New Book From Terrorism Expert Richard Drake to Examine How the Ideology of Terror Becomes Rooted in Society

Richard R. Drake, Ph.D.

Terrorism Expert, UM Department of History Professor

By Brian D’Ambrosio

To call Richard Drake a sterling analytical historian and prized intellectual figure, while very much true, scarcely pays him suitable respect. Drake, the author of numerous internationally acclaimed books and articles on Italian history, began teaching classes at the University of Montana in 1982. Highly regarded by his students, fully respected by his colleagues, he has ripened into one of the university’s academic gems, and his course: Terrorism: Political Violence in the Modern World is routinely one of the most prominent on campus.

Imprudent to make transparent generalizations about, terrorism is a vastly convoluted and complex topic, with acts and exploits falling into separate categories and subcategories such as state terrorism, individual terrorism, state terrorism perpetrated against a foreign population and individual or group terrorism committed against the state. Drake, voted Most Inspirational Teacher by the graduating seniors of 1991 and recipient of UM’s Distinguished Scholar Award in 1996, familiarizes his students with the upsurge and advancement of terrorism in the modern world, starting with terrorist episodes at the time of the French Revolution and ending with contemporary events. He concedes that his terrorism course can be difficult to teach because it stimulates so many disparate ideological, religious and ethnic passions. Dilemmas and emotions aside, the classroom isn’t the place for political indoctrination or manipulation, said Drake: “I go before my students and explain as clearly as I can both sides. Or how many sides there happen to be. And I try to be fair and critical to all different sides of an argument, describing such debates fully and completely, and then letting them know where I think the preponderance of the evidence lies.”

Different kinds of terrorist challenges warrant various types of solutions, said Drake. While he believes that a military option is a valid response to certain circumstances, once a terrorist organization establishes strong connections within a community or country, securing substantial support and a sympathetic base, as is the case, he believes, within both the Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities in Iraq today, a military solution will never be victorious. “Once that military response fails, a political, social or economic dimension must be added to the equation. If support for a group is negligible, then you can send in the Marines to cauterize them…if serious support exists then it’s time to consider a far more varied strategy. Sometimes a political compromise may detach such support.”

Liquidating terrorists doesn’t eliminate the problem or the widespread support that such groups attract, said Drake, who added that invading Iraq has been a misdirected and feckless response to the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001: “Richard Clarke (national security advisor to four U.S. presidents, including George W. Bush) put it most eloquently in his book Against All Enemies, when he describes terrorism as something that’s metastasizing all over the Islamic world as a direct consequence of this invasion. We really need to revise our strategy in that country or we are bound to sink deeper and deeper into a morass of violence there. I think we are doing the wrong thing based on my knowledge of history.”

“To shift our military resources away from Afghanistan and pour our military budget into Iraq, a country that didn’t attack us, is the most singularly unintelligent thing the president could have done. Now we’ve got billions and billions of dollars going out on a hemorrhage. Not only is it irresponsible, but the results have been tragic and they are bound to get worse. Our leaders were ignorant in rushing to war, something that leaders of a country cannot be when they decide to go to war. Bush and his entourage get failing grades as leaders in my eyes.”

Drake, always concerned with examining the breeding grounds of terrorism, feels that our leaders have misread the symptoms and causes of such violence, conditions which, in many ways, are plainer than Jimmy Durante’s nose. In his 2003 book, Apostles and Agitators, he explores and studies how the ideology of terror becomes rooted in society, explaining the historical element of the Italian Marxist revolutionary tradition to which so many ordinary Italians claimed loyalty, scrutinizing its beginnings and internal hostilities, the men who shaped it, and its repercussion and legacy in Italy.

