Michiko Kakutaniコミュの（34）THE LESSONS OF TERROR

January 31, 2002
BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Augustus, Napoleon, the C.I.A. and Other Terrorists
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

THE LESSONS OF TERROR
A History of Warfare Against Civilians: Why It Has Always Failed and Why It Will Fail Again
By Caleb Carr
272 pages. Random House. $19.95.

Caleb Carr's highly subjective and unpersuasive new book, ''The Lessons of Terror,'' purports 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.'' The book actually turns out to be a long laundry list of atrocities and wartime brutalities committed throughout history (from the days of the Roman empire through the present), a laundry list that Mr. Carr uses to suggest that there is nothing terribly new about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the continuing activities of Al Qaeda, and to imply further that the United States itself has a long history of engaging in ''terrorist tactics.''
In the course of laying out these arguments, Mr. Carr relies upon lots of gross generalizations and misguided analogies, and he also assumes an annoying, finger-wagging tone that reeks of condescension and superiority. The author of the period thriller ''The Alienist,'' Mr. Carr is also a contributing editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, and in these pages he sets forth several lessons that he says can be learned from looking at the history of warfare waged against civilians.
He argues that terrorists should be treated not as simple criminals, but as ''organized, highly trained, hugely destructive paramilitary units.'' He argues that ''the strategy of terror is a spectacularly failed one,'' nurturing resentment and anger on the part of its victims and leading eventually to the frustration of the terrorists' own interests. And he argues that ''the only coercive measures that have ever affected or moderated'' terrorist actions are ''pre-emptive 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,'' a view that echoes the policies pursued by the Bush administration in the wake of Sept. 11.
Unfortunately for the reader, Mr. Carr undermines these more valid arguments by writing as though he were one of the few observers with the perspicacity to grasp them, and he undermines his more common-sensical observations by mixing them up with all manner of arbitrary examples, flawed reasoning and his own political hobbyhorses.
To begin with, Mr. Carr not only defines terrorism in extremely broad terms -- as ''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'' -- but he also proceeds to confuse such acts with the so-called collateral damage to civilians that frequently occurs in the midst of military campaigns.
As a result, virtually every nation in history, in Mr. Carr's opinion, is guilty of terrorism. The men responsible for the survival of terrorism into the modern era ''were not fringe lunatics or mystics,'' he writes. ''They were soldiers and statesmen, many of them well respected, who generally did their work not in the shadowy corners of the world but in the halls of national power.''
Among the historical figures Mr. Carr counts as terrorists are the Roman emperor Augustus, King Louis XIV of France and Otto von Bismarck of Germany, and during the Vietnam era John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger. He chastises the Allies for the firebombing of German cities during World War II, and he chastises the United States for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For that matter, much of this book's narrative devolves into a litany of mass deaths, massacres and other horrors that have occurred in the history of the world, from the African slave trade to the terrors unleashed by Hitler and Stalin. Mr. Carr mentions the Romans' destruction of Carthage, the Crusades and the Inquisition, the brutalities committed by the Ottoman and Mughal empires and the fallout from the French Revolution.
Many of the events cited by Mr. Carr, bloody and horrifying as they are, seem less like examples of terrorism per se than simple illustrations of the awfulness of war. At one point he even writes that ''it is difficult not to view the First World War as an exercise in terrorism on the grand scale.'' He contends that Napoleon's ''subordination of all other human activities to the needs of his army had an effect equal to any deliberate targeting of civilians,'' and he suggests that Britain's naval blockade of Germany during World War I -- to starve, in his words, ''not only the German armed forces but the population of Germany generally'' -- fits entirely within his definition of international terrorism as well.
Mr. Carr's selection of examples in this book is highly arbitrary at best. Although he does not detail the cruelties inflicted by Saddam Hussein on the people of Iraq, for instance, or the cruelties inflicted by the Taliban on the people of Afghanistan, he goes on for pages about what he calls an ''American tradition'' of ''unusually brutal and desperate conflicts'' and a ''perceived need'' on the part of Americans ''to fight savages with savage methods,'' as evidenced by violent episodes dating back to the Revolutionary War, the wars against the Indians and the Civil War and running through the prosecution of the Vietnam War.
Of the Civil War, he writes: ''The Napoleonic Wars had, to be sure, approached it in scope, but the destruction of civilian life and property had not been as systematically, even scientifically, calculated and planned as it was in America.''
By the end of the book, Mr. Carr is calling for the abandonment of America's use of ''long-range bombardment as a decisive strategic instrument,'' arguing that it is a counterproductive strategy that has contributed to ''the diminution of American and Western moral authority,'' and he is also calling for the abolishment of the C.I.A., which he says bears ''an uncomfortable resemblance to an organ of state terror.''
As for current tensions between the West and fundamentalist Islamist forces, he has a Pollyannaish solution: ''Western governments, specifically the American, must finally acknowledge that the days of gunboat diplomacy are over,'' and ''Islam must finally reinterpret those contextual, anachronistic passages of the Koran that were so necessary to the survival of the faith in seventh- and eighth-century Arabia but that now propel men to self-defeating acts of terror against civilians.''
Such passages, typical of the specious and shallow reasoning in Mr. Carr's book, indicate that he has little credibility as military historian or political analyst, and that he would do best to go back to the writing of fictional thrillers.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01E7DD1E3AF932A05752C0A9649C8B63&sec=&pagewanted=all