TerrorismThis is a thoughtful and stimulating study of the greatest security problem facing the world today: how to deal with the threat from terrorists. The author is an Irish-born Harvard academic who had a youthful flirtation with republicanism in the mid-1970s and now draws heavily on the Irish situation in making her arguments.
A recommendation from Mary Robinson is highlighted on the cover of the book, so it is hardly surprising to find that the author, a graduate in history from Trinity College Dublin, is largely out of sympathy with the Bush administration's war on terror. Indeed, one could imagine the more intelligent and liberal-minded contenders for the presidential nomination in 2008 reading this book and incorporating some of its ideas into their campaign speeches.
This is the softly-softly approach to catching terrorists and containing the threat they pose. The author pours scorn on the invasion of Iraq and few would disagree that, at least in the short term, the Baghdad adventure exacerbated the terrrorist problem it was supposed to help in resolving.
Dr Richardson has mixed feelings about the previous attack on Afghanistan, conceding that it was a severe blow to what the TV pundits call "al-Qaeda Central". On the plus side, it became much more difficult for the terrorist group to function in a coherent and structured fashion, but if al-Qaeda suffered organisationally it gained in terms of popular support among young Muslims who were roused to anger by what they regarded as further heavy-handed action on the part of the US.
In a telling segment of the book, she contrasts the approach of the first US president with that of the present incumbent. During the war of independence, the British were badly mistreating and frequently killing captured American fighters, whom they regarded as mere rebels rather than proper soldiers who should be treated like regular prisoners of war.
Estimates for the number of deaths on British prison-ships range from 7,000 to 11,644, far greater than the number of Americans who died in battle. But when 221 British soldiers were captured, George Washington wrote to the officer in charge of the prisoners: "Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren."
That, according to the author, is the true spirit of America and the kind of approach that would rally worldwide support for the US in its anti-terror drive. Instead, as she sees it, we have Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and all the other damaging stains on the US's reputation since the war on terror began.
Describing herself, rather inelegantly, as a member of the "terrorism studies community", she writes: "Had the American Government's policy in the past few years been informed by the views of the terrorism studies community, it would have been a very different policy indeed."
Nevertheless she acknowledges that, "Americans prefer big ideas to small ones", and the war on terror, for all its fundamental flaws, falls into that category. The average US citizen is far more religious than most Europeans and the concept of a war on terror has the same elemental fire-and-brimstone appeal as a crusade against evil; at times, indeed, it has been characterised as a crusade, giving considerable offence to Muslim sensibilities.
By contrast, Dr Richardson urges patience, engagement, dogged detective work and no grandstanding. Holding up Tony Blair's initial and apparently unscripted response to the July 2005 bombings in London as an example, she writes: "Far from elevating the rhetoric and engaging in the language of warfare or revenge, he spoke calmly of crime scenes and police work and of Britons' quiet determination to defend their values and way of life . . . In subsequent, and clearly scripted, speeches Blair slipped back into the more familiar and less constructive response mode generally adopted by democratic leaders."
She has praise, too, for the British government's ability, as she sees it, to learn from its own mistakes by seeking to resolve the Northern Ireland conflict through political initiatives and painstaking negotiation, an approach she recommends to the Bush administration in dealing with the terror threat.
Her basic thesis is that terrorists are seeking three things: revenge, renown and reaction. Now, two out of three ain't bad but the claim that these individuals are seeking some kind of spurious fame from their horrific deeds is somewhat implausible. Nevertheless it's not a bad working model and, if it provokes debate, so much the better.
More controversially, and indeed courageously, she argues that, instead of regarding the terrorists - even al-Qaeda types - as mindless and irrational creatures motivated by dark forces of evil, it would be more constructive to examine and seek to moderate some of the grievances that drive previously normal and even nondescript characters to kill and maim innocent people they don't even know.
A list of such grievances might include the oppressive regimes in Arab countries, the US role in the Middle East, and Israel's policy towards the Palestinians (hard to see the Americans rushing into that particular situation on a white horse).
It is a challenging proposition that is at least worth exploring. But there will still be fanatics who remain impervious to political gestures and the author does not spell out in sufficient detail the security measures she would favour to prevent such people launching terrorist attacks in the future. The Bush administration can at least claim to have prevented any repetition of 9/11 on US soil for almost five years afterwards and its supporters would argue that emergency measures involving the curtailment of civil liberties were an unavoidable element of that strategy.
Here in Ireland, North and South, it was the approach adopted for many decades and sometimes the former "terrorists" were the most enthusiastic oppressors when they got into government. The Belfast Agreement marked the adoption of a new approach and the jury is still out on whether it is going to succeed or not.
One of the points made repeatedly throughout this book is that terror will be with us for a long time to come. The world had better start getting used to it and develop shock-absorbers to cope with the latest outbreak because, as the author makes clear, there is a major psychological dimension behind most acts of terrorism. Whether at London's Bishopsgate in 1993 or New York's Twin Towers in 2001, a large part of the plan is to break the will and the spirit of the government and the society that are under attack.
We are all potential targets and, as the author points out, "There is no silver bullet for counter-terrorism".
Terrorism is a complex phenomenon which requires sophisticated and varied responses and, while security measures undoubtedly have an important role, the ultimate answer in most cases has to be political.
Deaglán de Bréadún is the Foreign Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times and author of The Far Side of Revenge: Making Peace in Northern Ireland, published by Collins Press
What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Terrorist Threat By Louise Richardson John Murray, 339pp. £12.99