Since 9/11, the Bush administration has consistently reminded us that the country is engaged in a "war on terrorism," sometimes phrased as "the war on terror." Louise Richardson, the executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and an expert on terrorism, reminds us in this important book that terrorism is not an ideology like communism or fascism, but, rather, a means to an end. Thus, in order to combat the terrorists, she says, it behooves us to understand the enemy, their motivation, tactics, and objectives, be it the restoration of the Islamic caliphate, the creation of radical jihadist republics, or the destruction of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic state.

Richardson defines terrorism as deliberately and violently targeting civilians for political purposes. She notes that terrorism has seven crucial characteristics:

A terrorist act is politically inspired; if not, then it is simply a crime.

If an act does not involve violence or the threat of violence, it is not terrorism.

The point of terrorism is not to defeat the enemy but to send a message. In the aftermath of 9/11, an al Qaida spokesman declared that the attack "rang the bells of restoring Arab and Islamic glory."

The act and the victim usually have symbolic significance. Osama bin Laden, for example, referred to the World Trade Center towers as "the icons of America's military and economic power."

States such as Iran, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Syria, and Libya have all sponsored terrorist groups; nevertheless, argues Richardson, "if we want to have any clarity in understanding the behavior of terrorist groups, we must understand them as sub-state actors rather than states."

The victim of the violence and the audience the terrorists are trying to reach are not the same. Victims, states Richardson, are used as a means of altering the behavior of large audiences, usually a government.

Following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres was a clear favorite to win the election as Israel's prime minister, thus continuing the peace process commenced by his martyred predecessor. But suicide bombings initiated by the Palestinian enemies of the peace process staggered Israel to the extent that it changed the political climate, resulting in the election of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Similarly, terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2004, which killed 191 people, altered the country's electoral outcome and led to the removal of Spanish troops from Iraq.

Richardson argues that the most important and defining characteristic of terrorism is

7. the deliberate targeting of civilians.

This is what sets terrorism apart from other forms of political violence, what distinguishes the Irgun — the military organization led by Menachem Begin in prestate Israel, which, for the most part, confronted the British military — from Hamas or Hizbullah, which deliberately attacks civilians. Striking noncombatants is a deliberate strategy. Hamas justifies its terrorist acts against Israelis because in Israel the population serves in the army; therefore, they say, everyone is a legitimate target. Al Qaida defended its 9/11attack and the death of 3,000 citizens on the basis that Americans, by paying taxes to support its government's policies, are therefore justifiable targets. Shamil Basayev, the leader of the Chechen rebels responsible for the Beslan school massacre , declared all Russians fair game because "they pay taxes."

Turning to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, Richardson notes that terrorist groups like Hamas find an endless stream of recruits for suicide bombings and other acts of terror because of their desire to avenge alleged Israeli atrocities. She cites one incarcerated Islamist who declares: "You Israelis are Nazis in your souls and conduct…you uprooted people from their homeland…and chased them into exile…. You smashed the skulls of defenseless civilians. You set up detention camps for thousands of people in sub-human conditions…. Given that type of conduct, there is no choice but to strike at you without mercy in every possible way."

Although it is possible that Israel may one day make peace with Palestinian "moderates," it would still face the unalterable opposition of radical groups like Hizbullah, which, like Al Qaida, view Israel as the vanguard of the United States in the Islamic world. Richardson quotes from the Hizbullah program, which states that their struggle against Israel "will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease-fire, and no peace agreement, whether separate or consolidated." Richardson reminds us that until Al Qaida emerged as the United States' most formidable enemy, Hizbullah, until 9/11, had killed more Americans in terrorist attacks than any other such group. Both the United States and Israel will continue to suffer from terrorist acts in the near future, and Richardson's book is indispensable in understanding the nature of what we are up against.

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POLLS INDICATED that most Americans considered the country to be in a state of war [after 9/11]. There was overwhelming popular support for a resort to military force in response to the attacks. The American public was also overwhelmingly confident that the United States would find and punish the people responsible for the attacks.

To declare war on what is, after all, a tactic does not appear to make a great deal of sense. One would never hear of war being declared on, say, precision-guided bombing. It's not so much the tactic that ought to be the focus of our attentions as those who deploy the tactic. Later, the war on terrorism became the Global War on Terror (GWOT), which is an even more nebulous notion. Terror, like fear, is an emotion, so declaring war on an emotion is hardly a strategy conducive to success. When the president was not declaring war on terrorism or terror, he was declaring war on evil. At a meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan, President Bush said, "I have assured His Majesty that our war is against evil, not against Islam." Two months later he gave the same message to the Warsaw Conference: "We do not fight Islam, we fight against evil." In January 2002, the president told a town meeting in California, "Our war is a war against evil." On another occasion the president assured Americans, "We will rid the world of evildoers."

There were, of course, alternatives available to declaring war on terrorism, terror, and evil. The administration might, for example, have declared war on al-Qaeda or on Afghanistan, the state that harbored it. Had it done so, there would have been some clear matrices of success or failure by which progress could have been measured.