Topics War

Question How can politicians across the globe get away with saying that they support a 'War on Terror'? How can terrorism possibly be something that can be defeated? We don't try to preemptively stop violent offenders in the developed nations, so why are 'terrorists' people that can be so easily branded and fought against?

Accepted:
October 19, 2008

Comments

I believe that the meaning of the expression "war on terror" contains a metaphor and a judgment, neither of which is explicitly presented as such. This double equivocation has grave political consequences. Let me address each fold of the equivocation separately.

The Metaphor of "War."

I do not see how, in the "war against terror," "war" is used as anything else than a metaphor, as in the "war against cancer" or the "war against drug-trafficking." In principle, there would be nothing wrong in making use of the metaphor of war to describe the fight against terrorism, and the terror that it produces. Now, given that acts of terrorism are so destabilizing precisely because of their intrinsic production of terror (an individual and collective state of mind), I am not sure that the metaphor of war would be my pick, since it is obvious that it increases, rather than decreases, the production of terror.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, however, by formally "declaring" war on terror, the Bush administration equivocated on the status of the term "war." All of a sudden, the United States was at war , engaged in an actual armed conflict against the terrorists. This has allowed the Bush administration several very problematic moves:

to ask countries around the world to either align themselves with or against the US;
to suggest that whoever was "with us" was good and whoever was "against us" was evil;
to infuse secular democratic discourse with theological sentiments;
to accuse critical voices within the US of betrayal and anti-patriotism -- a vicious accusation that has silenced any form of dissent, including most of the liberal media until the war in Iraq began to lose steam. A recent example of this slippery slope is Sarah Palin's statement about the pro-American versus anti-American, states of the Uniion.

In my view, the equivocation on the status of the term "war" in the expression "war on terror" is not a simple rhetorical twist but a deliberate attempt to change the substance of political discourse, whose effects are still present today. Look at the responses given uniformly by the media as well as by the Obama campaign against the "accusation" that Senator Obama is a Muslim, or that he is deliberately concealing his Muslim background. In unison, these responses simply disputed the "allegation" on factual grounds. Senator Obama is a Christian and not a Muslim, and he is not concealing his Muslim background. How did the American public not take the accusation as offensive in terms of the demonization of Islam? How is it that in the oldest liberal democracy in the world religious discrimination still reigns sovreign? The truth is taht no candidate or media can afford this line of response yet. And this limitation of freedom of expression is, I believe, a consequence of the last 8 years of equivocation on our being really at war against an elusive enemy.

"Terrorism" as a Judgment

Declaring war against terror implies that the fight against it can be won or lost. In my opinion, the promise to eradicate terror rests on the wrong assumption that "terrorism" is a referring expression, which is to say, the fitting description for a specific type of violent act, carried out by a new military enemy, an enemy that can and should be beaten on the battlefield. By contrast, in my scholarly work I have claimed that terrorism is not a description but a judgment. In this case, it is important to underline that judgments may be offered not only by individuals, but also by institutions, government agencies, the media apparatus as well as the political elite in charge of major policy decisions.

You might argue that I am conflating terrorism and terror here, and that the war that the United States has declared is against terror rather than terrorism. My answer to your remark would be that in the past 8 years these two terms have indeed been used interchangeably. In my view, this interchangeability is another deliberate and dangerous equivocation that has allowed the Bush administration to obscure that terrorism is in fact a judgment, which, as all judgments, need justification pronouncing them. My point is that the Bush administration’s decision to declare “war on terror” is essential in establishing terrorism as a referring expression. The specificity of a terrorist act is to deliver terror, which is conceived as the essence to which the multiple and varied forms of terrorism can be reduced. In Platonic language: terror is the absolute essence and terrorism is the particular embodiment of terror. This way of thinking about terror and terrorism obscures the fact that terrorism has had a long history and assumed, throughout it, very different forms: think about the difference between the targeted killings of the Red Brigades in Italy, in the 1970s and 1980s, and the mass murder of 9/11, which closely resembles, although not in scale, the fascist attacks against railway stations and banks that accompanied the history of Italian terrorism during those same years.

Declaring war against "Terror" (which was more often that not capitalized in the earlier years of the millennium) erases the need to distinguish between the specificity of the context in which terrorist act is committed and the ideological brands that each one of them has embraced. It is a legitmate to debate whether, in very specific circumstances, a terrorist act may be acceptable in the liberation from liberation from an unjust oppressor.

In contrast with the reduction of terror to an essence (I call it the essentialization of terror), I see terrorism as a judgment for which, whoever pronounces it, has to provide a justification. Today’s mainstream conception of terrorism is the very specific product of a very specific political culture that bears the responsibility of having formulated it and constructed it as a "fact" of sorts, independent from language and circumstances. This is why I call this political culture the culture of terrorism.

All my points seem to me a way of articulating more fully what remains implicit in your question when you ask: "We don't try to preemptively stop violentoffenders in the developed nations, so why are 'terrorists' people thatcan be so easily branded and fought against?"

The declaration of "war on terror" implies that the fight against terror should be conducted by traditional military means, without which the Bush Doctrine of preemption would not make any sense. This doctrine applies only if terrorism is seen as a single recognizable agent (the particular embodiment of a supposed essence, called Terror) whose harmful intentions can be preemptively anticipated and staved off. By following this line of argument, the Bush Doctrine avoids asking the question of who, in fact, is a terrorist. In my opinion, a terrorist is first and foremost a violent offender who claims political motives for her criminal activity. So that the real question becomes: who is in the position of determining whether that claim is justified, and thus to judge whether the violent offense is in fact an act of terrorism? And this is an open question at the intersection between the national and international judicial systems.