After Sept. 11, the search for wise counsel continues

September 11 created an unaccustomed problem for many writers: how to discuss events that until that day had been inconceivable. The terror attacks on New York and Washington were so unexpected, and so overwhelming in scale, that many normally prolix pundits found themselves at a loss. Much of what was published in the immediate aftermath of the attacks was either incoherent or intemperate.

That was then. Now, figuring out how to speak in the face of an overwhelming crisis has been supplanted by another challenge: how to distinguish one's writing from the gushing tide of ink. The problem is no longer too little analysis. If anything, there's too much to wade through (though opinions still tend to vary too little).

This includes reams of articles, and even a handful of books. Some of these are surprisingly good, especially considering the speed with which they were produced. (Full disclosure: The magazine I work for, Foreign Affairs, has sponsored one of these volumes.) Even considering the time constraints, however, "The Age of Terror" doesn't fall into that category.

Edited by Strobe Talbott, a veteran Time reporter who served as Clinton's deputy Secretary of State, and Nayan Chanda, a longtime editor at the Far Eastern Economic Review, "The Age of Terror" is a collection of eight essays, mostly by professors at Yale, where Talbott and Chanda now head the Center for the Study of Globalization.

The term "essay" is used lightly here: Some of these pieces, which rarely stray over 20 smallish pages in length, are little more than beefed-up op-eds. Many of them meander haphazardly; some are downright confused.

A few offer original analysis, or analysis that might have seemed original in October, when they were written. Most of what we get, however, are well-intended platitudes (at best) or angry invective (at worst). Only a few offer much new thinking.

Into the worst camp - angry rants - falls Charles Hill's "A Herculean Task: The Myth and Reality of Arab Terrorism." With more invective than argument, Hill derides Washington's attempt to eradicate terrorism and promote peace over the last 30 years, and blames American journalists and diplomats for ignoring international conflicts and promoting cowardly quick fixes.

Hill reserves his real spleen, however, for Middle Eastern countries, and the Islamic world in general, for failing to develop politically or economically and thus creating the miserable conditions that allowed violent hatred of the West to flourish.

While Hill is right that Arab tyranny is partly responsible for the kind of rage that fueled bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, and while it is appropriate to point out that too few Muslim authorities condemned the attacks after they occurred, the former aide to three Republican secretaries of State (Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and George Shultz) undermines his own case by making sweeping statements such as, "The shadow of illegitimacy falls over all political power in Islam." And his insistence that Washington shouldn't bother with peacemaking efforts in the Middle East until all terror there has been eradicated is dangerous to the extreme.

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