Walter Laqueur: Life and Works
Friday, December 18, 2015
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Review by Donna Robinson Divine: Walter Laqueur, Best
of Times, Worst of Times: Memoirs of a Political Education
Walter Laqueur enjoys a
well-deserved reputation both as a scholar and a public intellectual. Through
his carefully crafted books and essays, Laqueur has guided students through
some of the most turbulent developments of the past century. For Walter Laqueur
is not simply a scholar devoted to the painstaking process of collecting all
that is relevant to explaining and analyzing the events that have shaped the
modern world, he is also a writer who understands the power of words and how to
weave them into a lucid and moving narrative. The Best of Times, The Worst
of Times explains the sources of Laqueur’s interest in political affairs
and how that interest has unfolded throughout his life. He begins with his
early experiences in a Germany gripped by the delusion that Nazism would save
the country from its post World War I trauma. But Laqueur’s lifetime of
reflection, research, and writing has led him to acknowledge the many layers of
influence shaping his understanding of politics. For one, the memory of his
life as a young boy in Breslau is connected with the adventure stories he read
during those years. For another, his birth in interwar Germany where his family
resided gave Laqueur entry into a cultural world of classical music and
literature. That cultural world stayed with him as an immigrant in Mandate
Palestine and accompanied him on his intellectual odyssey in Great Britain and
the United States.
For Laqueur, there seems to be a
deep relationship not only between culture and politics, but also between
culture and how to unpack the many elements in any political development. Thus,
his recollections of the wisdom he gathered from texts expanded with the
insight derived from the many friendships he forged with the political
activists who wrote some of the articles he read as a student. He has a
remarkable awareness of how reason and emotion, common sense and irrationality
can conjure up recurring cycles of violence and tragedies that no politics has
ever been able to eradicate. Thus, explaining the Cold War meant overcoming
ideological blinders and fully possessing the knowledge of the historical
mainsprings that shaped this confrontation. Hence, in trying to read the signs
of what were to become increasingly dark and troubled times, Walter Laqueur had
to work through all sorts of troubling inconsistencies.
There is no doubt that during the
Cold War the West and above all the United States made mistakes, big and small.
And I mean not only half-baked adventures like the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba
in 1961 by U.S.-backed exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro. Vietnam, too, was a
mistake; I never understood why America should be in Vietnam….But, on
essentials, however, the West was right. Soviet aggression had to be resisted.
[Pages 76-77]
At a time when the ideologies of
Nazism and Communism not only shaped power struggles in Germany but also
defined the fault lines of international relations, Laqueur was initially and
some might say, quite naturally drawn to the study of the Soviet Union and its
Russian historical context. He eventually came to understand the devotion to
Marxism as a kind of religious zeal that could not be discounted as a factor
instructing, energizing, and directing political action. For this reason, he
believed that people as much as ideologies matter in actual politics. His
histories, informed by thorough investigation of the archival records, are
equally sensitive to the ideas and convictions that seemed to matter to the
people as well as to their leaders. Laqueur’s depiction of the interplay of
ideology and personality is one the most intriguing features of this remarkable
memoire. Steeping himself in the Hebrew University’s collection of Marxist
periodicals, Laqueur began to understand the attraction of these ideas to
certain classes of people some of whom he met and some with whom he interacted.
Much writing about politics is
tendentious. But there was something different in the Communist literature, a
systematic disregard for truth that undermined the claims of the movement
itself. But there was also much more. Reading the Russian émigré literature, I
found that some was raving mad: I refer to the writings about The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion, of giant conspiracy theories involving Jews,
Freemasons, and what not. But I also found that some of the critics of
Bolshevism were far more astute in their political analysis and prediction than
others. [Page 70]
The end of the Cold War did not
usher in an era of peace and tranquility. Read Laqueur’s collections on
terrorism and you will discover the reasons for there is a literature celebrating
violence as a strategy for liberation that reaches back to antiquity. Laqueur
shows that poverty, wide gaps between rich and poor, between the powerful and
powerless have led people in every age to think of state institutions as the
problem rather than the solution to these difficulties. Even before the
glorification of jihad and the creation of an Islamist discourse of war
against infidels, there were writers furnishing activists with an intellectual
and presumably moral architecture for violence that offered justification for
attacks against the powers of the state. Ideas, as Laqueur would be quick to
emphasize, have consequences long after their adherents are dead and buried.
