"The Lessons of Terror is so earnest, so well informed and so outrageous...that almost any reader will find something to love and something that will make you want to throw the book across the room. It is, in short, pure Carr."--Newsweek

"After the deadly attacks against the United States, many Americans now may view Carr's earlier arguments as
prescient and his approach as the only one that has a chance of working. The Lessons of Terror is fascinating to read and provocative in the best sense of the word."--The Christian Science Monitor

"A provocative history of warfare against civilians from Roman times to the present."--Time

To be emblematic of our age is to bear an evil burden. The twentieth century, scarcely finished, will be remembered as much for its succession of wars and genocides as it will for anything else; and sadly the dawn of the new millennium has brought no end to this horrifying tradition. The first year of the twenty-first century produced images that will likely identify the decade, if not the generation, to come: commercial aircraft, hijacked by agents of extremism, slamming into crowded, unprotected office buildings, bringing about the collapse of those structures and the deaths of thousands of people.

How can we have come to this? How can we have reached a moment in history when men professing to be soldiers serving a cause are capable not only of committing such atrocities but of calling them acts of war?

In this era of ethnic and religious strife we know only too well that human conflict is often inexplicably savage; and yet there were and remain questions about the events of September 11, 2001, that seem to defy even our sadly overdeveloped inurement to horror. The cacophony produced by media sensationalists and television talking heads, a continuous aspect of daily life since the attacks, has done nothing more than crystallize these basic questions, which have gone on to embed themselves in the minds of citizens in every country facing the threat of what has, over the last generation, become known as "international terrorism." As the initial assaults in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania have led to countermeasures and then, inevitably, to further outrages, these deep and troublesome queries have continued to work their way into the vulnerable fiber of the public psyche -- for these are questions that do not admit of sound-bite solutions, that do not fade even as we see the architects of the massacres arrested, attacked, and killed:

How can we, how can human civilization, possibly have reached such a point?

The immediate causes of the current crisis have been discussed to such a numbing extent that they have attained for many people a somewhat rote quality: again and again stories are disseminated about the grievances and fanaticism of extremists from nations in the Middle East and Asia, about the morally ambiguous economic expansionism of the West, and about the inevitable clash between the two sides' religions, cultures, and wildly conflicting conceptions of how people should live. Yet these never-ending and finally overwhelming dissections seem somehow unequal to the events we are living through, never attaining commensurate scope or magnitude.

There is nothing inappropriate about this confusion, this sense of disconnection between lived facts and received commentary. Relatively few people alive today can recall with more than childhood vagueness the last time that civilization faced such a truly epochal moment; and of those few who are old enough to have participated in the struggle against fascism and totalitarianism during the middle of the twentieth century, there are almost certainly none who are actively making executive decisions about the content of television programming or newspaper and magazine articles. Even if there were, television, newspapers, and magazines cannot supply the proper context for studies of what we are experiencing, since they are at best shortsighted records of recent happenings and at worst mere entertainment disguised as thought. Epochal moments belong rightly to history, and it is history that holds the only hope of providing an understanding of the twisted road that has brought us to this frightening pass.

This brief book is intended to provide an introduction to the historical roots of modern international terrorism by placing that phenomenon squarely within the discipline of military history, rather than political science or sociology. It will be proposed that what has to date been viewed and treated as a uniquely modern problem is in fact the current stage in a violent evolution whose origins extend as far back as does human conflict itself: terrorism, in other words, is simply the contemporary name given to, and the modern permutation of, warfare deliberately waged against civilians with the purpose of destroying their will to support either leaders or policies that the agents of such violence find objectionable.

Bloodshed of this kind is quite distinct from what many now label (often with utter disingenuousness) "collateral damage" -- that is, accidental casualties inflicted on civilians by warring military units. Yet like collateral damage, deliberate warfare against civilians has always been with us and cannot be truly understood out of context. Any examination of its historical origins must therefore rest on numerous specific precedents if it is to contribute to a deeper and more productive discussion of our present crisis. That such discussion continues to be necessary at all levels of society, regardless of the day-to-day development of events and policies that affect particular aspects of our current predicament, is indicated by a difficult but ongoing problem: although terrorists themselves must bear the principal culpability for their activities, violent and otherwise, citizens and leaders of the nations and communities in which they have chosen to create their particular form of hell cannot completely escape responsibility, for we have either misunderstood or ignored both the origins and nature of the threat to an extent sufficient to have made the work of its perpetrators far easier.

To contend as much, in the light of recent events, smacks dangerously of blaming the victim; yet when we understand just how this form of violence fits into the record of human conflict, we will see that such terms as victim and perpetrator attain altered definitions -- as, indeed, does the word terrorism itself.

