Chasdi, Richard J. Tapestry of Terror: a Portrait of Middle East Terrorism, 1994-1999.

Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2002. 507pp. $80

This is a book only a statistician could love. This reviewer is not a statistician. Chasdi, a visiting assistant professor of international relations at the College of Wooster, presents a quantitative analysis of the terrorist phenomena in four regions of the Middle East: Algeria, Egypt, Turkey, and Palestine and Israel. Purportedly Chasdi attempts to examine the antecedent events and conditions in the four subject nation-states with an eye toward understanding why terrorism occurs at the systems or operational level as well as at the state and subnational-actor levels. He hopes that in doing so he will give counterterrorism planners and policy makers data to help them better craft counterterrorism policy in the future. If this sounds complex, it is. Chasdi's complicated quantitative analysis coupled with his turgid and at times unfathomable prose makes the effort even more difficult.

Tapestry of Terror is the second of a projected trilogy studying the root causes of Middle Eastern terrorism. In his first volume, Serenade of Suffering, Chasdi examines terrorism in the context of the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian-Arab conflict. He throws a wider net in his second work by examining conditions in countries as diverse as Turkey and Algeria, as well as the more widely studied Israeli, Palestinian, and Egyptian varieties of terrorism. Because comparatively less has been written about terrorism in Algeria and Turkey, these two sections are uniquely interesting. In the section relating to Algeria, Chasdi devotes considerable time to the Islamic Salvation Front, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), and some relatively obscure splinter groups of the GIA. Unfortunately, Chasdi's examination of them falls short. Much of his analysis does not really address the basic questions of who these groups are or what constitutes their ideologies, their political, social, and religious goals, and how they differ from each other. Rather, Chasdi devotes most of his effort to studying the current state of the scholarship on different Algerian terrorist movements. This approach, historiographical in practice, is unhelpful, because it presumes that the reader is familiar with the differing views of the various scholars he is discussing. Last time I looked, not too many policy makers were steeped in the nuance of Algerian terrorist historiography.

The section devoted to the study of Turkish terror covers such well known groups as the Kurdistan Worker's Party and some not so familiar organizations, like the Greater Eastern Islamic Raiders and the Anatolian Federal Islamic State. While the information presented on these obscure organizations is interesting and frankly better presented than in the Algerian case, Chasdi once again falls victim to his fascination with the internecine disputes and discussions among scholars. Many times the more immediate questions of who and what these organizations represent are simply not presented in sufficient detail.

Another problem plaguing this book is Chasdi's basic quantitative approach to the issue of identifying the root causes of terrorism and then using data to predict terrorist incidents. While using quantitative methods to study terrorism has been vetted and is useful in certain instances, Chasdi's devotion to the methodology almost approaches the religious. With the text littered with such terms as "Pearson chi square values" and "Yates continuity corrections," Chasdi is for not the casual reader but one who is well versed in statistical research analysis methods. This, of course, harkens back to the original purpose of the book, to assist policy makers in understanding the causality behind Middle Eastern terrorism. Unfortunately, Chasdi has crafted a work so complex and arcane that one must question the real utility of his work to those who shape policy. While the efforts of his scholarship are impressive, one cannot help wondering if the only real audience for Chasdi's Tapestry of Terror is Chasdi himself.

JACK THOMAS TOMARCHIO

Office of the Secretary of Defense Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict