19 Skyjackers Are Not the Soviet Union

 

 

Americans and the world have been bombarded with the phrases “war on terrorism” and “war on terror” thousands of times over the last three years.  The very multiplicity of its repetition in so many respectable or formerly respectable sectors of public discourse has partly numbed public opinion and paralyzed the public’s ability to fight back.

 

Since I don’t have either amnesia or Alzheimer’s yet, however, I wish to insert into the public discourse a few reminders here, before they’re too late:

 

(1)               There is no such thing as a “war on terror.”  The phrase itself is a metaphor.  Figuratively, the phrase “war on terrorism” or “war on terror” is, at best, like invoking a “war on violence” or a “war on war.”  It would be better to talk about combating violence, lowering the level of violence, reducing strife domestically and globally.  But that is apparently the last thing the Bush team wants to see:  I have never heard anyone in this White House give even lip service to reducing dangerous levels of conflict or other violence, in any context.  Did you see how the Bush team jumped all over John Kerry’s use of the word “sensitive”?  That wasn’t just meanness, semi-illiteracy and stupidity.  Kerry actually said something deeply threatening, because it threatened to approach the terrain of exposing how bogus the “war on terror” is, as a means of genuinely reducing the incidence or harm of terrorist attacks.

 

(2)               Terrorism itself is, as the 9/11 Commission’s final report accurately pointed out, a tactic or set of tactics, not an army.  “Terrorism” as a word is basically a new name for guerrilla tactics – using your weaknesses as strengths, enlisting your entire population if possible, using the opponent’s power as weapons – and “terrorists” are the persons who use those tactics. 

 

(3)               You cannot fight guerrilla tactics by launching invading armies and navies.  This basic military truth was discovered by the British redcoats when they marched against the Swamp Fox in the Carolinas, back in our Revolutionary War.  Any student of military history or of World War II’s OSS must know it, making one wonder why so few old-line Republicans or genuine conservatives are speaking up about it.

 

Pseudo-warriors like George W. Bush, Rush Limbaugh and Arnold Schwarzenegger, however, are particularly big on the “war on terror.”  They’re not big, mind you, on giving our first responders and last-ditch security workers better working conditions, that is, conditions designed actually to keep the best-qualified people on the job, with adequate pay and benefits, humane hours, and genuine training and supervision.  Nor are they big on opposing typical corporate erosions of security, including outsourcing, privatizing, and hiring contractors who in turn hire the cheapest subcontractors possible, regardless of background checks.

 

But they are big on rhetoric that represents nineteen half-baked skyjackers and their cohorts as a threat equivalent to the former Soviet Union, even though the results include erosion of our most cherished civil liberties, half a trillion in deficit spending that threatens to gut our middle class, and near-total dominance over and control of our press.

 

You have to wonder whether maybe those are the results they want.  They’re certainly not reducing terrorism.