Instead of the international police action we had hoped for during the war in Kosovo, there are wars again - conducted with state-of-the-art technology, but still in the old style

From a moral point of view, there is no excuse for terrorist acts, regardless of the motive or the situation under which they are carried out.

I cannot imagine a context that would some day, in some manner, make the monstrous crime of September 11 an understandable or comprehensible political act

Historically, terrorism falls in a category different from crimes that concern a criminal court judge.

What was new was the symbolic force of the targets struck. The attackers did not just physically cause the highest buildings in Manhattan to collapse; they also destroyed an icon in the household imagery of the American nation.

After September 11, the European governments have completely failed. They are incapable of seeing beyond their own national scope of interests.

Some of those drawn into the holy war had been secular nationalists only a few years before. If one looks at the biographies of these people, remarkable continuities are revealed.