The problem is that those who conduct acts of terror today refuse to be described as terrorists — because terrorism has not only lost its revolutionary luster but has been universally recognized as a barbarous form of political violence.
There is, of course, no chance that terrorism will ever regain the romantic aura that it once enjoyed. Thus, there is little possibility that those who use terrorism will ever acknowledge their deeds in such terms.
As long as no one is ready to admit that he is a terrorist, no one will be able to impose a universal definition of terrorism.
So what is the way out?
We could, of course, shrug our shoulders and admit that in a world that asks "what is the definition of a definition?" there is little chance of defining terrorism in universally acceptable terms. After all, there are many facts of life that we cannot define in such terms,
Or we could approach terrorism as a method, a form of action, and refrain from even the slightest hint of ethical judgment when proposing a definition.
Such an approach could provide us with a possible definition: Terrorism is any act or series of violent acts against civilians designed to persuade a part or the whole of a community or a group of communities to do something that the terrorists like, or to stop doing something that the terrorists do not like. (emphasis added)
On the basis of such a definition, what the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks did in the United States and what the so-called al Qaeda is now doing in Iraq and Saudi Arabia is terrorism.
That sounds like a fine definition to me. Of course, under this definition the United States government has committed numerous acts of terrorism, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being two of the most obvious examples. The military value of those targets was nil, but the terror value was high. And the result was that the war with Japan was ended sooner and with much less loss of American life than an invasion of Japan would have required. So were the bombings wrong? They did what they were supposed to do, which was end the war quickly. They were effective.
The point of war is simple: minimize your own casualties while maximizing those of your opponent. Eventually he will get upset and quit. Throughout history, new and devastating forms of weaponry and warfare have been condemned as unfair or immoral, the most famous being the crossbow (the "dastard's weapon"), the use of which was condemned by Pope Urban II in 1097. With a crossbow you could stand a ways off, hide behind a tree or battlement or some such, and just pick your enemies off their horses, while they on the other hand had gone to all the trouble of dressing up in shiny armor and marching in nice, neat battle lines. It was just rude. So they tried to pass laws against it.
There were similar arguments made against dropping bombs from airplanes, and I'm sure someone said something similar way, way back when, the first time someone brought a rock to to battle:
UG: Grok, that no fair. You have big rock, we have only teeth and fingernails.
GROK: Screw you, Ug. You shouldn't have kick me in testicles last time. Now your water and women are mine, or face the wrath of my rock.
UG: Okay, but we'll be back with a stick, or better yet, with paper to cover your rock. Then you be sorry.
(Curtain)
Maybe it was unfair for Grok to bring that rock to battle, but it was effective. And that's a key point about terrorism: it works, unfortunately. It worked at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It worked for the IRA. It worked for the Algerians. It worked for Israel's founding fathers. It's worked for the Palestinians (were it not for Palestinian terrorism we wouldn't even be discussing a Palestinian State). Time will tell if it works for the anti-democratic Iraqi insurgency. To be clear, I'm not defending the use of terrorism, I think the targeting of non-combatants is despicable, only pointing out that terrorism been used by a lot of organizations, some governmental, some not, to further a variety of political goals. Like the crossbow, it's a field-levelling weapon used by the weak against a more powerful foe. It's a tool, and as such it's somewhat ridiculous to declare war against it.
Quickly, I have to disagree with Taheri's assertion that terror "has been universally recognized as a barbarous form of political violence." First, are there non-barbarous forms of political violence? Second, the claim of universality is weak. We in the West may have recognized that terrorism is barbaric, though, as I pointed out above, this hasn't stopped Western governments from employing it. There is much less recognition of this in other parts of the world, and in these places terrorism certainly does retain its romantic aura. Whether or not militant jihadists refer to themselves specifically as "terrorists" seems to me entirely beside the point.
2 comments:
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki cases are interesting. Certainly, I think that the firestorming of Japanese cities in the last years of the war is terrorism. Our B-29s bombed the civilian sections of Japan's major cities rather than the industrial; Japanese industrial capacity by late 1944 was close to nil, in any case. Mass slaughter, with the intention of driving the Japanese population into uprising, sounds like terrorism to me. Would be indefensible even if it worked; the fact that it failed makes it one of history's greatest crimes.
The atomic strikes are a bit different. Their direct impact didn't differ that much from the firestorms which had hit other Japanese cities. What they did was to serve notice that the US had more powerful weapons than even the massed B-29s with incendiary bombs, and that all Japanese resistance was hopeless. This is somewhat different than terrorism; it's a message to Japanese policymakers, not civilians.
It seems to me that if the goal of the atomic strikes was to send a message to Japanese policymakers, the U.S. could just as easily have provided a less deadly demonstration, such as:
"Hey guys, you see that little island off your southern coast? No, you don't, because we just obliterated it. Cheers."
The fact that the U.S. chose to target civilians indicates to me that the U.S. wanted to send a message to both the policymakers and the population.
P.S. I'm not necessarily condemning the use of atomics, I tend to think that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki strikes are one of the main reasons why the Cold War stayed cold, as they gave us a terrifyingly real, rather than abstract, idea of what nuclear war would be like.
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