Michael Burleigh
The Long War
Warrant for Terror: The Fatwas of Radical Islam and the Duty of Jihad
By Shmuel Bar
Rowman & Littlefield 134pp $21.95 order from our bookshop
Words assume an enormous significance in warfare. The First and Second World Wars or the Cold War each got right what was at stake, in a way that ‘war on terror’ doesn’t. At present, many policymakers are desperately searching for an alternative since ‘terror’ is a tactic, and many of the activities we routinely place in that category – such as assassination – probably do not belong there. As realists, some US military people prefer the term ‘the long war’, which although depressingly accurate as a description of the next fifty years, does not appeal to politicians who need to lift our eyes to sunlit uplands. It’s not easy, this word business: the ‘new wars’, ‘the Second Battle of Britain’, ‘the struggle for liberty’, ‘the wars of religions’; what on earth does one call what our generation is experiencing? Answers on a postcard to George W Bush.
Many military people will explain that there is no military solution to our present problems when dealing with a mindset that is doing the work of Allah. One might think that the prospect of killing most of the Palestinians with the bomb President
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Things began to go wrong between Mr and Mrs Eliot almost immediately. Ostensibly the problem was Vivien’s mysteriously fluctuating health. It would be easy to reduce the Eliot marriage simply to a catalogue of Viv’s medical crises.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/marriage-made-in-hell
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions