God save me from my friends! The President of the republic asked the Mallet Commission to produce the justification for aligning himself with the ‘war on terror’ led by the United States. The White Paper duly obliged him, at the cost of the contortions and short cuts that we are aware of. And at that same moment, the RAND Corporation, which you wouldn’t exactly call a nest of bleating pacifists, has taken a turn in the opposite direction.

Much Ado about Nothing

‘The French were right!’ No American pen would ever write that, of course, but nonetheless it is something like this that RAND did in an on-line monograph on 29 July, How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al-Qaeda,⁽¹⁾ a text that follows a series in five parts and one synthesis of studies intended to be exhaustive, on the war in the East.⁽²⁾

RAND’s close links with the Pentagon and its typically American taste for reductive modelling are well known. But for once, its latest opus abandons the usual catechism. How, it asks, do terrorist groups die out? From natural death or killed off, but they all end up dead with the total or partial disappearance, in the more or less long term, of the crises that engendered them. This is why they have a cause, explanatory rather than justificatory. Above all, terrorism doesn’t exist. It is a recurrent historical phenomenon, which resurfaces regularly as a combat method—morally unacceptable, no question about that—but it is not History.