Over the past forty years, American and other world leaders have generally identified international terrorism (as distinct from domestic terrorism, which falls outside the scope of this study) as a type of crime, in an effort to rally global indignation against the agents of such mayhem and deny them the more respected status of actual soldiers. Even since the September 11 attacks caused many such leaders to acknowledge a global "war" against terrorists, for example, the actions of those terrorists have been described more often as "criminal" than as "belligerent." And to be sure, before they developed the tactic of turning commercial airplanes into ballistic missiles, terrorists' typical behavior (whether assassination, kidnapping, or bombing) was often indistinguishable from that of common criminals. In addition, terrorist causes frequently attracted -- and still do attract -- individuals who simply use philosophical or political rationalizations to veil their more fundamental greed and bloodlust: as has been noted of late, terrorist organizations -- with their money laundering, drug dealing, and forgery experts -- bear more than a passing resemblance to the families of organized crime.

Yet there has always been a central problem with insisting that terrorists are essentially criminals: such categorization generally limits to reactive and defensive measures the range of responses that the American and other governments can justifiably employ. During most of the Clinton administration's eight years, for example, despite the fact that the natures and purposes of such global terrorist organizations as Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda were well-known, almost all federal funds for antiterrorist efforts were targeted at detective and intelligence work, while preemptive military strikes against terrorist leaders, networks, or bases were ignored. (Clinton's most significant military move against terrorism, the bombings of Afghanistan and Sudan that followed terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, were wholly reactive and completely predictable, to say nothing of utterly ineffective.) In the present crisis, George W. Bush's administration, rather than take full advantage of the rules that typically govern a state of war, has taken limited advantage only of the weapons of war: strategically, it early on accepted the demand of many nations that America legally "prove" its case against Al Qaeda, as if the struggle against terrorism were being conducted in some open-air international courtroom, rather than on the battlefields of New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, Afghanistan, and dozens of lower-profile sites.

In other words, our leaders (and we as their citizens) have in the past been, and in disturbing numbers remain, prepared to treat terrorists as being on a par with smugglers, drug traffickers, or, at most, some kind of political mafiosi, rather than what they have in fact been for almost half a century: organized, highly trained, hugely destructive paramilitary units that were and are conducting offensive campaigns against a variety of nations and social systems. In truth, international terrorism has always been what its perpetrators have so often insisted: a form of warfare. And although American leaders and the international media were more than willing after the September 11 attacks to announce that the United States was in fact at war, a truly unified, comprehensive and resolute military strategy for conducting this war was slow in formulation and has proved difficult to maintain. Confusion and arguments over terms and concepts, goals and strategies, have hampered the prosecution of America's response from the start.

The costs of this confusion are apparent, the reasons behind it less so. Yet in a very real sense they center on one consideration above all: the status and nature of the enemy who has brought unprecedented death and destruction to our shores. Not just as Westerners but as human beings, we tend to ascribe a certain prejudicial nobility to the terms soldier and warrior. We have no wish to recognize such a quality in or bestow such titles on men and women who deliberately set out to victimize average citizens, noncombatants whose only reliable means of influencing the policies of their leaders is the occasional vote or the even more infrequent rebellion. Yet the purposeful targeting of civilians is nothing new in warfare -- in fact it is, as said, as old as warfare itself -- and the world has been more than willing to accord the status of "soldiers" to some of its most vicious practitioners. This book, therefore, is not a history of fringe groups or obscure cults. It is the tale of a type of war that has been practiced at one time or another by every nation on earth -- including, all too often, the United States.

Indeed, several of the most fabled heroes of the American Civil War -- Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, William Tecumseh Sherman, and others -- were responsible for the systemization and legitimization of what at the time was viewed as an extreme (though nonetheless common) military tactic. Nor is the list of great historical figures who fit the definition of terrorist -- that is, someone who deliberately attacks civilians in order to effect a change in both the support of those civilians for their leaders and the policies of those leaders themselves -- limited to strictly military or paramilitary figures: the Roman emperor Augustus, France's King Louis XIV, Germany's Otto von Bismarck, and the American team of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger are but a few of the statesmen who helped perpetuate the practice.

All such figures were in fact "soldiers," whether they considered themselves such or not. They were perhaps not soldiers in the narrow, Western, and largely ephemeral terms of the Geneva protocols of the early twentieth century, but they were indeed soldiers in the most primal, universal, and enduring sense, as were the hijackers who flew airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. One can refuse to call such people an army, if one wishes; yet they are organized as an army, and certainly they conduct themselves as an army, giving and taking secret orders to attack their enemies with a variety of tactics that serve one overarching strategy: terror.

