Nineteenth-century anarchists and 20th-century national liberation movements both sought radical goals, but their use of terrorism was rational and limited. They wanted a lot of people watching, but not a lot of people dead. But by the late 1980s a new religion-motivated terrorism, which embraced millennialist goals, was unconstrained by the same political, moral and practical considerations. In his most astute (and densest) chapter, Laqueur traces with authority the roots and development of Islamist fanaticism, illuminating above all -- in an analysis echoing Bernard Lewis' -- what he sees as its truly uncompromising hatred of the West.
That most Muslims don't embrace this ideology, Laqueur argues, is, when it comes to assessing the danger it presents, as true as it is irrelevant, for what now makes fanatical Islamist terrorism so dangerous is the marriage of its unrestrained goals with a highly adaptable, loosely structured international network that can increasingly kill many people with relative ease.
There is a bright spot in his analysis. Laqueur hardly views the Arab world as static. Eventually, he says, modernity will transform it. But until it is complete, that process will exacerbate the very forces most antagonistic to the West. The greatest national security question ever to face the US may well be: Will that transformation occur before religious fanatics acquire biological and nuclear weapons? If Laqueur's analysis is right, the West is in a race for its life.
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