Posted on 07/17/2002 11:28:09 AM PDT by traditionalist
"The American government sure is easily baffled. An extremist Egyptian Muslim chooses July Fourth to murder Americans and Israelis who are flying from an American airport on Israel's national airline – and the official line is we can't call this terror ..."
Adds exasperated columnist Dennis Prager, "This country's officials are in a state of denial and confusion that is almost as frightening as the terrorists they are supposed to be fighting."
But there is reason for this confusion. Though President Bush has declared that we are fighting a "war on terrorism," he has yet to define what terrorism is, or tell us who exactly our enemies are. Where in the U.S. military or criminal code is terrorism defined?
Traditionally, terrorism has meant the slaughter of innocents for political ends. But what was the political end of the atrocity at LAX? To get Israel off the West Bank? And if it was terrorism, should such a killer be transferred to Guantanamo Bay and denied the full protections of the Bill of Rights, like the rest?
The assassinations of JFK by a Castroite, of Robert Kennedy by a Palestinian, of Dr. King and Medgar Evers by racists, of Malcolm X by black Muslims, of George Lincoln Rockwell by a fellow Nazi were all "political" assassinations. But which ones were "terrorist" acts?
The assassination of Lincoln in John Wilkes Booth's plot to decapitate the Union government, to re-ignite the Southern rebellion, seems to qualify as terrorism, and the assassins were tried in a military court. But, again, they were not hanged for terrorism.
The confusion as to what to call the LAX atrocity stems from a confusion of thought in Washington and a failure to follow the U.S. Constitution, declare war and identify precisely who our enemies are. When Bush says we are fighting terrorism, does he mean the IRA, the Basque ETA, the Tamil Tigers, FARC, Hezbollah?
None of the above. The president is authorized by Congress only to take down the Taliban and al-Qaida, and any other nation-state that helped or harbored the mass murderers of 9-11. Yet, no other nation, not even the "axis-of-evil" nations, seems to have been involved.
Why not then declare war on al-Qaida? Because that would tie the president's hands and give legitimacy to al-Qaida. For there are rules of war we would then have to observe. And what would we do if al-Qaida offered to negotiate an end to their attacks in return for U.S. withdrawal from Saudi Arabia? Negotiate? We would confront the same problem Ariel Sharon has. Because he doesn't want to negotiate with Arafat, he de-legitimizes Arafat by calling him a terrorist.
We are in a new era, though few recognize it. One who does is William Lind, who calls today's conflicts Fourth Generation Warfare – a feature of our new world in which nation-states are losing their legitimacy, the first loyalty of their peoples and the monopoly on warfare they have held since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
As nations crumble, loyalties are transferred to cults, gangs, tribes, races, cartels, religions and causes, from FARC to the Cali Cartel, to Crips and Bloods, Hutu and Pashtun, Islamists, anti-globalists, enviro-terrorists and Branch Davidians.
These "non-state actors" cannot hope to defeat nation-states in conventional war. The Taliban's try proved suicidal. But now that the Taliban no longer have a state we can smash, and al-Qaida is no longer concentrated where smart bombs can strike it, the odds have shifted. Recall: Fourth-generation warfare drove the Marines out of Beirut, the United States out of Somalia, the Israelis out of Lebanon and the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
Non-state actors have adopted their own rules of warfare to justify what they do, even as we justified Nagasaki. To us, Timothy McVeigh is a mass-murderer and a terrorist. To McVeigh, the United States was the enemy on which he had declared war, and he attacked a U.S. command post with unfortunate "collateral damage" – i.e., the kids in that daycare center. Seeing himself as a soldier, McVeigh was no more remorseful than the British bomber pilots who did Dresden.
Of Nagasaki and Dresden, we say, "That was war!" But Osama bin Laden declared war on us, and al-Qaida says it is waging war to drive Americans out of their region, as we once drove the British out of ours. We reply, "You are terrorists!" They reply: Before 9-11, our targets were U.S. embassies, Marine barracks, the USS Cole and Khobar Towers – all political or military command sites.
