It's Much, Much Worse.
~~~
It took far too long for the
stupid and fatuous term War on Terror
to be expunged from the lexicon of foreign policy. The political history of the
United States is littered with silly declarations of hopeless domestic
conflicts – on drugs, on poverty, on want, on crime – but the War on Terror is so asinine, so
self-contradictory, so evidently impossible to prosecute that it could only
have been created in and maintained by W’s White House.
What is war if not a terrifying
prospect? What does it do if not utilize means and methods that terrify the
sane? Has there ever been an account, from a civilian trapped in a conflict
zone, that has not spoken in stark and candid terms of the terror they felt?
How can a War on Terror then be prosecuted when it involves us in a mind-numbing
tautology. War involves terror; a war on terror must necessarily involve a war
on the means of warfare., and yet not once did the Bush White House order the
bombarding of an enemy with white poppies.
Bush, it seems to me, was at best
half right. What he presented as a declaration of a new war, on terms and
against an ‘enemy’ of a nature that made a mockery of the claim, should have
been presented as a response to a
declaration of war on civil society.
Terror was never an enemy to be opposed; it is a symptom of war.
We, who are too often
disinterested observers, would do well to keep this fact in mind. We are told
of the “desperate search for answers” in the aftermath of acts that are
commonly, and wrongly, described as “senseless” and “meaningless.” In fact,
attacks like that on the Pulse nightclub (made bitterly ironic because a pulse
is what the victims have been cruelly deprived of) should serve as reminders:
that, whilst it is obviously ridiculous to say “on terror,” we are still participants in a war that predates, and
goes well beyond, our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Alright, if we are not at war on terror then against what, or with
whom, are we struggling?
The employment of the term terrorist actually predates the Bush White House by three decades
or more. It is not as self-evidently self-defeating a term as War on Terror, which probably goes some
way toward explaining why it is still in employ whilst the War on Terror is not. But it, too, is rank with contradictions and
ripe for specious misuse. A terrorist cannot be defined in isolation from the
concept and definition of terrorism
and terrorism has no universal or
binding definition.
It is commonly parsed as “the
unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of
political aims.” Yet this is quite obviously inadequate in a
conversation which often involves a debate about the ‘backers’ and ‘financers’
and ‘enablers’ of terrorism. And it grants the holder far too much power whilst
allowing for capricious and arbitrary application.
So it is that the Reagan White House could justify its
interventions in Nicaragua on the spurious grounds that it was becoming a ‘terrorist
state’ (thus admitting that terrorism can in fact be ‘authorised’) whilst at
the same time making nice with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan
which actually do support, finance,
back, endorse, enable and authorise acts of terrorism. Bush’s War on Terror cannot then be reparsed as
a War on Terrorism because his
related talk of a new axis of evil
made no mention of the supposed allies who created and supported the Taliban
and, more recently, Islamic State.
Furthermore, the definition requires that violence is used ‘in
pursuit of political aims’. This, again, allows for advocates of political
causes to be admitted as terrorists – whether they be Viet Cong, Sandinista,
PKK, ETA (but not, curiously, - and here again the point about capricious and
arbitrary standards – French colonialists, Bay of Pigs insurrectionists, contras,
the Turkish government, the murderers of Salvador Allende, for all of whom the
United States has found a use whilst denying that terrorism can be or has ever
been ‘authorized’) – whilst precluding the application of the term to the very
people we now most readily call terrorists, the invariably apocalyptic and
messianic death cults of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic State. These
are groups which combine the ugly fatalism of the nihilist with the dangerous
supremacist outlook of the fascist and the zeal of religious fanaticism. And one
would have to be very generous indeed to allow that the desire to bring on the
apocalypse could count as a ‘political aim’.
The injunction to ‘call things by their proper names’ has had
an unusual progression through philosophy and politics, it being recommended to
us by figures as diverse and removed from each other as Confucius, Orwell and
Ted Cruz. Donald Trump claims prescience on this matter but it was Cruz who first
and most often and most eloquently demanded that politicians describe their
enemies without equivocation, only then to mischaracterise the nature of both
the threat and its propagators.
“Radical Islamic terrorism” was and remains his
classification of choice. One might, I suppose, give him the credit of trying;
the response universally adopted by those on the liberal left-wing of politics
has always been to resort to the lines “it has nothing to do with Islam,” “hate
has no religion,” and words to that effect, a via negativa approach that does not attempt to provide an
explanation or to give answers to those who so “desperately search” for them.
But Cruz fails the standard he claims to value so dearly. For
one thing, terrorism is (as we’ve seen) a stupid and inadequate category that
affects specificity but is in fact staggeringly vague. For another, it does not
distinguish between different forms of Islamic, or Islamist, fundamentalism. Islamic
State is born of Wahabbism which is itself a strand of Sunni Islam; should
Hezbollah achieve its stated wish - the
destruction of the state of Israel – it would have achieved a goal of Shiite
extremists. And for another, it encourages jumping to a conclusion without
consideration for the facts. Remember how quickly people declared Anders
Breivik’s slaughter in Norway an act of Islamist terrorism?
There is no easy, immediate, catch-all definition which
answers our burning questions. Life, like the perpetrators of heinous crimes
against humanity, is not so forgiving. It is not blowback; the LGBT community so pointlessly massacred in Orlando
have no more invaded another country than had the children at Sandy Hook
Elementary, killed not by any Islamist terrorist but by a mentally deranged
American citizen. It cannot be justified by citing the alleged crimes committed
in the name of foreign policy, nor can it always be said that the perpetrator
is gripped by a fervour that is explicitly religious.
Where any of these things can be proved to be true, we should
then call them by their proper names. The shooter in Orlando did apparently
offer a pre-emptive declaration of affiliation with Islamic State. But what if
he hadn’t? What if he had been motivated by Shiite fervour? Would it still have
been ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism’ had this man, with a ‘Muslim name’, instead
been a devotee of some crazed, millenialist sect?
No, ‘terrorism’, whether Islamic or anything else, simply
will not do. There can be no guarantee of motive, no pre-emptive
classification. There can be no certainty, and that is a terrible thing.
Nihilism, the pointless taking of life, the wanton destruction in and of this
world by those to whom life has no value except as preparation for the
unknowable and non-existent beyond; this is what we are faced with. Not a clash
of civilizations but a war between civilization and its enemies ; enemies who
view all of us, gay or straight, man or woman, adult or child, black or white,
civilian or military, as combatants to be targeted.
It has no political aim, it has no realisable dream, it has
no goal to be justified. It’s not terrorism; it’s much, much worse.