Laqueur’s fearful anticipation of
the future is very personal and deep when he writes about Israel, a country
still subjected to repeated calls for its extinction. Recognizing that Israel
has moved so fast that the experiences of past generations have little meaning
for the next, he worries that even in this oldest and newest of nations,
history is becoming less relevant. While earlier leaders met the challenges
confronting the country from the Arab States, the current crop of politicians,
he suggests, are not quite equal to the task of finding a way out of the
problems generated from the great military victory of June 1967 which left
Israel occupying the West Bank and without a clear vision for peace with the
Palestinians or a pathway for managing the violence.
Finally, I must note that it is not
without irony that a political scientist is writing a review that expresses
such admiration for the work of Walter Laqueur since Laqueur, himself, has
little regard for this academic discipline. But just as there are times when
our knowledge of history provides the wrong lessons for actions in the present
so there are occasions when political scientists are not so much concerned with
predicting the future course of developments as simply understanding them.
Donna Robinson Divine
Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies
and Professor of Government
Smith College
Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies
and Professor of Government
Smith College
Herf – The Wise Man
In this
sobering overview of what he has learned as a
historian and political observer, Walter Laqueur regrets that the lessons he
has drawn from Europe’s twentieth century are not more widely shared. “There
are more attractive and less tragic historical figures than Cassandra,” he
writes. “She had the gift of prescience, but Apollo had put a curse on her that
no one should believe her.” In the 1970s, Laqueur raised the danger of the
“Finlandization” of Western Europe by the Soviet Union. In the same period,
Raymond Aron came to the “defense of a decadent Europe” and Jean-Francois Revel
described “how democracies perish.” These Cassandras struck a nerve in the
corridors of power. In Best of Times, Worst of Times, Laqueur worries that this
time his role as Cassandra may be less successful. But now as then, Laqueur
never uses the fashionable language of cultural despair. If the future does not
look brilliant to him, neither is doom inevitable—so long as we learn the right
lessons from history.
This wise and interesting book
condenses a lifetime of political learning into a few hundred crisply
written pages. Laqueur came of age as Europe entered the worst of times.
He grew up in Weimar and then Nazi Germany, and then worked as a journalist in
the Middle East from 1938 to 1953. In London, he helped to found and edit two
important journals, Survey and the Journal of Contemporary History, before
moving to Washington and working as a scholar of international affairs at
the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the last decade of the
Cold War. (He is certainly the least K Street-like man ever to work on K
Street.) Laqueur has been a significant figure in historical scholarship
regarding Nazism and the Holocaust, the Soviet Union and the Cold War, the
history of Zionism, anti-Semitism and the Israel-Arab conflict in the Middle
East, European history since 1945, and the academic study of terrorism—the
latter was his theme long before September 11. He may be the only scholar of
contemporary history who has made important contributions to all of these
fields. Along with Aron, he is one of those few intellectuals who, for decades,
was an important voice in both the academy and the policy world.
All the more remarkable is that he
did so as a contemporary historian rather than as a political scientist. Best
of Times, Worst of Times is an emphatic defense of the virtues of writing
contemporary history. Proximity to events and the inevitable bias about them can
be a huge advantage in the historian’s effort to grasp a deeper understanding
of a period. He points to illustrious predecessors such as Thucydides, Burke,
and Gibbon, whose personal experience, strong convictions, and proximity to
events offered the “deeper understanding of a period that only immediacy can
convey.” Laqueur regards his own youth in Germany as a painful schooling that
enhanced his ability to understand dictatorship. Conversely, citizens of the
United States and Britain, or Europeans who came of age after World War II and
who have never lived under a totalitarian regime, found it exceedingly
difficult to understand “the general all-pervasive climate…in an unfree
society” or the fanaticism that drives it. Indeed, “the greater danger as far as
democratic societies are concerned is the lack of memory and understanding of
the dynamics of societies and governments that are not like them.”