But perhaps the most significant thing that the terrorists of today share with those who practiced warfare against civilians in earlier times is an abiding inability to see that the strategy of terror is a spectacularly failed one. Surprising and difficult as it may be to accept that what we call terrorism is in fact a form of warfare, it may be even more surprising and difficult -- particularly given that we are in the midst of a war with terrorists -- to understand that it is a form that has never succeeded. It is from this discovery, however, that we must today take both our greatest hope and our sternest warning. Warfare against civilians, whether inspired by hatred, revenge, greed, or political and psychological insecurity, has been one of the most ultimately self-defeating tactics in all of military history -- indeed, it would be difficult to think of one more inimical to its various practitioners' causes. And yet those same imperatives -- hatred, revenge, greed, and insecurity -- have driven nations and factions both great and small to the strategy of terror and the tactic of waging war on civilians time and time again. Some parts of the world, in fact, have become so locked into the cycle of outrages and reprisals against civilians that their histories comprise little else. But out of all this bloody confusion one clear assertion repeatedly presents itself: the nation or faction that resorts to warfare against civilians most quickly, most often, and most viciously is the nation or faction most likely to see its interests frustrated and, in many cases, its existence terminated.

In the ensuing chapters and examples, we will see this surprising conclusion illustrated in many historical epochs going back to that of the Roman republic, and from this sad saga we can draw a second critical conclusion. By defining terrorism as war, we have already implied that attacks against civilians can be appropriately met only by military action (though this is not to say that military action should not be augmented by intelligence and criminological work); but the nature of that military action is as important as its undertaking. And in considering what that nature should be, we come upon another historical lesson as apparent as it has been ignored: warfare against civilians must never be answered in kind. For as failed a tactic as such warfare has been, reprisals similarly directed at civilians have been even more so -- particularly when they have exceeded the original assault in scope.

The successful answer to the terrorist threat, then, lies not in repeated analyses of individual contemporary terrorist movements, nor in legalistic attempts to condemn their behavior in courts of international law, nor in reactionary policies and actions that punish civilian populations as much as the terrorists who operate from among them. Rather, it lies in the formulation of a comprehensive, progressive strategy that can address all terrorist threats with the only coercive measures that have ever affected or moderated terrorist (or any other military or paramilitary) behavior: preemptive military offensives aimed at making not only terrorists but the states that harbor, supply, and otherwise assist them experience the same perpetual insecurity that they attempt to make their victims feel. The methods must be different, of course, for, as stated, terror must never be answered with terror; but war can only be answered with war, and it is incumbent on us to devise a style of war more imaginative, more decisive, and yet more humane than anything terrorists can contrive. Such a strategy does indeed exist; but it cannot be delineated without first tracing both the long history of warfare against civilians that has produced the present problem of terrorism in the first place, as well as the saga of those efforts that have been made in the past to address and curtail that savage tradition.

In other words, military history alone can teach us the lessons that will solve the dilemma of modern international terrorism. These lessons are not necessarily new; they have, in many cases, been apparent for centuries and to many previous generations of perceptive leaders. Yet most of these leaders have been unable to resist the temptation to make war against civilians, no matter how threatening to their own interests that indulgence may ultimately have proved to have been -- for terror's lure as a seemingly quick and gratifying solution is a powerful one. It is by no means the contention of this book, then, that we have reached a point in history where warfare against civilians might suddenly become morally and militarily obsolete. Nor will this overview assert that the tactics of terror can be defeated quickly: as a rule the process of frustrating them is generational in duration and broad in scope. What this study can claim, however, is that whenever and wherever such tactics have been indulged, they have been and are still destined to ultimately fail: this is the central lesson to be learned, and the chief cause of hope that can be taken, from the often troubling history that fills the following pages.

A final note: when I first presented the core of these ideas half a decade ago, many experts on terrorism whose work I have long respected pronounced that I was over-reacting to the menace then at hand by advocating "the liberal use of military force" and "elucidating a war paradigm." I have always confessed to a less than perfect understanding of what that last phrase might mean; but if the implication was that I was recommending that Americans do what their enemies had long been doing -- making war with all the means at their disposal -- then I accept the criticism and suggest that it is the terrorists who first "elucidated" such a "paradigm." At any rate, that the dangers of terrorism are continuing to grow I hold as presently irrefutable. Despite our current military efforts, the core terrorist threats -- biological, chemical, and even nuclear warfare, suicide bombings and attacks, and still more airplane hijackings, along with the complex programs of state sponsorship necessary to prepare for such actions -- remain largely unaddressed at their international roots, whatever our successes against specific groups or individuals. For many years, we ignored these dangers or, worse yet, tried to react to them by addressing the motivations and goals of their agents rather than their behavior. But today, responding to terrorism is not a matter for sociological study or negotiation: terrorists are no longer holding guns to our heads and making demands -- they are pulling triggers without discussion or warning. Continued and, in all likelihood, escalated military action will be the only remedy for this problem. Terrorism will be eradicated not when we come to some sort of accommodation with its agents, nor when we physically destroy them, but rather when it is perceived as a strategy and a behavior that yields nothing save eventual defeat for those causes that inspire it. (After all, even suicidal terrorists, though they care nothing for their own lives or the lives of others, venerate their cause.) History holds the key to this momentous transformation from world scourge to tactical and behavioral relic; and so it is to history that we must now turn.