In today’s world, American leaders are ignorant as to how our country’s foreign policies play on the mindsets of hundreds of millions of people in the Arab-Islamic world, said Drake, who believes that degraded political dysfunctions and desperate economic environments (80% unemployment rates in certain countries, steep collapses in the availability of medical services in others) eventually generate the monstrous and hopeless criminality of terrorism. This obstinate political blindness (America’s unqualified support for Israeli brutality, its bankrolling of thoroughly undemocratic Arab governments such as Egypt, and its umbilical relationship to despotic and irretrievably corrupt oil oligarchies like Saudi Arabia) makes the logical foundation of American foreign policy a laughing stock around the world. “Islamic people do not hate our freedoms, values, and our wealth; Islamic people hate our policies and our actions, because in many ways we have not been fair.”

One commonplace perception held by millions across the Islamic world, said Drake, is that the United States is exporting its civilization, its culture, and its values in a concerted effort to eradicate Islam and replace it with a version of ourselves: “Our adversaries see us this way: They see our exportation of this Wal-Mart culture that we have perfected here, as the final form of the West’s domination and exploitation of the non-advanced world.”

In sharp contrast to all the boisterous talk about terrorism in the Middle East, very little is being said about oil. Our country’s unappeasable addiction to oil, the heroin of the world economy, was most certainly one of the factors leading us into Iraq, said Drake. For the dwindling percentage of Americans refusing to believe that Iraq’s oil assets (and the enormous geopolitical strategic leverage gained by its occupiers) played a role in the invasion, accepting that the United States is on some type of global campaign of freedom against the enemies of liberty determined to roll back generations of democratic progress, Drake said that’s because “we think of ourselves as idealists taking part in this noble undertaking that has democratic values embedded in it, but that’s the fairy tale version of events.”

Drake, who maintains a self-recognized reputation as a fastidious professor, began studying history because he perceived it to be the most all-encompassing of the scholarly disciplines. After teaching terrorism as a course topic for the initial time at Wesley College in 1980, he authored his first book, concerning religion in Italian civilization, shortly after. Drake’s inaugural publication relating to his terrorism studies, released in 1989, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy, won the Society for Italian Historical Studies’ Howard R. Marrano Prize for Italian history. Six years later, Drake published The Aldo Moro Murder Case. Aldo Moro was a recognized and respected political leader and former Italian Prime Minister who was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in 1978. The terrorist group deemed responsible, the Red Brigades, sought to revolutionize Italy based on their Marxist-Leninist beliefs. The book was translated into Italian the following year. Drake’s latest book, Apostles and Agitators, provides a deep historical background to the origins of the left-wing political terror that ravaged Italy from 1969 to 1984.

Additionally, he has published more than forty book reviews, which have appeared in diverse scholarly journals and publications including: The Journal of Modern History, The Catholic Historical Review, The American Historical Review, Terrorism and Political Violence, Labor History, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, The European Legacy, and The Journal of Cold War Studies. Additionally, Drake was awarded the Kirby Prize by the South Central Modern Language Association in 2000 for his article: “Italy in the 1960s: A Legacy of Terrorism and Liberation,” that was published in The South Central Review.

Drake has worked as an on-screen expert and the chief historical consultant for two television documentaries about Italian civilization, both of which were broadcast on the History Channel. Since the late 1980s, he has been the coordinator of the university’s President’s Lecture Series, a program that hosts ten different speakers over a one-year period, with guests representing a wide range of studies in the arts, sciences, and the humanities.

Currently on sabbatical, working on two separate books, Drake travels to Rome and Milan for six weeks beginning in November, researching material (one book will explore the beliefs of Italy’s radical left and track the evolution of Marxism in that country up to the present) and doing necessary, though quite taxing, archival work. Yes, he will return to UM to teach his hallmark terrorism course in the spring of 2006, where he remains an enormously embraced and well-respected professor, not just for his copious historical knowledge, trenchant observations, and intellectual sinew, but for his pedagogical integrity.

“Historians, like teachers, are obliged to tell what they know,” said Drake. “Both have a higher obligation to the truth. And both need to look at things critically, bringing the experiences of the past into the present, in an effort to instruct, and change the future.”

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