I’ll be up all night, I’m afraid, working on my talk on “A Historical Overview of Liberty versus Terror” for an upcoming conference of newspaper editors and publishers. I’m trying to bring together an overview of the development of attitudes and practices regarding terrorization of, or attacks on, noncombatants, some of the relevant laws of war, and a set of concepts and distinctions regarding, in the hope that it may be helpful to advocates of liberty in sorting through the responses to terrorist attacks or threats. (The issue is so fraught with confusion, including that occasioned by the conflation of the war to overthrow Saddam and the war to overthrow the Taliban, which I see as quite different enterprises, and the fact that the current “war on terrorism” is a war on a tactic, which means that it is inherently unwinnable, that I wish I had more than an hour to deal with the issues. I hope that I’ll be able at least to lay out some of the relevant distinctions, historical developments, and moral/legal concepts to help advocates of liberty to sort through the claims made on all sides and to clarify their own thinking on the issues.)
I hope later to post as an addendum to this post a list of some of the historical, legal, and philsophical texts from which I’m drawing.
Tom, I wonder if your definition of the ‘War on Terror’ as an unwinnable war against a tactic isn’t too narrow. Garrison Keillor recently said that he thought the war on terror was already won because he (and presumably the majority of Americans going about their daily lives) no longer feels terrorised. If Keillor’s definition is credible, then it follows that the war has been won through time and complacency rather than any tactic of the Pentagon and the so-called Intelligence Services.
David,
That’s a tempting response, but….the problem we face is that framing the current geopolitical struggles as a “war on terror” both links together conflicts that are otherwise unconnected(so long as one can assert that there is terror involved) and sets a goal that can’t be reached. When would we know that we had “won” the war? It’s a recipe for perpetual conflict. Further, how tempted are our political leaders to undertake irrational measures because of the risk of terrorism? I think that we need to refocus the war as a war on fairly well defined organizations and networks, rather than on “terror.” That said, of course, the intelligence services have to make sure that various nasty groups don’t cooperate to obtain or traffic in WMD, such as nuclear warheads. Even that, however, is not a “war on terror,” but efforts to ensure that groups that are hostile to us don’t get access to the weapons to inflict massive harm.
(See for a helpful treatment that generally supports your point John Mueller’s essay “A False Sense of Insecurity?” from the Vol. 27, No. 3 [Fall 2004] Regulation magazine: http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv27n3/v27n3-5.pdf .)
Tom-
I have long regarded the charge the WOT as a cannard, a sham, the simple-minded criticism of a simple PR phrase. In short, a straw man. As such, it’s easy to knock down, but it gets things utterly wrong and covers a multitude of sins on both sides.
There is no WOT. There is, however, a war against Jihadism – the classic Muslim doctrine that Jihad against the Infidel is justified – now. (It’s also called a war against Islamism or Muslim extremism, which gets us nearer to the truth, but still misses too much.)
We simple-minded American’s don’t get this, however, because doing so would require a public debate about who the enemy are and why they hate us. I believe another large-scale attack is needed for this to occur – and perhaps the Bushies simply counted on this to enable them to move beyond the “WOT” rhetoric. In any event, neither the MSM nor the Bushies have seen fit to conduct a sensible public debate about “who our enemy is?”
But once we see that it is not a method but a religious doctrine that’s at stake, then it become clear how powerless we are to wage it. WE can’t change Islam – only Muslim’s can!
But the genuine positive prospects of Bush doctrine are seen when we grasp how Iraq is really a demonstration project. Intervention there has moved the conflict from the West to the confines of Muslim on Muslim where it belongs. We have a civil war within Islam (which it was originally). Bali, Morroc, Saudi and Turksih bombings – not to mention most attacks in Iraq – are attacks on Muslims.
Reports are that alternatives to Muslim decline like democracy are actively being debated (cf, a recent Charlie Rose program: reports by US academic participants at a conference in Egypt), under the veil official media, albeit percolating up into it on occasion (eg, Lebanese press).
So-how will Bush doctrine play out? A recent C-Span program with Reuel Marc Gerecht pointed to the Shi-ite solution: Clerics admit they are endorsing something, democracy, that’s heretical to Islam. Gerecht cautioned that the evidence was already in (symbolically in Iraqi Grand Mosques) that there will be a period of backsliding: women’s rights will be curtailed.
But Gerecht was full of long-term optimism! See his AEI presentation (Jan 6, 2005) for details. (I’ve not yet had a chance to absorb or evaluate them myself). http://www.c-spanstore.org/cgi-bin/cspanstore/185003-1.html
Ignorance of how much Arabs admire democracy and about the needs of these people for working government and their hunger for education and ecnomic success lead libertarians too often and too widely to misunderstand why a Bush Docrtine approach may well succeed. It recapitulates, in cultural terms, the decapitation that the Spanish so effectively achieved against the Aztecs in the virgin New World. Of course, if the US becomes a New SPain power, we have failed, too: the goal is not to rule from the outside but the planting of the roots of popular soveriegnty deep enough that they take root.
The primary obstacle is that Muslims – and with Iraqi’s in the vanguard – must create, invent, and nurture enough mediating institutions we call civil society – enough sources of countervailing authority and power – to check the unlimited authoritarian powers their peoples are so inured to.
It’s in this last fundamental detail that libertarians – since we, the partisans of liberty – have been abandoned by (or never had to begin with) all the sources (eg Solidarity, US labor unions, and the Catholic Church) of alternative civic power that so well set up the fall of communism so recently! And the left? Academe? Traditional elites – AWOL, as William Shawcross makes clear in a recent Guradian op-ed.
Cheers.
The Charlie Rose reference was to a participant at the conference in Cairo called “Islam and Reform:” Arthur Chrenkoff has an excerpt:
From the past few weeks, a selection of some positive steps and encouraging trends towards greater freedom and democracy throughout the Islamic world.
Region-wide: Not the first – and hopefully many more to come – stirrings of a reformist spirit in Islam
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2004/12/09/news/islam.html:
“Mohamed Shahrour, a layman who writes extensively about Islam, sits in his Damascus engineering office, arguing that Muslims will untangle their faith from the increasingly gory violence committed in its name only by reappraising their sacred texts.
“First, Shahrour brazenly tackles the Koran. The entire ninth chapter, The Sura of Repentance, he says, describes a failed attempt by Prophet Muhammad to form a state on the Arabian peninsula.
“As the source of most of the verses used to validate extremist attacks, with lines like ‘slay the Pagans where you find them,’ he believes that chapter should be isolated to its original context.
” ‘The state which he built died, but his message is still alive,’ says Shahrour, a soft-spoken, 65-year-old Syrian civil engineer. ‘So we have to differentiate between the religion and state politics. When you take the political Islam, you see only killing, assassination, poisoning, intrigue, conspiracy and civil war; but Islam as a message is very human, sensible and just’.”
Chrenkoff continues: Read the whole story of Shahrour and other like-minded intellectuals who have presented their call for reform after a Cairo seminar titled “Islam and Reform”.