Terrorism: What are We Actually Fighting?

"Wars are caused and waged not by state interests but instead from the clash of deeply seated beliefs and values", or so writes Eliot Cohen in Supreme Command. This is in opposition to the classical view of Karl von Clausewitz, which expressly states that war is just politics by other means; in other words, that one country imposing its will upon another is motivated by economic or other motives pertaining to power.

So let us think about this in the context of the war on terror.

First, there is no such thing as a war on terror, although it is a convenient term to use so as to keep from offending a small minority of American citizens and foreign allies. Terrorism, rather, is a tool, a methodology used to advance one group's political agenda. It is not, in itself, an entity that can be fought. Terrorism isn't even a new idea. It's been used throughout history, from the ancient Hebrew conquest of Canaan (kill all the men, leave not one stone upon another) through the Roman Empire to the French Revolution and the American Civil War (think Sherman's march to the Atlantic).

Now terrorism is being used, as it has been for decades, by Islamic fundamentalists who are not part of any government, although they are supported by them. So our fight is not against terrorism, but rather against the psychopaths who think that murdering civilians will get them the results that they want (unfortunately, they're all too often correct, thank you, Spain).

So what we're actually fighting are loose organizations supported by both national governments and wealthy individuals who hope to impose their ideological agenda upon the rest of the world in general and the West in particular. Their fundamentalist ideology of state-run religion and theological dictatorship are totally and completely incompatible with the traditional Western liberal ideology of personal and economic freedom.

In this case, the ideology drives the politics, and the economics drives the methodology of the war that our opponents are fighting against us. They use terrorist tactics not because they can, but because it's the only way that they can hurt us, and they know it. Terrorism is a tactic of the cowardly and desperate, caused by a view that the end justifies the means, no matter how cruel. In fact, the more spectacularly cruel, the better they like it because they believe it will advance their agenda.

It's the ideology that we must fight, not the methodology that our opponents use to attack us. That's what we're doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, or at least trying to. It'll take many years to convince the millions of people in the Middle East that we're not all bad. Chances are we'll never bring them around to our way of thinking in general. But we don't need to. All we need to do is create an atmosphere where the idea of terrorism as a legitimate tactic is no longer accepted. Even that may be so difficult as to not occur in my lifetime.

Go To Page: 1

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic