A twisted sense of duty and love.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side - Terrorism, United States

The other day, a friend told us that what shook her up the most after September 11 was the knowledge that many of the terrorists had lived peaceably among Americans for several years before their attacks, sending their children to our public schools, shopping at the supermarket, ordering pizza, waving a friendly good morning to their neighbors. "What chills me," she said, "is the thought that they hate us so much that not even all those daily interactions with Americans could humanize us for them." That's become the prevailing explanation of the terrorist attacks on September 11: We are up against an almost incomprehensible form of "hate" or "evil."

But although "hate" and "evil" are powerfully evocative words, they don't really tell us much. Indeed, we often haul them out precisely as a way to avoid grappling with more nuanced and troubling explanations for the horrific. On September 11, nineteen men knowingly went to their deaths in order to kill Americans, stymieing experts in terrorist profiling. These men were not desperate or bereft of hope: They had families, foreign language skills, opportunities. They were not unsophisticated, ignorant, or backward, "brainwashed" by simplistic promises of sloe-eyed virgins in the paradise to come; they were highly educated, cosmopolitan, people who lived easily among foreigners, both in the U.S. and in Germany. Was cruelty all they knew? No: Those who met them say they seemed like ordinary people, studying, laughing, picking their children up at school.

Did they hate us in some particularly relentless, unreasoning way? Perhaps, but what we need to acknowledge is that the September 11 terrorists may also have been motivated by their own understanding of duty, honor, and sacrifice--the very same values that have motivated our own soldiers in wars we consider just and necessary. Perhaps they were motivated even by their own terrible, fiery, brand of love, just as conventional warriors have, throughout history, been sustained by love of country and comrades--to the point of both dying and killing for them.

We shrink from the idea that the terrorists could have been motivated by the same impulses that drive soldiers in respectable wars. But imagine growing up, even in a middle-class household, surrounded by suffering, hopelessness, poverty, and pain, in the ruins of Kabul, in the Gaza Strip, in Algeria's ransacked towns, or the bleak streets of Baghdad; imagine being brought up to believe that the...