Fighting Terrorists Requires Understanding Their Concept of Time

By Louis René BeresWest Lafayette, Ind.

The struggle against terrorism can be improved only when the particular Islamist vision of time is first recognized, then challenged and transformed.
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” says the poet William Butler Yeats, “and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

Today, this “tide” stands as a convenient metaphor for terrorism. Whether it can be stemmed in time, America’s war on terror should certainly be conducted with a greater awareness and understanding of time.True chronology in counterterrorism must embrace more than the uniform intervals of clocks. For America’s determined Islamist terrorist enemies, time means something very personal. For these jihadists, real time has more to do with the subjective idea of felt time than it does with any standard measures of duration. Were it otherwise, the United States would already have been hit with substantial and potentially deadly follow-on strikes to 9/11.

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