War Against Terror Misfires

War Against Terror Misfires    By Verne McDonald
Publish Date: 26-Aug-2004

U.S. government still missing the point on sources of threat

 The so-called War Against Terrorism’s supposed goal is a world where people can live without fear. In most parts of North America, the obvious first priority would be to follow through on the principle that people who deliberately impair their ability to operate motor vehicles are criminals, and start jailing drivers who use handheld cellphones. Instead, the main activity of the War Against Terrorism has been filling cemeteries in Afghanistan and Iraq with the bodies of people who never threatened me or you or anyone else in North America in all their lives. Some of those lives were all too short: for instance, those of soldiers of many nations, including ours, who have been given the hopeless job of waging this traumatic war against fear.

 How did this go so drastically wrong?

 Part of the problem is declaring war on an improper noun, or, more precisely, on a tactic. It’s like declaring war on attitude, or on learning self-defence techniques. So long as someone, somewhere, is practising avoiding direct blows, you can’t win. If the U.S. is serious about staying the course and eradicating terrorism from the world, we can expect to be living in fear for the next century at least.

 A bigger mistake was to declare a war at all. For decades, even Israel stuck to the principle that terrorists were criminals to be arrested, tried, and convicted. No romance, no heroism, just boring court proceedings and a long time in an ugly place with a bunch of other violent criminals. What the U.S. has done is take the deranged and vicious dregs of humanity and raise them to the status of warriors, noble combatants for a recognized cause. That the U.S. has distorted and obscured their cause is immaterial; what matters is that it has legitimized it. Where young people in developing countries might have been deterred from criminal activity, instead they are flocking to the banner of what they believe is a just war against U.S. domination. It was George W. Bush, not Osama bin Laden, who gave them the idea, and it was his declaration that the U.S. is in danger that made them think they might win.

 So we have a war in which the enemy cannot be seen but might be the person next door. Worse, so long as there is an AK-47 or a box of dynamite unaccounted for anywhere in the world, the danger never ends. And the only way to fight back is to drop a lot of bombs on unfriendly countries, hoping that you hit a terrorist now and then.

 Terrorism, as practised for centuries now, is the inevitable resort of people who have no other means to resist a threatening power. The French resistance in the Second World War quite proudly called itself terrorist and used tactics to suit. When you are fully aware from previous experience that civilian casualties and trauma will result from an aerial bombardment and you go ahead and bomb anyway, that complies with every definition of terrorism you can think of, and it is not odd that the U.S. did exactly that when it had no other way to strike back after September 11, 2001.

 I also know that there is no known defence against terrorism, unless like the Israeli government you believe that the East Germans just weren’t given enough time to prove that a great big wall can control people and their actions. Medieval cities were suitable for that kind of treatment, but modern cities cannot be defended no matter how much money is poured into “homeland security” and no matter how many automatic weapons you hand out to inadequately trained high-school dropouts.

 The World Trade Center atrocity is a nice case in point. The investigations have shown that the terrorists were amazingly lucky and could well have been stopped at several points along the way to September 2001. But no one was expecting it, so it happened anyway. It will never happen again, because now everyone knows how to prevent it. And the next successful attack will be something no one is expecting, yet the U.S. has declared war on the unknowable. You might say it has declared war on the future.

 I also know that despite the claims of panicked U.S. citizens, their way of life is not in danger, was never in danger, and will not be in danger in the future even if they lose another dozen skyscrapers. Anyone who tries to convince them otherwise is insulting them. Islamists on the other side of the earth cannot make the people of the U.S. any more fearful or any less free. Only their own government can do that. The real danger to the way of life so dear to the people of the U.S. is their government’s War Against Terrorism and the hatred that it fosters.