This danger is not overcome, in
Laqueur’s view, by the social sciences, with their rational actors and their
futile search for laws of politics. It is contemporary historians, who are
equipped with knowledge of the relevant languages, culture, and history of
foreign affairs, who may offer the best prospect for the deeper
understanding—the political analysis and the political judgment—that Laqueur
seeks. His argument implies that money spent on the chimera of a science of
politics would be far better spent on the less expensive humanities, which
emphasize the importance of local knowledge, languages, culture, and the
contingencies of history and politics.
Partly as a consequence of such
intellectual deficiencies, the major countries do not possess, in Laqueur’s
pessimistic view, the ability to confront the danger posed by “mega-terrorism,”
that is, the ability of very small groups with weapons of mass destruction
“[f]or the first time in human history” to have “the potential, to kill a great
number of people, to cause immense destruction, and perhaps to paralyze normal
life for considerable periods.” Massive military force has reduced terrorism to
“manageable proportions” in the past, but it is difficult for democracies to
engage in such a policy. The cultural diplomacy and battle of ideas that
Laqueur regards as an important factor in the Western victory in the Cold War
will “have no impact on radical Islamists, who abhor democracy, who believe
human rights and tolerance are imperialist inventions, and who do not want any
ideas circulating except those that appear in the Koran–as they interpret it.
They do not want compromise and peaceful coexistence. They do not believe in
diplomacy. They want to annihilate the enemy.”
The book addresses many things:
historical debates about Nazism, the Soviet Union and the Cold War, the Middle
East, terrorism, the successes and shortcomings of Washington think tanks, and
Europe since 1945. Laqueur takes issue with those who find it hard to imagine
that Nazism had popular support, or who de-emphasize Hitler’s role in decision
making. He criticizes Cold War revisionists who at the time refused to blame
Stalin as the primary cause of the Cold War or who sought to diminish the
proportions of the Soviet purges and the Gulag. In view of what has come
to light since 1989 from the Soviet archives, he finds it “more interesting to
ask why the revisionist school arose in the first place, why it gained so much
influence, and why it lasted so long despite the fact that in its essentials it
was manifestly wrong.” Answering his own questions, he locates the sources of
Cold War revisionism in Americans’ lack of understanding of how a dictatorship
works, their deficient appreciation of the role of nationalist and religious
ideologies in politics, and the political biases of the American left in the
1960s. He notes the reluctance of revisionists to revise their own views in the
face of new evidence. Historians of science have long recognized that such
reluctance to abandon wrong but treasured hypotheses is not unusual.
Laqueur could be described as a
participant-observer of the Cold War. He offers a spirited defense of the
Congress for Cultural Freedom, the association of intellectuals who waged a
political battle against communism in Europe. He recalls the journals Encounter
and Der Monat, and the efforts of Raymond Aron, Daniel Bell, Arthur Koestler,
Melvin Lasky, Edward Shils and Ignazio Silone, among others, to offer a
centrist and center-left ideological challenge to the communists. Laqueur
celebrates the CCF for being right about the key issues regarding Soviet
totalitarianism and aggression, and cites George Kennan’s comment about CIA
funding for the Congress as a “flap” that was “quite unwarranted.” Instead,
Laqueur looks back on the CCF as a superb example of what we now extol as “soft
power.” When the Cold War ended, the Soviet archives opened to some extent and
the Congress for Cultural Freedom was shown to have been right about the main
issues. Yet some were “unwilling to forgive the Congress that it had been right
prematurely.”
Laqueur correctly points out that
there are multiple studies of the political and military aspects of the Cold
War, but that “very few have focused on the contest for the hearts and minds of
people on the other side of the Iron Curtain.” He rightly challenges historians
to focus on the intellectual dimensions of the history of the Cold
War. Under the umbrella of the American-Soviet nuclear stand-off, the Cold
War in Europe was primarily a political and ideological battle. Its
intellectual history is central to the understanding of the kind of war it was.
Laqueur has written extensively on
the history of anti-Semitism, but he cautions—he is a completely unhysterical
student of political hysteria—that this does not fully explain why Israel has
been singled out for denunciation in the United Nations and elsewhere.
