A decade or so ago, in his book "Terror and Liberalism," social critic Paul Berman derided the West for repeatedly making the conceptual error of refusing to understand "that, from time to time, mass political movements do get drunk on the idea of slaughter." Our mistake, he wrote, is "expecting the world to act in sensible ways" — that is, "without mystery, self-contradiction, murk, or madness."
But terrorism isn't madness. That's the true lesson that the West keeps refusing to learn. The terrorist isn't irrational. Evil, yes; irrational, no. So although most of the world surely agrees with President Obama's condemnation of the fatal shooting at the offices of Charlie Hebdo as "senseless attacks against innocent civilians," it's useful to remember that to the terrorist, the attacks aren't senseless, and the civilians aren't innocent.
There is a logic to terrorism, a coldly calculated ends- means rationality. The armamentum of terror is chosen by radical groups not because they are madmen but because they consider it efficacious. In short words, they believe it will get them what they want.
Many news organizations, in reporting on the Paris attacks, have made the decision not to show the cartoons that evidently motivated the attackers. This choice is sensibly prudent — who wants to wind up on a hit list? — but from the point of view of the terrorist, it furnishes evidence for the rationality of the action itself. Killing can be a useful weapon if it gets the killer more of what he wants.
Terror seeks to raise the price of the policy to which terrorists object. In that sense it's like a tax on a particular activity. In general, more taxes mean less of the activity. If you don't want people to smoke, you make smoking more expensive. If you don't want people to mock the prophet Mohammed, you kill them for it. The logic is ugly and evil, but it's still logic.
To the terrorist, history is full of useful lessons: The U.S. withdrawal from Lebanon after the 1983 Marine bombing is a prominent example still discussed in terror circles. True, the counterlessons are often ignored, but perhaps that is because of their rarity. The Sept. 11 attacks brought the war in Afghanistan down on the heads of Al-Qaida and its Taliban protectors, but wars on terror in that traditional sense — boots on the ground, bleeding and dying to hold territory — are difficult to mobilize and impossible to sustain.
Thus, even after the fall of the Taliban, the terror lords counseled their warriors to patience. The West, they said, will grow weary. The West always grows weary. That, too, is a lesson drawn rationally from history. And, as the terrorist well knows, there will always be people in the West who will counsel yielding, often by dressing up the terror as an unfortunate response to a "legitimate" concern.
The United States nowadays fights terror largely electronically, through its surveillance, its drying up of the flow of funds and, of course, its drone wars. All of these the patient and rational terrorist learns to evade. The occasional spectacular killing of a major terror figure might be viewed by theorists (including me) as potentially reducing the demand side of the terror market, but the terror continues, and even expands. The U.S.-led coalition that is relying on air power to attack the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant does not seriously imagine that its missiles and bombs will be able to roll back their territorial gains. For that, ground troops will be needed. Very soon the Iraqi security forces are supposed to move on Mosul, but they will be trying to drive out a well-armed, well-funded and well-entrenched enemy.
