ABSTRACT
The West in general and the United States, along with Iraq and Afghanistan and some other countries, are facing campaigns by organized groups using terrorism to further their political, ideological, and in some cases religious goals. The motivations of individual terrorists vary, but many experts say the broad underlying motives appear to include opposition to an existing order, fueled by a mixture of social and political idealism, mass unemployment and hopelessness, social humiliation, and religious fundamentalism and affronted nationalism. The modern terrorist challenge began with the so-called boutique terrorists of 1970s, small groups of disaffected radical youth in developed countries in Europe and in Japan, but soon expanded in numbers and ambition. After Palestinian terrorists staged the 1972 Munich massacre, killing eleven Israeli Olympic athletes, President Richard Nixon established a cabinet-level committee to coordinate counterterrorism efforts. Operational responsibility for dealing with terrorism was widely distributed throughout the US government bureaucracy, and lines of jurisdiction tended to be blurred and overlapping.