“The basic reason [for the disproportionate criticism of Israel] was that the
state that emerged was small and relatively weak...no one in his right mind
would have dared to show a similar attitude toward a state ten times as
populous and powerful.” An early critic of the messianic visions that
flourished in some segments of Israeli society after the 1967 war, he ruefully
notes that “[s]ome Israelis have been slow to accept the basic facts of life in
international politics: that there is not one measure of justice in the world,
that a small country will be treated not like a great power, and that it cannot
afford to behave like one.” Especially when so many critics, including
self-described realists, presume to possess great courage in attacking Israel, Laqueur’s
reminder of the perils of the small in international politics is a more humane
sort of realism, in the tradition of Thucydides and
Aron.
In the world of Washington think
tanks, Laqueur found some of the same shortcomings as he did in the positivistic
methods of university-based social science. Understanding the intentions of
other countries remained the most difficult challenge for political analysts,
he recalls, owing to “the inability to understand the mental makeup of leaders
rooted in a wholly different tradition.” The intelligence failure of
Middle East experts who, with some exceptions, did not recognize the arrival of
militant Islam “must have been motivated to a large extent by political bias”
in favor of the Arab world. The study of militant Islam, let alone terrorism,
was discouraged in that field. Political biases and reluctance to abandon
cherished theories, such as the notion that political repression and poverty
produce terrorism, proved remarkably resistant to empirical refutation, even
when faced with terrorists who came from affluent backgrounds or emerged in
conditions of relative freedom.
In a chapter on postwar Europe,
Laqueur recalls the alternating waves of optimism and pessimism that
accompanied the end of World War II, economic recovery and political stability
of the 1950s, gloom again in the 1970s, euphoria in the aftermath of the
collapse of communism in 1989 and sobriety in the face of the persistence of
national interests and differences in the European Union. He summarizes recent
scholarship on trends in demography and immigration. As Europe’s population is
shrinking and ageing, it will need “many millions of immigrants to keep its
economy going and its social institutions functioning.” Yet it will be more
difficult for Europe “to obtain the kind of immigrants needed—workers who are
qualified and industrious and enterpriseing.” He does not foresee a Muslim
“Eurabia” and rejects the use of that term. Over half of the immigrants to the
UK are not Muslim. Most British Muslims come from Pakistan, not Arabia. But
fear and rejection of terrorism is not “Islamophobia.” He argues against the
use of that term as well. That said, he points out that children of Muslim and
other overseas parentage are 30 percent to 45 percent of the age cohort in
many French, Belgian and German cities. He then asks: “Once the minority in a
certain town or region turns into a majority, once schools consist
predominantly of children of foreign origin, with what right will the
authorities impose the teaching of standard curricula to a young generation
that is not part of this cultural tradition and is not particularly eager to
become part of it?” Why, for example should Turkish children in Berlin or the
Ruhr be taught poems of Goethe rather than Turkish literature? Laqueur is not
predicting that Europe cannot integrate its immigrants into its own
version of multi-ethnic democracy. He is raising important questions about a
Europe that is “greatly changing.”
His view of Europe as a factor in
world politics will come as no surprise to readers of his past work. Europe has
“become weaker and weaker.” The obstacles to a common defense, and foreign
policy “seem insurmountable.” Europe has “very little moral confidence left.”
It may experience “helplessness in the face of storms in the years and decades
to come” due in part to pressures from “countries less squeamish about power
politics.” “As the current century is likely to be one of savage conflicts”
fueled with “fanaticism, not to mention the spread of weapons of mass
destruction…there will be no significant role for a civilian or moral
superpower” that Europe prides itself on being. It will thus “count for less
and less in a bigger world.” Laqueur thinks in terms of tendencies and
possibilities, not predictions and certainties. Obviously, he is making these
arguments with the hope that the trends in question are changed.
Coming from someone who has seen the
best of times followed by the worst of times, Laqueur’s warnings about possible
disasters to come—as well as his argument for the importance of contemporary
political, intellectual and cultural history in the realms of policy and world
affairs—deserve to be taken very seriously. His antidote is political clarity
that is based upon historical learning. He offers no simple solutions, but he
does remind us of mistakes we should not repeat. His understanding is
especially pertinent to the present era in American history, which has been
anything but innocent. The war on terror, begun under Bush, continues under Obama.
