All the wrong places

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What Terrorists Want

Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat

Louise Richardson

Random House: 314 pp., $25.95

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Without Precedent

The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission

Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton

Alfred A. Knopf: 374 pp., $25.95

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Not a Suicide Pact

The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency

Richard A. Posner

Oxford University Press: 208 pp., $18.95

IN June 2005, Karl Rove came up with an effective new quip: Liberals, he declared, wanted to respond to terrorism by offering “therapy.” In the White House advisor’s view, “Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said: we will defeat our enemies. Liberals saw what happened to us and said: we must understand our enemies.” Today, it’s hard to regard Rove’s remark with anything but heartsick disgust. Despite the five years that have passed since the Sept. 11 attacks, we’re nowhere near defeating our enemies -- in large part because we’ve never made the slightest effort to understand them.

Three new books highlight these failures. In “What Terrorists Want,” Louise Richardson, executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, distills decades of research on terrorist movements around the globe and concludes that post-9/11 U.S. policy is based on deep misconceptions about how terrorists function. In “Without Precedent,” Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, co-chairmen of the Sept. 11 commission, describe the Bush administration’s relentless stonewalling of their efforts. And in “Not a Suicide Pact,” federal appellate judge Richard A. Posner asks whether the terrorist threat justifies restrictions on civil rights.

Lucid and powerful, Richardson’s book refutes the dangerous idea that there’s no point in trying to understand terrorists. She offers rare firsthand knowledge of how terrorists think: Raised in Ireland in a Catholic republican family, she was 14 at the time of the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre, when British troops fired on Irish protesters. She recalls her girlhood diaries, “filled with invective against the latest example of Britain ... exploiting and brutalizing Ireland.... The extremism I imbibed came ... from the air around me.”

As a university student, she watched many of her idealistic friends turn to the Irish Republican Army -- and although she did not join, she recognizes that those who did “were like me in almost every respect.”

Drawing on interviews and primary source materials from dozens of such movements, Richardson reminds us that despite the awfulness of their acts, most terrorists are neither “insane” nor even unusually cruel. On the contrary, their acts are rationally calculated, and most terrorists believe themselves to be altruistic and noble, Davids fighting Goliaths.

This is a simple insight with profound implications for counter-terrorism policy. The rhetoric of “evil” prevents us from understanding how terrorists think and alienates those who may be torn between sympathy for the political aims of such movements and disapproval of terrorism as a tactic.

And these are precisely the people Richardson says we can least afford to alienate. Although terrorist movements thrive when they are based in what she calls “complicit communities,” they fizzle out when they lose community support. Thus, understanding the grievances of those drawn to terrorism is crucial to designing effective policies to halt its spread.

By refusing to consider that terrorists may have any legitimate grievances, the Bush administration has radicalized moderates throughout the Islamic world and has wasted opportunities to deprive terrorists of the community support so critical to their survival. From the war in Iraq to the abuse of detainees, U.S. anti-terror tactics have backfired, driving more and more recruits into the arms of Al Qaeda.

At the same time, the rhetoric of the “war” on terror has played into Osama bin Laden’s hands. Terrorists long for legitimacy: They want to be seen as courageous soldiers forced to adopt brutal tactics in the face of the enemy’s superior resources. Here Richardson is blunt: “For the United States to declare war on a bunch of radical extremists living under the protection of impoverished Afghanistan is to elevate their stature in a way that they could not possibly hope to do themselves.”

Despite her grim assessment of the U.S. record since Sept. 11, Richardson holds out hope for containing terrorism and halting the spread of Islamic militancy. She urges talks (even if covert) with terror groups, to better understand their motivations and aims. Similarly, she advocates policies and foreign aid designed to address the political grievances that spur terrorists -- not out of any “illusions that these actions would impress, much less mollify, the perpetrators of the violence” but because they are vital to depriving terrorists of the complicit communities that sustain them.

Compared with Richardson’s rich, readable volume, “Without Precedent” and “Not a Suicide Pact” are narrow and anemic. But in different ways, each illustrates her fundamental point.

Beltway insiders will thrill to blow-by-blow accounts of meetings, memos and hearings in “Without Precedent,” but most other readers will find its detail numbing. Nevertheless, the book is a devastating indictment of how the Bush administration blocked the Sept. 11 commission at virtually every step.

For instance, when the commission first sought access to the president’s daily briefings, or PDBs, the administration decided that commissioners would not be shown the actual memos but would be briefed on their contents. The briefing proved farcical: “There was a detailed presentation by the White House ... with PowerPoint documents breaking down the number of PDBs responsive to our document request -- for instance, we were told how many PDBs mentioned al Qaeda [and] how many officials ... had received the briefings -- but the substance of the briefings was excluded.”

It was in such an atmosphere that the commission sought to make sense of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11. Unlike Rove, the commissioners took seriously the idea that we can’t defeat our enemies if we don’t understand them. They wanted to produce a report “populated by characters: human beings who struggled and continue to struggle, on both sides of the war on terror.” To that end, they tried to examine Al Qaeda’s origins, structure and goals -- and found themselves “asking why nobody within the government had done so before.” But when they tried to interview terror suspects detained by the U.S., the request was denied.

Kean and Hamilton carefully avoid explicit condemnation of the administration, but their message is apparent: Their efforts to come to a nonpartisan understanding of what led up to Sept. 11 were thwarted at every turn by an administration far more interested in partisan politics than in insights needed to enhance U.S. security.

Unlike Richardson, Kean and Hamilton, Posner is concerned with U.S. constitutional norms and the degree to which fears about terrorism should lead us to restrict civil liberties. On the whole, he favors restrictions on individual rights during national emergencies. But -- thank goodness for small mercies -- although Posner thinks torture may occasionally be useful, he considers it unwise to pass legislation authorizing it.

The legal arguments in “Not a Suicide Pact” are provocative, but Posner’s writing has a crabbed, academic quality. And although the degree and nature of terrorist threats surely ought to inform the degree to which we should allow our rights to be compromised, he seems remarkably uninterested in understanding terrorism itself.

Instead, Posner merely offers up a long string of adjectives: Americans rightly fear terrorists because they are “fanatical, implacable, elusive, resourceful, resilient, utterly ruthless, seemingly fearless, apocalyptic in their aims.” He ruefully concludes that “we know little” about the terrorists we face, “and in part because of our ignorance, we have no strategy for defeating them, only for fighting them.... Indeed, it is arguable that we have lost ground since 9/11.”

Too true. *