War on Terror

Overview

The United States's War on Terror (2001-), also known as The War on Terrorism, is an example of an endless crisis. It is also a misnomer or at least a misleading use of the word "war", as it can lead to confusion over the appropriate response. "War" suggests retaliation using techniques effective in standard (symmetric) warfare but which are not effective (and even counterproductive) when used in asymmetric warfare.

The United States experienced one morning of coordinated attacks by perhaps a few dozen individuals on September 11, 2001; there have been no further attacks since, although several attempts have apparently been thwarted. There certainly has been no presence of enemy troops on or near US soil for many decades, probably not since Pearl Harbor.

Reference

• War on Terrorism: Wikipedia

Quotes

• George W. Bush: "When terrorists murder at the World Trade Center, or car bombers strike in Baghdad, or hijackers plot to blow up planes over the Atlantic, or terrorist militias shoot rockets at Israeli towns, they are all pursuing the same objective - to turn back the advance of freedom, and impose a dark vision of tyranny and terror across the world."¹
• Professor Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York¹:

  There's something profoundly illogical about talking about a war on terrorism. It's like a war on weather. You know, terrorism is a method, methodology, it's an approach, it's killing civilians to achieve a political objective. It's a means. It's not a discrete thing. It's not like Burma, you can have a war on Burma, you can have a war on fruit trees, because that's something physical. Terrorism is not tangible, and, as one might have guessed given this President, this administration, their orientations, this was a sort of portmanteau term which was used to group together those targets that they already had decided they were going to go after - so-called "rogue regimes", including governments that had and have had absolutely nothing to do with the people who attacked the United States, were a target before 9/11...

  In fact, the Iraqi government was an opponent of al-Qaeda. The Iranian government has always been an opponent of al-Qaeda. Hezbollah, which is another target of the war on the terror, has always been an opponent of al-Qaeda, so we are not talking about the people who attacked the United States. We are not talking about the terrorists who killed 3,000 Americans.

  To lump every form of radical Islam together, to lump for example Hamas - which is a movement that's never attacked the United States, which has not got attacking the United States or the West or opposing Western values as central to its program - with al-Qaeda is a huge, huge error. It's a terrible, terrible, terrible mistake. Hamas is... whatever the heinousness of the means they may have used, it's a resistance movement.

  Hezbollah similarly is essentially a Lebanese resistance movement. To lump them together with al-Qaeda, which is a world-wide anarchistic, anti-Western millenarian movement which has no roots anywhere - it's a global movement - there's a fundamental falsehood there. A fundamental falsehood, and it has led the United States to do something which is extremely dangerous, which is to turn itself into the opponent of movements which, throughout the Islamic world, because they are seen as legitimate resistance movements, and are very popular, in a way, that is driving people towards the more radical, towards the much more dangerous movements like al-Qaeda.

References

Note 1

• Four Corners - 2006-09-11 - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Links

Discussion

• TruthMapping: The phrase "war on terrorism" is a misnomer

Editorial

• 2006-10-29 The Only Issue This Election Day: Orson Scott Card, apparently a lifelong Democrat, urges voting Republican on the grounds of the latter's support for the War on Terror – almost exactly a mirror-image of David Brin's position urging Republicans to abandon their party due to the need for Democratic opposition to the corruption in the Bush administration
• 2006-10-01 The 'war on terror' that ruined Rome by Robert Harris, The New York Times: "In the autumn of 68 B.C. the world's only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. ... in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty." Another lesson from history.

Opinion

• The Phony War: "President Bush not only created a fake 'War on Terror' to scare voters into supporting his policies – he is failing to address the real threat facing America" by Robert Dreyfuss, Rolling Stone: "According to nearly a dozen former high-ranking officials who have been on the front lines of the administration's counterterrorism effort, the president is not only fighting the wrong war – he is fighting it in a way that has actually made the threat worse. The war on terrorism, they say, has been mismanaged and misdirected almost from the start, in no small part because the president simply does not understand the nature of the enemy he is fighting."