The United States has expanded its role in Afghanistan and is contemplating
sanctions against Iran. The President who came to office intent on engaging our
enemies now expresses his understanding that yes, there is evil in the world.
Whether the Obama administration acts forcefully to prevent Iran from acquiring
nuclear weapons remains to be seen. Laqueur has seen enough accident and
contingency in history to know that another era of major catastrophe is not
inevitable; but his point is that if it is to be prevented, the democracies
must not repeat the same mistakes that brought about the worst of times in
twentieth-century Europe, or that allowed the danger of militant Islam to
gather momentum with far too little notice. Is this too dark? Recall that when
Osama Bin Laden issued his fatwa in 1998, Washington, D.C. was too preoccupied
with a sex scandal to pay much attention. We are not the same country we were
before September 11, but then we are not a wholly different one either.
Countries and their habits and mentalities do not change so quickly.
Our country and our culture have
never suffered from an excess of informed and thoughtful pessimism. And
pessimism, if this is what Laqueur is offering, is not a conclusion so much as
a challenge: it may be useful in goading us to act to thwart its fulfillment.
Walter Laqueur’s calm and candid reflections deserve a wide readership among
scholars, journalists, politicians, and anyone willing to cast an unflinching
gaze at the past and present.
Bruce Hoffman
In
Celebration of Walter Laqueur’s 90th Birthday: Reflections on His
Contributions to the Study of Terrorism and Guerrilla Warfare
Bruce
Hoffman
Scholars today researching and writing
on terrorism and guerrilla warfare face a daunting challenge. Walter Laqueur. While it would be fatuous to state that
Walter has said or written every thing that there is to say or write about
either of those two phenomena; such a claim is not entirely inaccurate. For nearly forty years, in a dozen or so books
and countless articles and reviews, Walter has indefatigably shed new light on
both subjects while simultaneously dismembering the conventional wisdom and
dismantling the latest, vogue-ish, but substance-less, methodological fads. He has systematically demolished myths and
corrected popular misconceptions. In
doing so, Walter has laid claim to having the first or final word——and often
both——a throughout his long and intellectually luxurious career.
A modest sampling of Walter’s engagement
with these two fields’ most pressing policy and intellectual issues would
include:
• the fool’s errand of divining a
universal definition of terrorism;
• the posited, but historically,
exaggerated invincibility of the post-modern guerrilla;
• religion’s salient role in
contemporary terrorism;
• the nexus of terrorism and technology;
• the causal link between poverty and
terrorism and with guerrilla warfare as well; and,
• whether in fact a war on terrorism can
ever be won in any meaningful sense.
Walter’s prodigious
scholarly output is the product not only of his discipline and focus, but
significantly also of his personal generosity and kindness and his
fundamentally open and inquiring mind.
His magisterial command of multiple European and Semitic languages endow
his work with uncommon breadth and depth.
His insatiable thirst for knowledge and daily consumption of a vast
variety of print and digital media has given him a uniquely broad and dynamic
perspective. Walter’s fervent embrace of
cutting edge technology at once maintains his unrivalled access to information
and opens up new intellectual paths to pursue.
And, his interest in culture and society is pivotal to all the
above.
