How To Fight Terrorists by Rami G. Khouri

How To Fight Terrorists
by Rami G. Khouri Released: 16 Jun 2008
WASHINGTON -- The 9/11 attack against the United States happened nearly seven years ago -- time enough, you would think, for the United States to come to grips with the causes and nature of terror. I am puzzled by how American society as a whole, with few exceptions, continues to react to the terror phenomenon with heated anger, rather than the cold analysis required to understand and defeat it.

As Americans conduct their foreign policy with the expressed aim of reducing terrorism, their policy often has precisely the opposite effect of increasing and stimulating terror in a whole new generation of youth.

Americans tend broadly to express understandable anguish about terror that emanates from Islamic societies. They point to conditions -- poverty, dictatorship -- and institutions -- radical mosques, madrasas -- that they see as the main cause of terrorism. Having lived in predominantly Islamic societies most of my life, my sense is that a more useful approach would be to ask why individual Muslims occasionally become radicalized to the point where they engage in terror, including suicide bombings where they take their own life, while the overwhelming majority does not accept or practice terror.

A healthy debate is underway in the United States on this issue, as more and more Americans undertake the hard research and analysis required to grasp what transforms ordinary young men and women into inhuman killers. One important discussion revolves around the argument by Marc Sageman, author of the books Understanding Terror Networks and the more recent Leaderless Jihad. Sageman, a sociologist and forensic psychiatrist, argues that the major terror threat around the world today does not emanate primarily from Al-Qaeda and its centrally planned spectacular operations.

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