OVERTHINKING TERRORISM

Nicholas Kristof has in his short time as a Times columnist mastered the art of overthinking the most important foreign policy issues of our day. First, he dug past the roots of Arab rage. Now, with an assist from The Greatest University in the World's K-School, he goes behind, past and right by the root causes of terrorism. Kristof's straw-man is the notion that "poverty and illiteracy" are the root causes of terrorism. Why, he asks, then, do most terrorists seem to come from the more educated strata of their societies? The answer according to Nick and friends is that the root causes of terrorism are humiliation and American foreign policy.

The logical conclusion to such reasoning is that the solution to terrorism is appeasing terrorists. Thus, Israel needs to stop humiliating Palestinians by defending itself, or better yet existing. America must stop humiliating the Arab world by having a prosperous democracy, and worse yet, flaunting its prosperity and power. Not to mess this wonderful theory with historical fact, but wasn't humiliation the root cause of Nazi terror? Well, at least Neville Chaimberlain would endorse Kristof's analysis.

Kristof managed to stumble across one of the root sources of terror when he mentioned economic isolation - the fact that terror-supporting regimes trade in oil, arms and not much else. He missed the point by supporting WTO expansion. The problem is the isolation - cultural, political, philosophical of these regimes from the Western world. Trade is not a panacea, but it will help to chip away at that isolation.

There was one word, however, desperately missing from his column - Democracy. The common link in all of these terror states is a complete lack of liberal, democratic freedoms. Terror, alas, can not be solved by materialistic means alone (although failed states DO facilitate terror). It is fundamentally an ideological disease, and it must be fought with ideological means. Tyranny, not poverty, or even illiteracy is what causes the humiliation that terrorists rage against. This rage is vented against an external foe - usually those more free and prosperous - but its root is the internal rot of the terrorist's own society.

Thus, the only effective solution to Islamic terror is the democratization and liberalization of the Arab world. Regimes that stand in the way of this progress need to be uprooted. The fact that this is a hard, difficult task doesn't make it a less obvious one. It's time for the K-school to stop pontificating about the causes of terror, and start brainstorming ways to begin work on the only solution.