-Caveat Lector-
U.S. needs clear terrorism definitionBY CALEB CARRCaleb Carr, professor of military history at Bard College, is author of "The Lessons of Terror." This is from The Washington Post. August 18, 2004 Toward the end of its widely praised report, the Sept. 11 Commission makes a genuinely shocking assertion. It says that in our current conflict "the enemy is not just 'terrorism,' some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment is more specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism - especially the al-Qaida network, its affiliates, and its ideology." At a stroke, in other words, the commission members have tried to rewrite the terms of the global war on terrorism and turn it into a global war on Islamist terrorism alone. It seems incredible we could have been at war this long without defining precisely who or what we're at war with. But such is the case, and it has never seemed an urgent matter to lawmakers. When I appeared before a congressional subcommittee studying strategies for the war on terrorism in 2002 and suggested that the first step should be the promulgation of just such a uniform definition, the members were momentarily dumbstruck. We did begin to discuss the issue, but a comprehensive definition of terrorism for the use of the American government and the education of the American people never emerged. Now, however, the president and his supporters are apparently ready to approve the radical definition set forward by the commission. Terrorism, as defined by military historians, has been a constant, ugly feature of warfare, an aberrant tactic akin to slavery, piracy and genocide. One reason that some of us argued throughout the 1990s for undertaking of genuine war on terrorism (involving the military in addition to intelligence and law enforcement) was the notion that we might finally declare the tactic to be out of bounds, for the armed forces of civilized nations and non-state organizations alike. It's true that both slavery and piracy are still practiced, but only in remote corners of the world; certainly genocide is still with us, but its employment is now cause for immediate sanction and forceful reaction by the United Nations. Actively stamping out such tactics has been the work of some of the great political and military minds and leaders of the past two centuries. Now it is time for terrorism to take its place as a similarly proscribed and anachronistic practice. But first we must agree on an internationally acceptable definition. Certainly terrorism must include the deliberate victimization of civilians for political purposes - anything else would be a logical absurdity. Yet there are powerful voices, in this country and elsewhere, that argue against such a definition. They don't want to lose the weapon of terror - and they don't want to admit to having used it in the past. Should the United States assent to such a specific definition, for example, it would have to admit that its fire-bombings of German and Japanese cities during World War II represented effective terrorism. In the intellectual arena, meanwhile, the fatuous logic that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" keeps left-leaning intellectuals away from the cause of definition. And so its promulgation continues to elude the world, even as we have embarked on a war against the phenomenon itself. The Sept. 11 Commission evidently also believed that defining terrorism was too thorny a problem to be undertaken in anything but a partial and temporary manner. Fighting wars against tactics, they announced - fighting wars over the nature of war itself - is simply too complicated. We need to fight specific wars about people, not general wars about ideas (the American Revolution, the Civil War and two world wars notwithstanding). By this token, any and all intellectual or moral meaning is removed from our military undertakings in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as from the global war on terrorism generally. What began as a war between modernism and medievalism, between progressive ideas of how to reform war and regressive notions of cataclysmic conflicts, will, if the commission's recommendations are fully implemented, become instead a "clash of civilizations" between extremist Western and extremist Muslim values: a simplistic confrontation. The 9/11 Commission should amend its report and reassert, rather than deny, that we are indeed engaged in a global war against terrorism, whoever practices it. Then Bush, Sen. John Kerry and all national leaders should support the change in message. The war on terrorism began not as a crusade about ideology but as a pragmatic war about war. It must remain such.'The promulgation continues to elude the world, even as we war against the phenomenon itself.' Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om |
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