NP What Terrorist Want

[David Morris]

>From the very good article linked below:

During the nineteen-nineties, when nobody was paying much attention, the 
terrorist-studies field was caught up in a fight, which intensified in 1995 
after members of the Aum Shinrikyo sect released nerve gas in a Tokyo 
subway. In one camp were academics, who stuck to the traditional view of 
terrorists as political actors who use violence to achieve what they can’t 
achieve through traditional means, and who therefore aren’t likely to engage 
in mass, and apparently senseless, killing. "Terrorism has a purpose," 
Hoffman told me. "Writing it off as mindless and irrational is not useful." 
In the other camp were former and current government officials, who believed 
that terrorists were going to begin using weapons of mass destruction, out 
of sheer rage. The positions of the two camps are neatly conveyed by the two 
most resonant maxims ever coined by terrorism experts. On the academic side, 
Brian Michael Jenkins, a rand colleague of Hoffman’s, wrote in the 
seventies, "Terrorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people 
listening and not a lot of people dead." On the government-official side, 
James Woolsey, the former head of the C.I.A., argued, "Terrorists don’t want 
a seat at the table, they want to destroy the table and everyone sitting at 
it."

>From: "Jasper Fidget"
>
>It's a good article, btw, called "What Terrorists Want", by Nicholas 
>Lemann.
>Here's a whisper-link to it:
>http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/message/12446

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