No End to War - Softcover

Laqueur, Walter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082641656X ISBN 13: 9780826416568

Publisher: Continuum, 2004

Synopsis

While the destruction of the World Trade Center and the strike against the Pentagon shocked the world at large, experts on terrorism like Walter Laqueur couldn't feign complete surprise.

In No End to War, Laqueur, who has devoted three decades to the study of political violence, answers the most-often raised questions about terrorism in the light of 9/11 and the still unsolved Anthrax letters.

First, what constitutes terrorism? What is new about the "new" terrorism? Why is the Muslim world the most potent breeding ground of this 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? 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 the intelligence failure? Are Islamic terrorists the only terrorists we need to fear? What about other terrorists from the right of the left, ecoterrorists or anti-globalization terrorists? And finally, what is the best defense against terrorism?

About this title

About the Author:

WALTER LAQUEUR served as the director of the Institute of Contemporary History in London and concurrently the chairman of the International Research Council of CSIS in Washington for 30 years. He was also a professor at Georgetown University and the author of more than twenty-five books on Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. He has had articles published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and countless other newspapers worldwide. His books include The Last Days of Europe , Putinism, and After the Fall.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Continuum
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 082641656X
• ISBN 13: 9780826416568
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288