But perhaps
most important is Walter’s passion as teacher and mentor. He has long enjoyed intellectually close and
affectionate relationships with both established and especially younger
scholars. It is, accordingly, not an
infrequent occurrence to pick up a book and scan its acknowledgements page to
find Walter mentioned.[i]
The power of Walter’s analysis, clarity
of his thinking, and fluidity of his prose is perhaps best encapsulated by the
review of Guerrilla: A Historical and
Critical Study that appeared in London’s Sunday Times, upon its publication in 1976. Written by Professor Sir Michael Howard, the
world’s preeminent military historian and authority on strategy and warfare, it
seems now, in retrospect, as the perfect summation of Walter’s scholarship and
contribution to the literature——despite the fact that this was his first
substantial foray into what is collectively known as violence by non-state
actors. “[This] huge and ill-defined
subject,” Sir Michael wrote has probably been responsible for more
incompetent and unnecessary books than any other outside the field of sociology. It attracts phoneys and amateurs as a candle
attracts moths. When an experienced
historian like Dr Laqueur announced his intention of tackling it, his admirers
could not conceal their qualms. Could
even he more than flounder in this Serbonian bog? The answer is that he can and does, with a
mixture of massive learning and brisk commonsense.[ii]
Indeed, at the time, most treatments of
guerrilla warfare and terrorism were either anecdotal or, if within the
academy, uselessly theoretical. It was
thus a field of study to which shady memoirists, superficial journalists and
abstruse political scientists mostly seemed to gravitate. Guerrilla
was thus a veritable breath of fresh air and, as would characterize all of
Walter’s subsequent work on these subjects, a useful rejoinder to those lacking
the historical perspective necessary to understand events and trends that were
neither as new nor unique as the more gullible or parochial believed them to
be.
The scholarly authority and masterly
command of history apparent throughout Guerrilla
is perhaps evidenced by the fact that, more than thirty years since it’s
publication, the twelve core principles of guerrilla warfare elucidated by
Walter in its concluding chapter,[iii]
remain at the foundation of the insurgency and counterinsurgency courses today
taught at Georgetown University, where he was “University Professor”——the most
distinguished chair and title on that campus, and where Walter taught for the
longest single period——twelve years. The
importance of geography to the guerrilla; the timeless demographics and
socio-economic backgrounds of leaders and foot-soldiers alike; the serial
recurrence of guerrilla warfare in the same countries and regions; the inverse
correlation between guerrilla warfare and economic development along with
education and opportunity; the guerrilla’s perennial use of terrorist tactics;
and, personal motives of hate and fanaticism were among the pre-eminent
characteristics of this mode of warfare that Walter identified then which have continued
relevance today.[iv] His overall pronouncement given this
concatenation of empirical observations is hardly comforting and not terribly
optimistic. “Graduates of this school,”
Walter recently wrote in his own reflections of a career spent studying guerrilla
warfare and terrorism, “do not become apostles of humanism after victory.”[v]
It is though
in the study of terrorism where Walter has both had the greatest influence and
indisputably established his lasting legacy.
In the course of four seminal books spanning as many decades——Terrorism (1977); The Age of Terrorism (1987); The
New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (1999); and, No End To War: Terrorism In The Twenty-First
Century (2003)——Walter identified, explained and illuminated the most
pressing threats coming from this vexatious category of non-state actor. Not surprising, perhaps, is that the
springboard for these scholarly inquiries was doubtless the academic course on
terrorism that Walter conceived and taught at Georgetown University in the
early 1970s: the first to be offered at a university in the United States.[vi]
Walter brought a unique sobriety and
clarity to the study of this often visceral, febrile, subject. In both editions of
his monumental work on the subject (Terrorism
and The Age of Terrorism), he urged
scholars to move beyond their paralytic attempts to define terrorism: arguing
that it was neither possible nor really worthwhile to try to do so.[vii] Responding to a mid-1980s survey on the state
of terrorism research, Walter repeated this admonition. “Ten years of debates on typologies and
definitions,” he argued, “have not enhanced our knowledge of the subject to a
significant degree.” His empirical,
commonsense, conclusion was that the “study of terrorism can manage with a
minimum of theory.” Walter’s point was
supported by the twenty-two different word categories occurring in the 109
different definitions that 100 terrorism scholars were asked to provide.[viii]
Walter has been equally energetic and
persuasive in his debunking of theories about poverty, lack of education, and
unemployment as explanations for the eruption of terrorism.[ix] In the aftermath of the September 11th
2001 attacks this debate over the “root causes” of terrorism acquired new
relevance and greater urgency. A
succession of global leaders seemed to fasten on poverty, illiteracy and lack
of education as the sources of worldwide terrorism and insurgency.[x] Nearly a decade later, such arguments are
still heard. In February 2009, for
example, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani attempted to rally
support for his government’s controversial truce with Taliban fighters in the
Swat Valley by claiming that, since illiteracy is the source of terrorism and
insurgency, greater peace and stability in the region would now enable
Islamabad to improve education there and thereby eliminate political violence.[xi] Then, following the attempted inflight
bombing of North West Airlines flight 251 in December 2009, President Barack
Obama implied such a causal connection with respect to al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula’s resurgence in Yemen.[xii] And, last May, a column by Nicholas D.
