Carr, Caleb. 2002. The Lessons of Terror: A history of warfare against civilians, why it has always failed and why it will fail again. New York: Random House.

The war on terrorism rages on. You know you should read up on it; itÕs important to be informed. But all the books are so depressing. Who wants to read about ever more insidious microbes that float down from the sky or arrive in the morning mail to kill you with ever more horrible, ever more incurable plagues? Or, poisonous gases that float unseen to blister and pustulate your skin and throat, or nerve agents that short circuit your ganglions and make you quiver, belly up, like a cockroach zapped with Raid as it scurries up your kitchen wall. And, then, there are dirty bombs, as if the clean ones were not horrible enough.

No, terrorism is just too depressing to read about; yet, you know you should read something. What you need is a fun book, a hopeful book, a book that makes you think without making you double your Prozac intake. If this is your situation, then Caleb Carr's The Lessons of Terror is for you.

First off, Carr's book is not about terrorism. Instead, it is about terror, a closely related cousin. Terrorism is an ideological pathology that causes the infected disaffected to believe that 'affect' is more powerful and real than 'effect'. Most disaffected people strain and struggle to effect change in the world, for example, by feeding the hungry, clothing the destitute, or sheltering the homeless. It is very frustrating work, sometimes dangerous, but it is real work and, within limits, it is effective. People's lives change; sometimes whole political systems change.

In sickening contrast, a minuscule minority of the world's disaffected believe that the media splash generated by killing innocent people and destroying the symbols of power - the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, for example - will actually effect positive change. But the symbols of power are but the shadow of power, and the media affects much, but produces no effects. True, the influence of the media is often needed to effect change, but, without real power and real work, no real justice is possible. Peacekeepers and aid workers know this; terrorists do not.

If terrorism is an ideological pathology, terror is simple brutality. It is the joy with which the Christian knights of the First Crusade consecrated their capture of Jerusalem by slaughtering its population, men women and, children (p. 42-6). This is the solid heart of Carr's book, as his subtitle advertises, "A history of warfare against civilians, why it has always failed and why it will fail again." Although infinitely tragic, Carr's claim is hopeful. Mindless brutality and the killing of innocent civilians may always be with us; yet, we always overcome them in the end.

This is the hopeful, uplifting part of The Lessons of Terror - terror does not pay. The fun part is the evidence Carr uses to support his claim. Racing through world history from ancient Rome through the Taiping Rebellion to the Bay of Pigs to September 11 in 250 pages, Carr is forced to rely, perhaps too much, on extremely broad generalizations: "In other words, military history alone can teach us the lessons that will solve the dilemma..." (p. 14). Military historians might well agree, but the assertion ignores the contributions psychology, sociology, demography, and, above all, developmental economics can make. Few would deny that a more equitable distribution of the world's wealth would do much to drain the swamp of frustration and resentment in which brutality thrives.

Even more fun is Carr's call to disband the CIA (p. 238-9, 242) as one way to improve America. It is an amusing idea, one that many could support. But, one wonders, how realistic it is.

For more fun, there is the outrageousness of much of Carr's commentary: "Thus [in the War of 1812], the British gratuitously destroyed important structures during the Washington campaign (and killed many innocent civilians) because those buildings were obnoxious symbols of American [democratic] values whose spread and propagation the British government feared would spell the disempowerment of its own" (p. 134). This is all good Anglophobic stuff. However, it ignores, first, that neither the just-completed White House nor the unfinished Capitol were symbols of anything in 1812 and, second, that America, not Britain, had started the war, opportunistically attacking Britain while she was courageously defending freedom and democracy by defeating Napoleonic imperialism.

Still, in the end, with all its failings, despite teaching nothing about terrorism, The Lessons of Terror is a good book. It provides some amusement, a tragically hopeful conclusion, and much food for thought on the related issue of inhuman brutality: "...whenever and wherever such [terror] tactics have been indulged, they have been and are still destined ultimately to fail" (p. 14). If the hate-filled leaders of the world would only take this simple conclusion to heart, most of the complex humanitarian crises of our times could be avoided. Terrorism might well persist, but the large, million-plus-person political crises would be eliminated.

Brien Hallett is an Associate Professor at the Matsunaga Institute for Peace, University of Hawai'i and Director of its Program on Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance.

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