Threat management.

• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

It pains me to see a top-notch craftsman like Joshua Micah Marshall ("The Orwell Temptation," May) take such a firm grip on the wrong end of the stick in his review of Paul Berman's book, Terror and Liberation. Marshall has failed to address radical Islam as the new type of threat that it is. I believe it is Marshall, not Berman, who is wearing 20th-century blinders.

Yes, it is surely relevant to point out that the Islamic world does not itself threaten the West and indeed has no advanced technology-driven economy. Marshall's assertion that "the dissonance between the Islamic world's historic self-conception and present-day reality is what produces so much of the rage in the Middle East" is accurate. It is also true that militant Islam's "dysfunction and weakness" make it impossible for it to compete in the modern world of ideas.

What makes Berman's point of view so important is that the social, economic, and political infrastructure of liberal democracies is still extraordinarily vulnerable to suicidal fanatics who understand today's networks and technologies. By working our networks to learn and organize, and then to penetrate our infrastructure, by leveraging technology to make deadly weapons out of everyday items like castor beans, shoes, box-cutters, and passenger planes, small self-organized cells can cause a great deal of destruction in open societies like ours.

Berman is writing...