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The measure of terror
Evening Standard 21 Feb 2008BOOK OF THE WEEK
By: JUSTIN MAROZZI
A leading historian turns his focus on today's violent political movements - and delivers an uncompromising critique of the hypocrisies, delusions and crimes that sustain them
Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism by Michael Burleigh
THE AMERICAN-led war on terror has been kind to a number of people, organisations and countries, mostly those whom it was directed against. It has been a good thing for Osama bin Laden, who has been elevated to global, cave-dwelling celebrity. It has done wonders for al Qaeda and its international recruitment drive, churning out droves of bearded terrorists from Muslim ghettos in Europe to the sun-kissed jungles of the Philippines.
And, thanks to the conflict in Iraq, an illogical extension of an irrational war, it has thrust the United States's sworn enemy Iran into the Middle Eastern driving seat. The world still awaits the much-vaunted democratisation of the region promised by the neo-cons.
The security industry and publishing world have done rather well out of the war on terror, too. Amazon has an astonishingly long list of bestselling terrorism books with lurid titles such as Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington, and Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman Who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America.
The conservative historian Michael Burleigh has entered the fray with a more magisterial tome, broad in scope, powerful in its argument and brimming with healthy rage. The tone is immediately uncompromising. He brushes aside the rebarbative cliché that yesterday's terrorist is tomorrow's statesman. "If you imagine that Osama bin Laden is going to evolve into Nelson Mandela, you need a psychiatrist rather than an historian," he writes.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, almost a third of the book is devoted to Islamist terrorism, which Burleigh surveys from the Iranian revolution of 1979 to today's mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan, via set-pieces on Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan and Palestine. This extended section sees him at his polemical best, exposing the multiple hypocrisies - and lazy thinking - of the Islamist terrorist with a sharpened pen. Of the ruinous eight-year Iran-Iraq war, he notes acerbically that: "It is striking that, among the subjects that anger so many Muslims today, this obliteration of an entire generation is not among them." Warped delusions regarding Israel and the suspected hand of "Crusader-Zionists" in all the world's perceived ills are likewise given short shrift. The West is not obsessed with destroying Islam. Oil aside, economic interest in a region whose entire manufacturing capacity is equal only to that of the Finnish telecoms giant Nokia is necessarily limited.
The dense, discursive narrative of killing and bloodshed would be relentless were it not for occasional bursts of humour - grim, gallows and galling.
"Expectations are so low in places like Gaza and Jenin, that killing oneself can seem like an attractive career option," he writes of Palestinian suicide bombers.
Osama bin Laden is a pious bore, his manner that of "self-righteous superannuated rock stars with delusions of grandeur who harangue world leaders about Africa". (Who on earth could he mean?) Though many in the West fail to understand the rationale of suicide bombings, pragmatic calculations make it abundantly clear. During the Al-Aqsa intifada, Israel experienced 36,000 terrorist incidents from September 2000 to September 2005. The 144 successful suicide attacks represented just 0.4 per cent of the total, but more than 50 per cent of the deaths caused.
Pakistan, incubator of so much Muslim rage against the infidel West, is now reaping its own whirlwind of terrorist violence. This is not unrelated to the staggering rise in the number of radical, Saudi-approved Deobandi madrassas in the country, from 354 in 1972 to 7,000 in 2002. If only Pakistan was able (or willing?) to provide its people with a halfdecent state education, the contagion of madrassa-sponsored Islamism might never have spread like wildfire in the first place.
If Islamist terrorism receives the brunt of Burleigh's assault, the Left emerges bruised and bloodied, too. Intellectuals and academics, he argues, have historically proved far too accommodating to terrorist groups. The espousal of violence for other people is "an especially despicable trait among Left-wing intellectuals", not least in Italy where they provided a complacent Marxist base from which the murderous Red Brigades sprang in the 1970s.
"All of us in the Red Brigades were drug addicts of a particular type of ideology.
A murderous drug, worse than heroin," Alberto Franceschini, one of the founders, later recalled.
YET, AS Burleigh convincingly argues, ideology often plays second fiddle to more mundane concerns. Terrorists are essentially criminals. Think Taliban and the heroin trade, the IRA and drugs, al Qaeda and money-laundering ... The neo-cons, it is worth noting, come in for only a glancing reprimand, something of an anomaly when surveying the present mayhem in the Middle East.
As for the nobility of the armed struggle, the morality of killing innocent civilians in a hail of glass and metal has generally not proved a stumbling block for terrorists. For Dmitry Borgov, assassin of the Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin in 1911, it was no more than a "convention". ETA and the IRA were equally callous. The Islamist misfits and losers - or "amoral, deracinated scum that has fetched up from various Third World hellholes" - remain blithely dismissive of the innocent men, women and children sent to an early grave.
After the grand sweep of his history, Burleigh brings this riveting book to a close with a number of tentative prescriptions.
He highlights the Saudi programme to wean Islamists off terrorism with courses in religious education and re-engagement with estranged families, which has had encouraging results. He is right to condemn as counterproductive Guantanamo-style arrangements.
Arguing that the West should insist on strict reciprocity regarding freedom of religious practice, however tempting it may appear, is more problematic.
Western democracies, after all, are not Middle Eastern tyrannies.
Justin Marozzi is a political risk and security consultant and the author of Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World.
