The War on Terror

This is apropos of nothing-- I've just held this one in long enough. What I don't write here rattles around in my brain until I can't stand the clattering.

A "war on terror" is like a war on crime. Or a war on murder. Beyond the usual deterences of incarceration and the death penalty, even if you could remove most causes of why humans murder each other-- poverty, desperation, gangs, drugs, etc.-- even if you achieve amazing Star-Trek-like advances in humanity, there will still be some housewife who gets tired of her husband's complaining and beans him with the frying pan, or a blues musician who gets stabbed in a pool hall over a woman. (You'd be surprised how often that shows up in bios of blues musicians.) You can never eradicate murder.

And you can never eradicate the threat of terrorism. And the threat, the fear, is what terrorism is largely about. You could beat Al-Qaeda, you could win over the hearts and minds of the entire Middle East, they could sing and dance in the streets shouting, "Life to America!" and there is still the possibility that someone could plant a bomb somewhere. He doesn't like the Olympics or the WTO, he is the Unibomber or Tim McVeigh, he's got a sick kid in Cuba and hijacks a plane. Or he's the one Middle East denizen who isn't dancing. You can't eradicate terrorism.

We started this "War" business back in the day, I think with Nixon's War on Drugs (and look how that turned out), as a sort of catchy slogan to encapsulate an idea-- if we take the Greatest Generation and apply them to a problem like we did with WWII, they could save the day. So let's say it this way, it's a war on drugs, that will inspire you as a community to pull together and make a huge difference. (Is this true? I'm no historian, but it has a beat and I can dance to it. Truthiness, man, dig it.) Then all these other "wars" started showing up, using the word either to inspire ("war on poverty") or to warn ("war on the middle class").

This was so much a part of our lexicon that when the Pres told us we weren't just going to go after Al-Qaeda and the perpetrators and supporters of the 9/11 attacks, but that we were going to have an all-out war on terror, people didn't seem to bat an eyelash. In fact, a lot of progressive voices are now shouting that Iraq is a diversion from the War On Terror as if that were a sacrosanct idea.

But it was never clarified if this was a marketing slogan or an actual war. I suspect a lot of us, and our Congressmen, thought that it referred to the over-arching strategy of "getting" (through law enforcement and detention/interroagtion ala 24) all these people who were trying to get us. To call it something as vague as a war on "terror", this idea is not limiting the response to just one group, Al-Qaeda, and then not having the teeth to get to any other group or persons who had similar goals. OK, fine.

Then there was the "use of force"-- ok, fine on that too, I mean, if you've tracked down your suspect you can't just be expected to knock politely, you might have to kick the door in like good ol' Jack Bauer. And you might have to go into another country and clean house if its own government can't control it and keep it from being run by a terrorist group, like Afghanistan. OK, fine.

But then one day we-- I should say I, since I speak only for myself, but I speak of what I feel was a group realization-- woke up to discover that the "war on terror" was an actual war, using the full resources (and more) of our actual military, and that the use of force actually gave the Executive the power to just go around and start invading countries on the flimsiest of excuses.

And yet, while we learned the war on terror was being treated like a real war, it remains simply a slogan. What does it really mean? How can you defeat terror? (Other than the Zen-like answer, "To refuse to be afraid.") How can you assure me, once we've "won", that no one will ever be a suicide bomber again? It doesn't have to be for this reason, it could be because blue is the new black. And if we can't do that, how can you tell me we've won?

We not only need a sensible approach to dealing with the Middle East and what Lou Dobbs calls "radical Islamic terrorism", I think it can only start by getting rid of the BS "Clean Air Act"-esque language that defines our so-called "War on Terror".

UPDATE: Since I wrote this, Randi Rhodes on Air America Radio has gone off on the same idea, and John Edwards has been saying the WOT is a "bumper sticker slogan"... Thanks for reading LMP, guys! And remember, you heard it here first...