Okay, before I start on another fallacy, I would like to issue a (probably unnecessary) warning about applying historical analogies too literally. Islamic fundamentalism is infinitely less of a threat to the United States than Communism or Nazism was. I find it difficult to even conceive of any possible way it could ever threaten the existence of the United States, except through war hysteria. This means that avoiding war hysteria ought to be the main aim of US rhetoric and policy. Appeasement will not hurt the United States for generations to come. Of course, it will probably have disastrous effects in countries that are struggling with a real islamofascist threat, but the world as a whole should potter along reasonably well. This has just come clear to me recently, if it seems to contradict anything have written before...
If you are not someone seduced by the Utopian Neo-Conservative vision of making the world safe for democracy (i.e., if you are not someone like, er, myself) then appeasement is a perfectly rational strategy anywhere islamofascists do not have a realistic chance of overthrowing the government. Hmm, it all makes sense now. Within its pragmatic assumptions, Old Europe is right.
Okay, to the first fallacy. There is no real analogy in our time to the confusion of 'East' and 'Left' Koestler talks about, but we do suffer from a severe problem of a similar linguistic/conceptual nature. This is the problem of habitually talking about the struggle we are involved in as a 'war on a noun.' Indeed, a war on a noun with no universally agreed upon definition. The 'war on terror' is a dumb, dumb, dumb name. Where to draw the line between 'terrorism' and 'legitimate armed struggle'? It depends entirely, it seems, on whether we are the good guys fighting the bad guys, or the bad guys fighting us back. I would like to suggest the following definition:
Terrorism is the deliberate use of lethal force against civilians for political ends.
'Use' is there so that no one may be prosecuted for thoughtcrime, or for what they write or say. Writing that the Pentagon ought to be blown up is not terrorism.
'Lethal' is there to avoid snaring in the definition every picketer who ever threw an egg at a scab's car.
'Political ends' are, in my opinion, and in the opinion of the South African Truth and Justice Commission, always a mitigating factor for any crime. A terrorist is a better person than a psychopath, not a worse one.
The main elasticity in my definition, which could be argued about endlessly, lies in in the words 'deliberate' and 'civilian'.
First of all, there are many degrees of carelessness between 'collateral damage' through an accident that could not reasonably have been avoided and an unequivocal terrorist act. If you are expecting an armoured personnel carrier to drive over your booby trap, and a busload of villagers drives over it instead, you are not a terrorist. But if you lay your trap without particularly caring who drives over it, you certainly are.
The word 'civilian' will cause the most trouble. There are infinitely many degrees of being organised, and degrees of being armed, between the barefoot boy who stoops to pick up a rock and the uniformed officer on the deck of an aircraft carrier. In those numberless conflicts around the world where combatants do not wear uniforms, and move among the civilian population like fish in the sea, it will be particularly difficult to draw a line. The Arab world, for instance, has consistently tried to define Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza as 'non-civilians'.
Taking a step backward, what can we say is definitely not terrorism?
*Blowing up soldiers at a checkpoint, while bad for them, is not terrorism.
*Blowing up oil pipelines in Colombia, no matter how much it helps the US State Department demonstrate that there is less terrorism now than there was in 2002, is not terrorism.
*Blowing up the US Marine HQ in Beirut with a truck bomb in 1983 was not terrorism.
*I think we can confidently assert, following the exegesis of 'Return of the Jedi' given in the movie 'Clerks', that strikes against civilian employees of military organisations is not terrorism. Thus, the attack on the Pentagon would not have been terrorism, if everyone on the plane was a volunteer shahid.
*Blowing up a Hamas leader is not terrorism, if you are sure he is one. Knocking down his family home is not terrorism, because it does not involve the use of lethal force. Unless you don't bother to check if his mother is still inside; then it's terrorism.
*By the same token, shooting a settler on the West Bank as goes about his business is not terrorism, if you are sure he is a member of a paramilitary organisation. But shooting a rocket at his settlement, not giving any consideration as to whether it hits an armoury or a kindergarten, that is terrorism.
By any stretch of my definition, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were state-sponsored terrorism. The greatest terrorist acts in history. So how can the President of the United States claim that all terrorists are evil men? Or that all their motives are evil? Perhaps another name for 'terrorism' is simply 'total war'. What makes Timothy McVeigh's declaration of total war on the United States any less valid than Harry S Truman's declaration of total war on Japan? Total wars are bad things, whether they are fought by nations or individuals. And a 'war on total war' is a dumb, dumb, dumb concept.
3 comments:
(Disclaimer: I've been busy, or I'd be responding to TAB a bit quicker. Sorry).
Agree with almost everything here, although I do think that attacks on civilian contractors walks a mighty fine line, Kevin Smith's fine line of argument aside.
To an extent, I even buy into the the Neo-con Utopian interventionist worldview. I want the world to be democratic and peaceful, or at least sufficiently so that them what wants such can have it. And I agree that the USA is the only body capable of bringing about that vision (although in my fevered pinko imaginings, I envision a United Nations with funding that matches its members' promises, that isn't riddled with ineptitude, corruption and bureaucracy - three sides of the same badly-designed coin - and not saddled with procedures and rules that effectively tie its hands when there's work to do).
But I don't accept that its power gives the US carte-blanche authority to act unilaterally, nor (in the case of Iraq) incompetently. They were wholly justified in invading Afghanistan and (reasonably) successful. But dammit, "we're on a roll" is not a cogent foreign policy plan for a superpower. The rest of the world deserves better than to have the ground shaken by nitwits who want to score score touchdowns and brag about it on Fox.
Anyway, this is straying completely away from the point you were making, which was to define terrorism. It's a little difficult to be sure at such a remove, but based on reports of undertrained troops and officers from generals down complaining that there's no strategic plan for Iraq, I would guess that there's an awful lot of indiscriminate killing on both sides there that would qualify as terrorism.
To clarify, if you give a whole bunch of bored/angry/frustrated young men heavy armaments and provide them with inadequate training or intelligence as to whom it should be used on (so that, inevitably, they end up using it on the wrong, which is to say innocent, people) then that might not be technically terrorism, but it might for all practical purposes be indistinguishable from it.
(Here's a rant para that I wrote and cut that sums up my 'evidence' for the charge of incompetence: The planning for the Iraq invasion pretty much amounted to "This worked in Afghanistan, so it should work in this other desert country, yeah?". Bugger all intelligence, a short supply of resources, no long term strategy, *no contingency planning* (!) and the fatally stupid assumption that the exiles upon whom they were dependant for information were providing them with the unvarnished truth.)
Yes, it has been a disappointment to find out that the Bush Administration isn't following some secret master plan dreamed up by sinister Neo-Con policy wonks, but really is just making it up as it goes along...
I keep having this vision of Bush getting his daily Neo-Con Conspiracy Briefing from Rummy & Wolfy, but he keeps getting bored and tired, so he only listens to about half of it, and then says "Okay, that's enough talk. Do that stuff you just said and we'll see what happens."
It's just this little dream I have, apropos of nothing, I'm sure.
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