Walter Laqueur Walter Laqueur, PhD, now retired from his many academic postings, is most recently associated with the International Research Council at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C., as its former director and, currently, a distinguished scholar . What is terrorism? There are more than a hundred definitions. The Department of State has one, Title 22 of the U.S. Code Section 2656: "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience." The Department of Defense has another, and also the Federal Bureau of Investigation, while the present writer has contributed two or three definitions of his own. But none is wholly satisfactory. Too much has been made, in my opinion, of the element of "noncombatant targets" in order to define terrorism; there has not been a terrorist group in history that has attacked only soldi...
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