Marc Sageman, a French forensic psychiatrist, published the groundbreaking book "Understanding Terror Networks" in 2004 based on his biographical analysis of 172 known terrorists, including the men who carried out the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Sageman has expanded that study to more than 400 known terrorists, analyzing information available in trial transcripts, press accounts and academic journals. What he continues to find turns the stereotypical notion about terrorists -- that they are young, lonely, na�ve, idealists corrupted by al Qaida recruiters and religious schooling -- on its head.

"It's very much a war of ideas," Sageman said.

But the winning ideas are not necessarily the ones the Bush administration is pushing.

"Preaching democracy around the world is ineffectual," he said.

What would address the problem of terrorism at its roots, according to Sageman, is advocating justice.

"What you have to do is stick to core American values , justice and fairness, and distance ourselves from local regimes -- that's much of the grievances of young people. As long as we support those regimes, we are seen as a 'far enemy' supporting the 'near enemy,'" Sageman said.

Among those regimes are those the United States government considers allies or at least partners: Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia, and Jordan.

"We always think it is all about us. It's never been about us," Sageman said. "And we actually make mistakes and support local corrupt regimes so that people kind of think, 'oh well the reason we are exploited and in this condition is because the United States is propping up'" the hated regime.

"You've got no job, the legal system is stacked against you," Sageman continued. "It's a little like the Jim Crow laws of the South. A white man could never be convicted in the (American) south even when they killed black people. It's kind of the same thing in the Middle East.

"That's where our policy comes in. If our policy is blind support of local regimes no matter how corrupt, how despotic, the local people would blame us," he said.

The perception that the United States is helping to prop up those regimes allows groups like al Qaida and other fundamentalist Islam agitators to turn the would-be terrorists' attention from the near enemy -- the society in which they live, where they have grievances -- to focus on the "far enemy," the United States.

Understanding who joins terrorist organizations and why they end up sacrificing their own lives or killing for their cause is the first step in stemming the tide of new terrorists.

"You have to try to deflect new people from wanting to join the movement," Sageman told UPI.

By and large the 400 terrorists he collected data on are middle class people, the majority married with children. The majority had schooling beyond high school, and most of them were trained in a technical or natural science field. The average age of joining is 25.

They were not raised to be religious and the vast majority - more than 300 of the 400 biographies analyzed -- never attended madrassa, the religious schools that Rumsfeld himself fingered in a leaked memo to his top lieutenants n October 2003.

"Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" he wrote.

Neither were they recruited to terrorism by al-Qaida masters. Al-Qaida does not recruit in the way most people understand the word. Most terrorist cell members mutually recruit each other. They are friends first, begin talking about their plight, and together decide to become terrorists supporting a fundamentalist view of Islam. Al-Qaida historically only accepts 15 to 25 percent of those who volunteer.

Their plight is the problem. Despite their educational qualifications and socieo-economic backgrounds, the societies in which they live -- Western Europe and the Middle East -- are largely closed to them. Their upward mobility is limited by discrimination or class distinction, and they sour on the societies in which they live.

Most importantly, Sageman says, the solution is not necessarily a matter of democracy. Many of the societies in which these terrorists come from are nominally democratic. Instead, it is a matter of justice: of having economic opportunity, of being accepted as a full member of society rather than being regarded as an outsider, of being respected.

Those very conditions were what led to the violent protests last year in Paris. They were fueled by a generation of young French people who's parents or grandparents were immigrants. While they were born and grew up in France, they were still deemed outsiders -- not employable, not French, said Sagemen.

Ironically, the fresh riots in Paris are being carried out by French young people, angry that employment rules are being changed in ways that could help address the grievances of the first rioters by increasing employment generally but that alter the traditional French job security.

When the United States preaches democracy, it does so blind to the fact that democracy does not automatically translate to justice, Sageman said.

Sageman believes U.S. attempts to win the war of ideas are fatally undermined by both the war in Iraq and the prison in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.

"Guantanamo Bay adds fuel to the grievances of young Muslims worldwide. That's one of the things that convinces them that it's not local conditions but a global fight. That tends to put the focus on us," he said.

"It doesn't matter what you say when you have 160,000 troops killing Muslims in Iraq," he said. "Especially when all the media outlets present that every night. People are not that stupid."

Sageman believes with a change in American policies and a focus on justice -- on freedom, on economic development, on fairness -- could shift the tide. The American mission should be to shift the focus of people away from the far enemy -- the United States -- and back where the grievances are, and where they can be addressed: to the local level.

"The damage is done, but thank God people have poor memories," he said.

Community
Email This Article
Comment On This Article

Related Links
- The Long War - Doctrine and Application

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News