to tell you all that anyone who truly wants to come to grips with what informs and motivates Islamic radicalism, and with the enormity of the challenge we face, must read Stanley’s tour de force in the latest edition of the Claremont Review of Books, “Tribes of Terror.” It’s just tremendous — in style, learning and insight.

Stanley hits the nail on the head so many times it is hard to pick one passage out. But I especially liked this one:

Economic development might well “tame” these tribesmen, yet poverty is less the cause of their warlike ways than the result of a deliberate decision to preserve their traditional way of life—their Pushtun honor—even at material cost. The Islamist revolution is a conscious choice—an act of cultural self-defense against the intrusions and seductions of an alien world. Although the social foundations of the traditional Muslim way of life have been shaken, they are far from broken. So long as these social foundations cohere, advancing globalization will provoke more rebellion, not less—whatever America decides to do in Iraq and beyond. The root of the problem is neither domestic poverty nor American foreign policy, but the tension between Muslim social life and globalizing modernity itself.