This week's column

Targeting roots of terrorism in this long war
With the Bush administration's efforts in this long war against radical extremism grinding to an inconclusive halt, it's useful to revisit strategic issues that invariably frame our approach.

What makes a terrorist? Are the drivers primarily political or economic?

Depending on the answer, one could argue that America's grand strategy should lead with either promoting democracy or encouraging economic growth.

Princeton economist Alan Krueger has made a great study of this question, and published his findings earlier this year in a book whose title, "What Makes a Terrorist," lacks a question mark. That's because Krueger, marshaling persuasive statistics and analysis, comes down firmly on the side of politics, pointing out that most terrorists are middle-class and well educated.

Read on at KnoxNews.
Read on at Scripps Howard.

Comments

[Bill C.]

From an international perspective, what appears to spawn terrorism is the dictatorship of the United States.

Possibly globalization will work to change this -- for ill or for good.

[Joe Clay]

Help me out. How does middle class terrorists' activities such as happened on 9/11, in England and Spain fit into either model posed by Drs Barnett and Krueger? I don't think anyone has satisfactorily explained why presumably educated/middle class men are so willing to die by becoming human bombs. From what little I know, poverty has not been a consistent variable among the participants nor were all of them living in weak dictatorship countries. Were those conditions consistent among those who are willing to commit homicide of as many as possible as well as their own death I think I could get my brain around it. As Dr. Barnett noted, adherence to the Muslim religion is a common denominator but certainly not all Muslims participate in terrorism.

[stuart abrams]

I have not read Krueger's work, so I do not understand what criteria he uses to define a "terrorist" or what time-frame his studies consider. Viewed in a broader perspective, I don't see any necessary connection between Islam and terrorism. For the past 30 years, the US has been subjected to large numbers of acts of terrorism from right-wing groups, predominantly Christian, in the form of abortion clinic bombings and events such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in US history. In the 70s and 80s, the US also experienced terrorism from anti-Castro Cuban groups and anti-Communist Croatian groups. Until relatively recently, most acts of terrorism in the UK came from the IRA (Catholic, with financial support coming from the US), and throughout the 70s and 80s, all of Europe was subjected to terrorism from left-wing anarchist groups such as the Red Brigade and the Baader-Meinhof Gang (with Soviet support), and the US also experienced some terrorist activities by such left-wing groups, but not to the extent that Europe did.It seems to me that the real common denominator that links such groups with the current Islamic terrorists is fundamentalism. Fundamentalism tends to arise when one group feels threatened by the influence of competing groups; as certain individuals are drawn more completely into the fundamentalist mind-set, they reject all other rule-sets, which almost inevitably leads to terrorist violence. Since globalization increases group interaction, it also leads to an increase in fundamentalism and ultimately terrorism. It is not surprising that well-educated, middle class individuals, who are often on the cutting-edge of globalization, are the ones who feel a need to cling to a group identity, leading to fundamentalism and ultimately to violence.This is why I find the "war on terrorism" to be an unhelpful metaphor. Terrorism is not endemic to any one particular group against which we can "declare war." Terrorism is essentially a form of criminal activity and should be dealt with as such, although new techniques for doing so may be required in the era of globalization, which is, I guess, where the sysadmin force comes into the picture.