Reflections on the American War on Terror: A Corrective from the Pages of History

The American government’s official policy statement on terrorism ignores the historical literature on the subject. The book-length document released by the United States Department of State on April 30, 2007, Country Reports on Terrorism 2006, contains not a single reference to any of the classic or modern studies of terrorism.

The State Department’s Country Reports begins with a strategic assessment that celebrates America’s advances in the war on terror. The authors point to the progress that has been made in producing security improvements, reducing terrorist capabilities, and eliminating key terrorist leaders. They lament the problems that remain: Iran, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Lebanon, al Qaeda and its affiliates worldwide. Indeed, no part of the world is free of terrorism or the threat of it, with the Middle East, North Africa, and South and Central Asia the regions most at risk. State sponsors of terrorism—chiefly Iran, Syria, and Cuba—are said to provide critical support for nonstate terrorist groups. Nuclear, radiological, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMD) attacks from terrorist groups could occur at any time. Uneasy lies the head that wears a superpower’s crown.

What is to be done about the manifold threats of terrorism? In Chapter 5 of Country Reports, we receive an answer to this question. In addition to eliminating terrorist leaders and safe havens, “we must address the underlying conditions that terrorists exploit.” The conditions favoring terrorist activity are as follows: lack of economic opportunity and political participation, ethnic conflict, ungoverned space, and political injustice.

In commenting on what the United States is doing about the underlying conditions that give rise to terrorism, the State Department authors reveal their ultimate concern: radical Islamic terrorism. All of the other terrorist threats against the United States amount to very little. Europe and Latin America, once hotbeds of terrorist activity, rate only passing mention by the State Department now. The section of Country Reports that deals with underlying causes (in Chapter 5) concerns Islamic societies exclusively. To eliminate these causes, the authors present a program called the Middle East Partnership Initiative as the paramount means of spreading democracy, women’s empowerment, and economic prosperity in the region. In addition, they tout America’s special aid programs for Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as effective counterterrorism measures. Most importantly, “the United States recognizes that the global and generational challenge of countering terrorism is, at its heart, a contest of ideas and values, and that America is more secure when people around the world share the same hopes and freedoms.”

Unrecognized by the United States, at least in the pages of the Country Reports, are the particular conflicts that have sparked the firestorm of anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world. The authors immediately move from their statement about the generic conditions favoring terrorism to a listing of America’s counterterrorism measures. Clearly, they missed a step in their analysis. Here is where the approaches of the classic historians, beginning with Thucydides, can be of help to them in establishing the proper ways to define the threats of terrorism (Drake 2007).

If we begin with the premise that terrorism is a particular form of warfare, the efficacy of Thucydides’s explanation for all wars becomes readily apparent. In the introduction to the History of the Peloponnesian War, he lays down the rule that wars result from general and particular causes. For the Peloponnesian War, he establishes a context by analyzing Greek history from the end of the Persian Wars to the outbreak of hostilities between Athens and Sparta, a period of about 50 years. These two powerful states contended for supremacy in Hellas, intermittently clashing with each other. An attempt to establish a meaningful truce did not hold for long: “As to the reasons why they broke the truce, I propose first to give an account of the causes of complaint which they had against each other and of specific instances where their interests clashed: this in order that there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind about...