On Monday, British international development secretary Hillary Benn [CORRECTION: see below] gave a speech in New York in which he
made a convincing argument against the phrase "war on terror":
In the UK, we do not use the phrase "war on terror" because we can't win by military means alone, and because this isn't us against one organised enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives.
It is the vast majority of the people in the world - of all nationalities and faiths - against a small number of loose, shifting and disparate groups who have relatively little in common apart from their identification with others who share their distorted view of the world and their idea of being part of something bigger.
What these groups want is to force their individual and narrow values on others, without dialogue, without debate, through violence. And by letting them feel part of something bigger, we give them strength.
Benn is right: The war on terror formulation serves the PR purposes of a thousand different militant groups and is a strategic blunder of epic proportions. Reading Benn's comments, I was reminded of what happened when I called in to an awful right-wing talk show somewhere in central New Jersey. The guest was promoting some DVD and book about the global jihadist conspiracy and the danger it posed to us civilized Westerners. The phrase "Islamofascism" came up, and I couldn't help myself. I dialed the number, told the producer what I wanted to talk about, and waited. I got on relatively quickly, and the conversation went something like this:
HOST: "Jesse, welcome to the show."
ME: "Thanks. I just wanted to disagree with your use of the term 'Islamofascism.' I feel like it's a mistake to lump all these groups together. When you look at Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah -- they all have different goals and were formed for different reasons. Many of them aren't
really about fundamentalist Islam, and it makes things more difficult when we sweep them all into the same category."
HOST: "Whoa. Jesse, Jesse. You do realize they are trying to
kill you, right?"
That was it. Since I disagreed with the manner in which terrorism was being debated, I clearly didn't understand that there existed, somewhere, people who wanted to kill me. I've seen this happen a thousand times on a thousand different shows -- anyone who doesn't toe the absolutist line is told they are either naive or a traitor. If you don't admit that we are in a battle for our very existence, that our enemy is absolutely evil and we are almost absolutely good, and that the enemy hates us because of our way of life (an intentionally loose term that can be filled in on the fly -- they hate us because we vote, they hate us because we let our women wear bikinis), then you are part of the problem.
The war on terror is an intellectual framework that, thanks to its broadness, answers several tough questions in advance: Who are we fighting? Whomever terrorizes us. Whose fault is terrorism? Theirs, obviously;
we're the ones fighting terrorism. When have we won? When there are no longer groups committing terrorist acts. It's unfortunate that these questions were neutered so shortly after 9/11. It would be nice to, you know, debate them.
It would also help us focus our efforts. It's tactically insane to treat Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Iranian government as parts of the same undifferentiated mass. This lack of precision, this inability to comprehend nuance, comes from the war on terror model, which postulates that the cause of terrorism is evil itself. Evil, of course, isn't reductive and can't be bargained with, so it's not worth sitting down with any of these groups.
The most tragic result of the war on terror's rickety facade has been Iraq. Imagine if, after 9/11, the administration had described the conflict in more accurate terms. Imagine if all of the cable news networks that ceaselessly flashed idiotic electrified logos touting THE WAR ON TERROR as the fall's hottest new product had instead had the temerity to question the formulation the American government presented its people. Would the Iraq war have happened if we were fighting something less vague than "terror" itself? If the proper people had questioned President Bush, had asked him, "How can you possibly link a nationalist, secular tyrant leader like Saddam Hussein to a radical pan-Islamist like Bin Laden?"? But it wasn't important enough. Terms like "Sunni" and "Shiite" and "pan-Islamist" weren't yet en vogue, because we weren't fighting anything that specific; we were fighting terror.
"Neoconservative" is used far too often, too loosely, and in too conspiratorial a manner, but the fact of the matter is that the neoconservatives -- Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz, just to name a few -- were and are largely responsible for the war on terror and its stark, epic imagery. The BBC ran an excellent critique of the neoconservatives' role in designing the war on terror in
"The Power of Nightmares," a three-part documentary that aired a few years ago and which can be
watched on Google Video. It's very effective at explaining the neoconservative infatuation with big, evil, Enemies to End All Enemies. For a while, the Soviets served this role, then no one, then, after 9/11, the Islamofascists. The people who have been most influential in leading us to war in Iraq see America's destiny as nothing less (or more complicated) than fighting evil, and have never let the nuances of reality interfere with this messianic vision.
It's 2007 and we are still unable to have a mature, intelligent discussion about terrorism. I hope an American politician or two will take a cue from Hillary Benn and start to deconstruct the war on terror, which has gotten us nowhere.
(Almost forgot: I would be remiss if I failed to mention James Fallows's excellent
Atlantic piece from last fall,
"Declaring Victory," which expertly explains what's wrong with the U.S. approach to fighting terrorism.)
[CORRECTION: I originally had the international development secretary's last name as Bunn, not Benn, throughout the post.]
