Why the phrase War on Terror is bad
It creates confusion, unrealistic expectations, and sanctions boneheaded policies.
Exhibit 1: Dean calls members of Hamas “soldiers”, opponents have apoplectic fits:
Asked if he would oppose the Israeli policy of selectively killing leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups, Dean said, “I think no one likes to see violence of any kind.”
But he also said that “there is a war going on in the Middle East, and members of Hamas are soldiers in that war, and, therefore, it seems to me that they are going to be casualties if they are going to make war.”
“Hamas militants are not soldiers in a war – they are terrorists who need to be stopped.”
Look, you can’t have it both ways: you can’t declare “war” on terrorists, emprison a whole bunch of them because they’re “unlawful combatants”, and yet still claim that calling them soldiers is somehow a shameless loosening of the language.
Exhibit 2: Clark describes Egypt as one of the three most important fronts in the War on Terror, critics suggest he suggests a military invasion of Egypt.
“Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and to a lesser extent, Egypt, those are the central fronts in the war on terror,”
Wesley Clark quoted in a Reuters report, 19th September
“[Is] Wesley Clark […] irresponsibly suggesting we should invade Egypt [?]”
[…]
War on terror" is a metaphor for a global police and intelligence operation, backed up with the usual diplomatic carrots and sticks that these things need. So, no one should think that Clark is suggesting we invade Egypt or Pakistan when we use that language, but of course they might now that we’ve pretended the Iraq invasion and the operation to minimize global terrorism are one and the same.Atrios commenting on this quote
Atrios, as often, is exactly right. The easiest, and most mendacious, way to declare that there’s a simple, easy, effective and quick solution to any problem is to declare war on it.
War is well-defined. Everyone knows what war means. We have established and accepted systems for training and recruiting people to be soldiers or other military employees; centuries-old organisations with which we have a historical and emotional attachment; significant proportions of our taxes go to fund their continuing existence and evolution; many companies earn a good living by providing support and researching new technologies for the military.
You win a war by the opponent admitting defeat and signing a legally-binding document that declares the war over.
The same goes for health care.
(Doctors win by making people not die, temporarily.)
(As an aside: is it a coincidence that the two current leading candidates in the Democratic primary are a doctor and a general?)
In contrast, the “wars” on drugs and terror are far more murky businesses. Their targets are vaguer, inherently more resistant to setbacks, more endemic, and there’s nobody to publicly wave the white flag.
Consider: the Cold War was one superpower vs another, US bloc versus Soviet bloc, and it ended in the US’s victory when the USSR collapsed and was dismantled, and most of its client states renounced Soviet-style communism in favour of Western-style democracy.
What if, though, the immediate post-war US Presidents had declared a War on Communism? We would have to admit that the war was still not won: despite the demise of the major proponent of communism as we knew it then, there are still self-proclaimed communist regimes in the world (e.g. China, Cuba), communist parties in major western European countries (it gets even worse if you add to that list the left-wing parties that still call themselves socialist, as opposed to social-democrat), and there are arguably communist influences in some of the newest left-wing movements (e.g. the anti-globalisation people).
There are simple, structural reasons why people will continue to illegally grow, trade and supply illegal drugs. There’s demand: drugs make you feel good, at least in the short term. And there’s profit: addictive drugs compel past users to require a continuing supply, which hampers their bargaining position. If you get rid of one drugs cartel, another will rise up in its place. Society as we know it practically demands the existence of an illegal drug-providing infrastructure.
And while the war on drugs will fail because of economics, the war on terror comes up against politics. Terrorism is a fundamentally political mode of expression. Nelson Mandela arguably qualifies as a terrorist; other ex-terrorists such as Martin McGuinness or Yasser Arafat are today intimately involved in officially-sanctioned peace talks.
Conversely, leaders of organisations such as Action Directe or the Red Brigades have been brought to justice through diligent police work, and their violent organisations shut down. In the US, there have been no further Timothy McVeigh-style terrorist attacks against Federal buildings. But that was only possible because they didn’t have a sufficiently-powerful political base.
(As another aside, for all that the US right wing decry France as a weak-willed friend of terrorists, it has a pretty good track record at defending itself against terrorism.)
As the Israelis, French and several other agencies have demonstrated, human intelligence is the most effective weapon against terrorism.
Jane’s, 24th September 2001.
It is an egregious misnomer to call “wars” the political decisions to crack down on drugs and terrorists. Almost by definition, the purveyors of drugs and terror are not connected with any individual sovereign state, or if they are, they can easily shift if they’ve had the basic sense to prepare contingency plans. The solutions to the problems of drugs and terrorism require major police and political activity. The military has a very limited role here. We should not co-opt its term “war” because we think it sounds cool.
As a final aside, Howard Dean doesn’t think we should imprison non-violent drug users. It makes a lot of sense: the money we no longer spend on providing room and board to random drug users, and giving them a crash-course in professional criminality, can easily be spent on more deserving causes.