Kristof in the New York Times claimed
that building schools in Pakistan is “just about the best long-term
counterterrorism investment available.”[xiii] Walter, however, has repeatedly pointed out
that both the historical and contemporary empirical evidence fail to support
such sweeping claims.[xiv] “It has been widely argued that a direct
correlation exists between terrorism and poverty——that poverty, especially in
what used to be called the third world,” he wrote in No End To War, is the most
important factor responsible for terrorism.
However, the historical evidence does not bear out such categorical
statements . . . in the forty-nine countries currently designated by the United
Nations as the least developed hardly any terrorist activity occurs.[xv]
For this reason, unlike many analysts and commentators
who were shocked that Umer Farouk Abdulmuttalab——the Christmas Day 2009
would-be bomber——was well-educated and from a wealthy family, Walter was
not. Similarly, when many expressed the
same surprise when in May 2010 Feisal Shahzad was apprehended after attempting
to detonate a vehicular bomb in New York City’s Times Square, and it was found
that he held a Bachelors of Science degree in computing and a Masters in
Business Administration, Walter was not surprised either. As he had correctly explained seven years
earlier, for terrorists to survive, much less thrive, in today’s globalized,
technologically savvy and interconnected world, they have to be educated, have some technical competence and be able
to move without attracting attention in alien societies. In brief, such a person will have to have an
education that cannot be found among the poor in Pakistani or Egyptian villages
or Palestinian refugee camps, only among relatively well-off town folk.[xvi]
In his seminal 1996 Foreign Affairs
article titled, “Postmodern Terrorism,” Walter rightly argued that we were on the cusp of a new era of terrorism for
a new century. Religious imperatives and
theological justifications and perhaps even the use of weapons of mass
destruction, he wrote, would usher in a new wave of
terrorist violence——even bloodier and more destructive than before.[xvii] In another context——and another debate during
the years following September 11th 2001 attacks, he took little
solace in arguments that “soft power,” or non-kinetics in military parlance,
offer any particularly novel or effective solution to terrorism. In characteristically piquant, but prescient,
prose, Walter explained that “it is not the terrorist idea that constitutes the
threat but their weapons.”[xviii]
Last year, around the time of the ninth
anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, some
commentators began to suggest that we may have overreacted to the events that
tragic day and thus created a self-destructive “climate of fear.”[xix] Walter, with his perspective on history and
analytical acuity is rightly less certain.
In Best Of Times, Worst Of Times,
he explains that, “Terrorism acquired its negative connotations as it became
more cruel, savage and bloodthirsty. The
enemy was not just to be annihilated; he also had to suffer as much main as
possible in the process.” He then draws
an historical parallel to the Russian revolutionaries of the late nineteenth
century who abjured from assassinating the czar and his ministers when there
was any risk of harming innocents. A
century later, he continues, the Tuparmaros in Uruguay enforced a code of
behavior whereby the shedding of innocent blood was to be avoided at all
costs. “Today, however, terrorism has
become inhuman,” Walter observes.[xx] Not a terribly comfort thought but a critical
one given that, he continues,
For the first time in human history very
small groups have, or will have, the potential to kill a great number of
people, to cause immense destruction, and perhaps to paralyze normal life for
considerable periods . . . .
Freud was partly correct. War, at least between great powers, has
become far less likely for rational reasons.
