Original Thinkers Debate Terror

A must-read "symposium" with a great set of contributors. They examine the basics of the terror war in a historical context, and cover more new ground on how to approach Islamist terror than anything I've seen in a while. Some samples below:

Clashing is what civilizations DO. It's their inherent mission. There is no example in history of adjacent civilizations cooperating constructively over an extended period.

What can be done to reduce the dangers? Intelligence should be greatly improved, Western counter propaganda is virtually non-existent, political use should be made of the mistakes of the terrorists. But democracies will find it exceedingly difficult to act effectively for reasons which need not be elaborated in detail. This will change only following terrorist attacks in which weapons of mass destruction are used and it is probably unwise if governments are moving too far ahead of public opinion.

During the last six years of my other life, as a Romanian intelligence general, the main task of the Soviet bloc espionage community was to transform Yasser Arafat’s war against Israel and its main supporter, the United States, into an armed doctrine of the whole Islamic world.

Democracy is not a panacea for several reasons:

• You needn’t be a democracy to oppose terrorism – e.g. Morocco, Jordan, China, Russia.


• In most Arab countries democracy will produce an Islamist state as it nearly did in Algeria.


• In the Islamist Middle East, absent a background of civil liberties and religious freedom, democracy is not in the cards.