...And my other article, a new editorial
Rethinking the "War on Terror"
By Moonmaster
Since 9/11, we've been provided with a new vocabulary, a new lexicon of words and phrases to describe the global issue of terrorism. No one has contributed more to this vocabulary than President Bush and his administration, but the problem is that this vocabulary is flawed and maybe even dangerous.
Language is a powerful tool, and Bush must have a cunning roster of speech writers behind him. After 9/11, Bush was forced to adopt a decidedly "tough-guy" attitude, and it's something he hasn't really dropped in the intervening years. With it have come some memorable, but ultimately mocked phrases. He's still catching flak for billing himself as "The Decider". Other phrases have been accepted, to a certain extent, such as the ominous "Axis of Evil". Frankly, these sound like the titles of rejected Steven Seagal films. Not to mention the constant and quite tactical invocation of September 11th and the fact that the man uses the word "freedom" as frequently as most people use the word "is". But out of all of these phrases, the most widely accepted and perhaps, most telling one is of course, "war on terror".
It's easily become a part of the national vocabulary. Politicians, news organizations, and everyday people use "war on terror" as the collective title of America's current foreign policy efforts. But it's a uniquely American term. In other countries, it's not only not used, but it's mocked. The truth is that "war on terror" is indicative of a greater problem with American foreign policy, which is a basic lack of understanding as to who we're fighting or what we're doing.
The first issue is one that is incredibly simple and incredibly profound: you can't fight a war on terror. Terrorism is an ideology. It's a philosophy, it's a tactic, call it whatever you want, but don't fool yourself into believing that it's anything tangible. There is no country called "Terrorism", there is no leader named "Terrorism", there is no physical space or group to which it is confined. No matter how hard you try, you can't wage war on an ideology. There's a reason why the Cold War lasted four decades.
And terrorism is not only not a single tangible nation or a single tangible power, but it comes in many, many forms. From Al Qaeda to Hamas, there are dozens of major terrorist groups across the world. And, believe it or not, they're not all the same thing. Terrorism immediately brings to mind angry clerics preaching Jihad, but there's more to it than that. Different groups come from different places, with different motivations and different tactics. Lumping them all together as one movement is simply irresponsible and shortsighted. It's like fighting an enemy in five completely different environments but using strategies that are only tailored to one.
When you start lumping these different groups together, you start to find confusion in where your efforts should be focused. This is why we're in Iraq. Instead of dividing our attention, we were duped into pouring everything we have into a single country that turned out to have little to do with terrorism anyway.
At this point, you may be wondering: if I think the "war on terror" is so flawed, then what do I think would fix it? Well, for one thing, a little less of the "war" part. Expounding upon my earlier point, a war on terrorism is impossible because it's an ideology. As the character V says in Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, "There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There's only an idea. And ideas are bulletproof." The government seems to have an old and serious problem with this notion, the notion that there are some things that you can't bomb or shoot. There are some problems that can't be solved with military might, even the titanic force of the US Army.
If terrorism is about ideas, then there's no way one can solve it using purely military methods. A social problem must be foremost dealt with by changing society.
The Middle East obviously has an unfavorable opinion of our country, fostered by the propagation of a generally negative image by oppressive leaders. But it's not like we do much to help this image. We talked about spreading democracy to Iraq, but that mostly just seemed to translate to "bloody, full-scale invasion". Instead of large-scale operations, anti-terrorism efforts should consist of highly focused, surgical strikes against confirmed terrorist leaders. Why do we have to invade entire countries to stop rather small groups of terrorist leaders? In this way, we can actually subtract from the violence in the Middle East rather than adding to it. I find it hard to believe that the average Al Qaeda recruit is really all that obsessed with conquering the world in the name of Allah. It seems that many low-level terrorists are motivated less by their religious fury and more by what they perceive as everyone else filling their lives with war and chaos. Getting rid of the "bad apples" so to speak would begin to break up the structure of terrorist groups and decrease terrorist attacks. A gradual decrease in violence would beget even greater decreases, and maybe, a little bit more hope.
Another way we can curb violence is through economics. It would be unreasonable for me to blame the amount of money that gets pumped into the Middle East by the oil industry as the sole cause for all the violence, but I think it definitely fuels it. Decreasing our dependency on oil would go a far way towards bringing about change in the Middle East. The Middle East could be helped greatly by well thought-out economic efforts. While I think Capitalism is a system that's becoming quite stagnant and dangerous here in America, it may be exactly what the Middle East needs. Many countries over there are, quite frankly, behind other parts of the world socially. They're at a stage where they could benefit from Capitalism.
But we need to be careful about what kind of ideas we export over there. There's already a lot of distaste in the Middle East for the excesses of Western culture. That's not to say that there isn't substance to our culture, it's just not what we're showing them. We're throwing our culture in their faces without letting them develop their own. As a result, the only culture of ours that they know is one that's hollow and superficial. The Soviet Union dissolved, in part, because people over there started realizing that they were missing out on a lot of good things. That attitude could be a good thing in the Middle East.
There's also a need to curb terrorism at home. Europe has a problem with usually moderate Muslims turning to extremism. Why? Again, it's an issue of culture. We've created a society that makes young Muslim men feel endangered. Many of them feel that they're people are being killed all over the world for no reason. While this is no excuse for terrorism, this is an issue that should be addressed. We have a serious problem in America with Islamophobia and it's understandable that a sizable segment of Western society feels hated, threatened, and ostracized.
I could go on about the topic of terrorism for hours, but I think I've made my point. I doubt that many would agree with my thoughts, and I know that few politicians would, but I feel like we're obviously doing something wrong and we need to figure out what to do right. The cultural battle to slow terrorism has already claimed minor victories. Here in the West, others are rethinking terrorism as well. British international development secretary Hilary Benn recently made a speech about the need for a fresh approach to the "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 organized enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives." He went on to say, "The fight for the kind of world that most people want can, in the end, only be won in a different battle - a battle of values and ideas." In the Middle East, there is also an unexpectedly strong cultural movement against oppression, specifically in Iran. College students have embraced Western culture and campaigned for civil rights. Last year, students risked imprisonment and death in order to protest oppressive leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, chanting "dictator" in reference to him.
In order for this to happen, we as Americans must change the way we think. Ham-fisted terms like "war on terror" only demonstrate the archaic bluntness with which we treat a very modern struggle. 9/11 was a terrible tragedy, but it seems to have stolen our rationality. We can't let grudges cloud our judgment. It's going to take rationality and imagination to impede terrorism. It's going to take a different language, a language of understanding, peace, and most of all, hope.
