The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians Book

Choosing to examine international terrorism in the context of military history rather than political science or sociology, Caleb Carr's The Lessons of Terror is a howitzer of a journey through centuries of violent conflict to its bloody continuance today. Carr, the author of two bestselling period crime novels, The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness, makes plain the spine of his provocative dispatch: "terrorism ... is 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". To illustrate his other central contention, that terrorism always fails, he trawls through an unremittingly grim record of human brutality and greed, from the Roman practice of destructive war and plunder through to, inevitably, the recent attacks on America. The breadth of his definition proves commendable, if confusing; the lack of discrimination between state violence and individual or small-cell activity renders rightly culpable actions such as the British blockade of Germany in 1917, or William Tecumseh Sherman's 1864 march from Atlanta, but neglects to consider the role of violence for the oppressed, or what Michael Ignatieff has called "the force multiplier of the weak". Despite this, Carr successfully outlines a vigorous history of military engagement, and the thinkers that have shaped its course. Among others, he considers St Augustine's notion of a "just war", Grotius' seminal The Rights of War and Peace, Frederick the Great's reformation of European war in the 18th century, Swiss jurist Emmanuel de Vattel's The Law of Nations, and the influential On War by Karl von Clausewitz, in which he developed the concept of "total war". An excellent Epilogue articulates the predicaments of our present troubled times, for which he prescribes progressive, discriminatory retaliations, "restricted in their effects, yet decisive in their outcome". The book contains a curious mixture of republican sensibility and liberal pragmatism, understanding of the background to Islamic militancy, condemnatory of the CIA and wiseness to the globalisation of fundamentalism; Caleb Carr has written an urgent, real-life historical thriller that does well to raise as many questions as it strives to answer.--David VincentRead More