But his argument does not apply to terrorism, motivated not by political
or economic interests but by fanaticism with an admixture of madness.[xxi]
All of Walter’s arguments and
conclusions presented in this brief essay attest to the fact that both
guerrilla warfare and terrorism are timeless phenomena that cannot be forcibly
eradicated; decisively defeated in conventional military terms; or
simplistically solved. Recognition of
their intractability and appreciation of their complexities are thus essential
first steps in managing these two particular forms of conflict. “[T]here can be no
victory, only an uphill struggle,” Walter wisely counsels us, “at times
successful, at other times not.” Nearly
ten years into the war on terrorism, this is not necessarily what many
Americans wish to hear, but it is perhaps what they need to hear. As with everything that he studies, Walter
looks at the world as it is and not as one might wish it to be. Incisive analysis based on the cumulative
process of acquiring knowledge and then weighing the empirical evidence remains
at the heart of Walter’s approach: which is why, on guerrilla
warfare and terrorism at least, he is as close
to an oracle as any of us here are likely ever to meet.
¨ Presentation delivered at the
“Conference in Honor of the 90th Birthday of Walter Laqueur,” The
Joseph & Alma Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies, University of
Maryland, College Park, MD, 8 March 2011; and at “Celebrating Walter Laqueur,”
Center for Peace and Security Studies, Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign
Service, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 2 May 2011.
[i] See, for instance, the
acknowledgements page in Judith Tydor Baumel, The “Bergson Boys” and the Origins of Contemporary Zionist Militancy
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), p. xxvii, where the first
person recognized, not surprisingly, is was Walter——“whose patience and
advice,” this author wrote, “know no bounds.”
[ii] Quote from the Sunday Times (London) book jacket,
Walter Laqueur, Terrorism (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977).
[iii] Walter
Laqueur, Guerrilla: A Historical and
Critical Study (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1976).
[iv] Ibid., pp. 393-404.
[v] Walter
Laqueur, Best Of Times, Worst Of Times:
Memoirs of a Political Education (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press,
2009), p. 176.
[vi] Ibid., p. 187.
[vii] Laqueur,
Terrorism, p. 7; idem, The Age of Terrorism (Boston and
Toronto: Little, Brown, 1987), pp. 11, 142-156. See also, idem, Best Of Times,
Worst Of Times, p. 189.
[viii] Alex
P. Schmid, Albert J. Jongman, et al., Political
Terrorism: A Research Guide (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984),
pp. 3-6. See also, Laqueur, Best Of
Times, Worst Of Times, p. 189.
[ix] See Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism, p. 7; and, idem, The New
Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
p. 8.
[x] See, for instance, Scott Atran,
“Who Wants to Be a Martyr,” New York
Times, 5 May 2003; BBC News, “Poverty ‘fuelling terrorism’,” bbc.co.uk, 22 March 2002 accessed at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1886617.stm;
and, Nicholas D. Kristof, “Behind The Terrorists,” New York Times, 7 May 2002 accessed at:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0CE1DA1730F934A35756C0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
[xi] Saadia
Khalid, “Illiteracy root cause of
terrorism, extremism: PM,” The
International News, 21 February 2009 accessed at:
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=163751.
[xii] Peter
Baker, “Obama Says Al Qaeda in Yemen Planned Bombing Plot, and
He Vows Retribution,” New York Times,
2 January 2010.
[xiv] Laqueur,
Terrorism, p. 222; idem, The Age of Terrorism, p. 4; idem, The New
Terrorism, p. 80;
idem, No End To War: Terrorism In The
Twenty-First Century (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), pp. 15-18;
and, idem, Best Of
Times, Worst Of Times, pp. 181-182
& 185.
[xv] Laqueur, No End To War, p. 15.
[xvi] Ibid., p. 17.
[xvii] Walter Laqueur, “Postmodern
Terrorism,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 75,
no. 5 (September-October 1996), pp. 24-36. See also, idem, “Left, Right, and Beyond——The
Changing Face of Terror,” in James F. Hoge Jr, & Gideon Rose (eds.) How Did This Happen? Terrorism And The New War (New York:
Public Affairs, 2001), pp. 71-82. See
also, Laqueur, Best Of
Times, Worst Of Times, p. 182.
[xix] See Ted Koppel, “Nine years
after 9/11, let’s stop playing into bin Laden’s hands,” Washington Post, 12 September 2010; and, Fareed Zakaria,
“Post-9/11, we’re safer than we think,” Washington
Post, 13 September 2010.
[xxi] Ibid., p. 199.
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