This is a short single-author political essay, written immediately after September 11 and later paginated in Foreign Maladies. It argues that the attacks revealed a changed form of conflict: the United States faced neither a normal state adversary nor a conventional army, but clandestine terror directed at the conditions of social cooperation. Sennholz's central thesis is that the United States must defend itself, yet not by launching an imperial, open-ended war that would deepen the forces it seeks to defeat.
The appalling atrocities of September 11 are a manifest declaration of war not only on the United States but also on civilization itself.
The essay defines civilization through peaceful exchange and association, so terrorism appears as an attack on ordinary economic and social life. Its novelty lies in the enemy's indistinctness: the terrorist is linked to states, but does not fight as a state; he targets government and civilians alike.
It is a new kind of war declared by an enemy who is faceless and without a place of his own.
Sennholz next gives a compressed genealogy of the crisis. He presents Islam as a political-religious order whose fusion of faith and rule can intensify suspicion of secular democracy, then turns to Afghanistan and the Taliban as a case of fundamentalism, isolation, hunger, drug traffic, and terrorist training. Yet he also makes the problem one of American blowback. During the anti-Soviet war, he argues, U.S. money and intelligence encouraged jihadist forces that later escaped their sponsors.
It is a bitter harvest the seeds of which our own officials helped to sow.
The middle of the essay locates the anger behind jihad in the U.S. relationship to Israel. Sennholz calls for protecting Israel from terror while also condemning the policies that perpetuate conflict: Israeli confiscation and settlement, discriminatory state enterprise, and Palestinian insistence on a right of return. His peace program is characteristically libertarian: end seizure, secure property, privatize discriminatory state functions, open land markets, and replace grievance with commerce.
The leaders of both sides seem to prefer to lead their men to combat rather than urge them to the patient labors of peace.
The comparison with postwar German refugees clarifies this argument. Palestinians, he suggests, should not be held in permanent camps and retrospective nationalism, but should build trade, finance, housing, and productive institutions. Peace is not chiefly a treaty; it is a slow change in habits, incentives, and public opinion.
Since war always begins in the minds of men, it is only in the minds of men that peace can be won.
The essay then turns sharply against Washington. Sennholz insists that American bombing, sanctions, foreign aid, drug wars, and global management have produced enemies. This is not a denial of terrorist guilt; it is a distinction between moral blame for murder and strategic responsibility for provoking hatred.
In fact, most Americans are unaware that their government has profoundly antagonized much of the human race.
Against calls for declaration of war, expeditionary forces, or punitive strikes, Sennholz warns that such a response would become another Vietnam. Pakistan and Afghanistan would not offer a finite battlefield, and terrorists would likely relocate faster than armies could occupy territory. The most extreme temptation, nuclear vengeance, is rejected absolutely.
To wreak a nuclear holocaust on any Muslim city would be a crime against humanity and the start of a hundred-year-war between Islam and the West.
The final section generalizes the lesson: technology has given small bands the capacity to strike mass societies, while battleships, bases, and nuclear arsenals may be ineffective against dispersed cells. Sennholz's alternative is intelligence-led self-defense: international cooperation, border control, pursuit, arrest, trial, and patient detection of terrorist preparation.
The best defense against terrorism is intelligence effort and ability, that is, obtaining knowledge about all manifestations of terrorism.
The essay remains relevant as an early post-9/11 warning against endless war. Its core conceptual moves are to recast terrorism as anti-civilizational violence, explain it through religious-political grievance and U.S. intervention, separate defense from vengeance, and replace conventional conquest with a focused manhunt. Sennholz closes not as a pacifist but as a critic of militarized overreach.
Self-defense is a virtue; it is a bulwark of civilized order.
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