If Congress will not force our War Cabinet to tell us exactly who we are fighting and what the expectations are of the war's duration and the war dead, it will leave us in this dangerous limbo of confusion columnist Prager rightly deplores.
If we do not do this, this war on terrorism could end like the war on drugs, in a twilight struggle in which Americans soon lose interest, that results only in a steady loss of our freedom to the true enemy of American liberty: The Leviathan State.
If we cannot recognize, and deal with this enemy on those terms, we're doomed.
The mistake al-Qada made was that they still had an Industrial Age command and control center (of sorts) in Afghanistan. The next Information Age terrorists will not make the same mistake.
On the other hand, a country that kills enemies using a uniformed force using planes, gunships, tanks and missiles is by definition not a terrorist. An added plus is that any children killed are just 'collateral damage' while yours are 'innocent civilians'.
You see the way to end terrorism, is to provide millions of dollars year after year to each side then each side could afford big time weapons and not have to blow themselves up.
The Feds are holding us hostage, claiming that they can't stop the invasion coming across the borders because said troops would be deployed on American soil and they claim that violates the PCA. Who are these guys? What are they thinking? Does that mean that if America was being invaded by foreign armies that our American troops would not be used because they might have to fight the enemy from American soil.
To Senator Bunning and the rest in Washington: We here in America are petitioning you to deploy American troops AGAINST foreign invaders and illegal aliens, and migrant terrorists -- NOT AGAINST American citizens. It is perfectly legal. Just do it and leave the PCA alone, as if the Federal Government that you are supposed to oversee did not violate the PCA when it launched a preemptive strike against the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco. Wake up ----
The authority we have to live freely resides in our ability to resist, overcome, and sometimes destroy those who would seek to prevent us from living the way we do.
We don't yet live in a world of civilized discourse. We don’t yet live in a world where freedom, as we know it, is universal. Our objective is to neutralize those parts of the world that would threaten our way of life. This objective is relatively easy: 1) we have the means, 2) we are slowly finding the will and 3) it is a given that the true natural state of humanity is to be free.
"It is my sincere belief that the "War on Terrorism" has become a device to maintain GW's popularity. We have spent Billions on bombing a few mud huts in Afghanistan, and what have we accomplished? "
Maybe popularity but I think some guys in Washington, who perhaps never served, have GW by the gonads maybe from his actions as governor, business owner, or personal. He has made too many direction changes. (Just like I think they had Clinton).
With all due respect, I believe you have misunderstood Buchanan's question.
Of course ...a terrorist is one who uses a car or becomes a human bomb to kill enemies is one accurate definition of a terrorist. But it is incomplete; you have eliminated the guy that shot up the El Al counter in LA, and he most definitely was a terrorist. And the terrorists in South America, Africa and Ireland, many of whom promote their terror through other means. And they most definitely are terrorists.
The point of Buchanan's question and article is that after the initial successes cleaning up on the Taliban (a magnificent piece of warfare, against a clearly defined and ultimately beaten enemy), the President has strayed from any sort of concrete goals and enemies.
War on Terrorism? The term is so abstract as to be meaningless. Why not a War on Car Bombers, or a War on Suicide Bombers, or a War on Molotov Cocktails? Unless the intent is to make the term "War on Terrorism" merely symbolic, it serves more to confuse than to define.
And if symbolism is all we are after, then what is the real goal?
The Times UK, commenting on Bush’s Homeland Security $10 billion “plan,” released yesterday:
The document begins with an acknowledgment of the difficulty of defining terrorism. “Terrorism is not so much a system of belief . . . as it is a means of attack.”
We are now at war with an apparently disembodied “means of attack.” It seems to me that a “clear-cut objective,” presupposes a clear-cut enemy: fundamentalist Islam. Call it those who have “hijacked a religion.” Call it extremists within the religion. But for God’s sake, call it by what it is.
By the way, I disagree with Buchanan’s assessment that no state was involved. I think our government has proof of state involvement (heck, I think many governments have proof of state involvement) but the proof won't be acknowledged unless someone in this administration finally decides to take out Saddam, and abandon Saudi Arabia to its own evil -- before it’s too late.
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