge, renown and reaction. Revenge for some kind of perceived slight or crime. And she has this very important observation that terrorists want attention and they also have this kind of vanity. They want to be famous. What Louise suggests, and I think she is right, is talking to them. That isn’t the whole solution, obviously. I see perhaps a bigger role for military action under certain very limited circumstances with very strict requirements. Where we do agree is that there is often a downside to military action, which I would say enables a terrorist to mobilise further. I think we have to be careful using that military instrument. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter We both agree that when there are obvious war crimes on our side that is a coup for the terrorists. Louise very strongly opposed the Iraq war as did I because it seemed that it had nothing to do with September 11. Now that view is commonplace, but when Louise and I were making these arguments early on, some of our colleagues probably found us naive. Louise also makes a very powerful argument, which is that terrorists aim to get us to overreact. This comes out of her long-term study of the IRA and related groups. The goal is to get the government to overreact, which serves their interest. The reason I like to use this book in teaching is because it explains what terrorists want in a very clear way."