Escaping from ‘terrorism’

The whole Bushite discourse of the US being involved in a “Global War on Terror” is, it seems to me, not only misleading but actually inimical to the best interests of the US citizenry.
GWOT is how “people in the know” like to refer to it. Gee, what the heck are you talking about? is my response to them.
Who was it who, not so long ago, wrote something to the effect that, “Terror is, like blitzkrieg, a tactic that a commander can choose to use or not to use. But who would declare a ‘war on blitzkrieg’? No, ‘terror’ is not in itself a political force that–like Nazism, or Japanism militarism–can be campaigned against and perhaps vanquished…”

[It was Zbigniew Brzezinski. He put it much more succinctly than I did. The actual quote was posted on the Comment board here by Bill. Check it out. ~HC]

I agree completely with that. I also think that by responding to Al-Qaeda’s intense provocation by declaring and pursuing a ‘Global War on Terror’, the Bush administration lost its ability to focus on and deal effectively with the main threat: that from Al-Qaeda.
Exhibit # 1 in this regard? The invasion of Iraq.
But the damage, it seems to me, goes much further than the mere diversion of effort. There has also developed such a huge degree of conceptual fuzziness around the whole concept of “global terrorism” that the Bushies seem almost unable to disaggregate the campaigns being waged by, for example, the Iraqis or Palestinians against foreign military occupation, or by the Chechens for (as far as I understand it) national independence from Russia, from the still-present threat from Al-Qaeda to US and allied interests around the globe.

And then, there is the issue of the deliberate rhetorical escalation/manipulation involved in declaring all violence of which the administration disapproves to be part of some heinous “global terror network”. Time was, Washington hawks and their allies in the defense industries could mobilize the massive amounts of resources needed to maintain a huge military establishment by continually hyping the fear that “Godless communism” was about to take over the world. That never happened. The once-feared Soviet Union collapsed almost like a cream puff under–as V.I. Lenin might have said–the weight of its own internal contradictions.
So now, we don’t have the “communist threat” to bandy around any more… But by gosh, these days, folks, there’s the threat of “global terrorism”. That’s why we can’t fund the schools in US cities adequately any more, why the country’s bridges and roads are crumbling, why 43 million Americans have no health insurance… Because all that money now needs to go into maintaining the 1.5 million-person military!
And then, have you noticed how the Prez keeps telling us that the GWOT is going to be “a long war”? Some of his people tell us it’s going to take a “generational commitment” in order to win it? In other words, they want to keep the US at this heightened state of alert, fearfulness, and above all of defense spending, for multiple tens of years!
This is national suicide. It is really time for the rest of us to tell them they have just got to be kidding.
Another cost we need to mention here is the massive cost to civil liberties and basic human decency. The whole rhetoric of the GWOT has been key to the administration’s arguments that it needs to curtail the civil liberties of Americans at home while it has also, at the international level, systematically walked away from the Geneva Conventions.
This is really scary stuff. Yesterday, in the NYT there was a very well-researched piece by James Risen, David Johnston, and Neil Lewis, in which an un-named former intelligence official is quoted as saying, chillingly, “There was a debate after 9/11 about how to make people disappear.” That was in the context of the attempts the CIA had been making to find, “remote sites in friendly countries around the world where Qaeda operatives could be kept quietly and securely.”
This is all, of course, in the broader context of the Bush administration having created/resurrected this obscure category of “unlawful combatants” to describe suspected Al-Qaeda members, precisely so they do not have to be accorded the protections given to formal prisoners of war. And of course, the category is quite elastic: the Bushites can put into it anyone they want to, except US citizens. (And in the case of Jose Padilla, they’re trying to do that to him, too.)
So here’s a vexing problem, alluded to briefly in the NYT piece: What do you do with one of these “unlawful combatants” once you’ve wrung out of him–through using any of the numerous methods of torture that the CIA , other agencies, and private contractors are allowed to use–any “intelligence” that might be worthwhile? (If any of it was, to start with.)
But seriously, how do you define the end-point of the curtailment of this person’s natural rights?
You see, if a person is tried in a regular court of law, there is due process that affords him/her certain important rights before and during a trial, and then, after deliberation, imposes a sentence on him. At the end of the sentence–assuming it’s not a death sentence–the person is restored to freedom.
If a person is a POW, he has the right to resist all interrogation beyond that designed to elicit his “name, rank, and serial number”. His period in a POW camp lasts only till the end of hostilities, after which the repatriation of POWs occurs…
Aha! But what if the prisoner in question is not judged by the US government to be a POW, but an ‘Illegal combatant”? And what if the “war” in which he was detained is a multi-decade “global war on terror”? Will this person be kept in his place of detention–whether it is one of the “secret” places around the world, or a legal-limbo kind of place like Guantanamo–throughout all those decades? And still, quite possibly, without appearing before any kind of a fair hearing mechanism?
Is this what America and its people have become? Is this how we want to continue to be?
I think we can start to roll back many of these abuses, and much of the intellectual fuzziness in which they have been incubated like mold in a damp basement. A key move in doing this should be to attack the whole notion of the US being involved in anything like a “global war on terror”. What we’re really involved in instead, I submit, is a focused, and essentially political camapgin against Al-Qaeda along with, of course, the challenging task of stepping back from a bad case of imperial over-reach in Iraq.
These are two almost completely separate tasks.
It means, essentially, cutting the US’s losses in Iraq, and re-directing a lot of US and international resources and attention to the crucial task of supporting healthy nation-building in Afghanistan and all those other nations teetering on (or over) the brink of failed state-dom where Al-Qaeda can find a hospitable home.
It means rediscovering what “American values” really are, and walking that whole walk.
But it means, first and foremost, not being taken in by the whole manipulative discourse of “terrorism” and “counter-terrorism”. The last people who tried to use that discourse to scare their own people into supporting a lengthy and unjust war, and to cover up terrible abuses inside their own secret prisons were, it seems to me, the apartheid bosses in South Africa. But most of those old reprobates finally saw the light!
So why is it taking the Bushites so long to do the same?