Winning the war
Oct. 12th, 2004 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jere7myBush slammed Kerry a couple of days ago for daring to say that our goal was to reduce terror to "nuisance levels." We must, sez our Prez, eradicate terrorism. We have to win the War on Terror. (All this despite saying, several weeks ago, that we probably couldn't win it. But never mind.)
Will somebody, somewhere, please step up and say Kerry was right? There's no way to "win the War on Terror." That's not defeatist; that's self-evident. Terrorism is not a dragon, which will die when you cut off its head; it's not even a hydra, which will die when you've cut off all its heads. Terrorism is self-generative: after fifty terror-free years, or five hundred, all it will take is a single frustrated kid building a pipe bomb in his basement, or a single oppressed minority to get fed up, and terrorism will live again. Anyone, anywhere, can reinvent terrorism. I could do it this afternoon.
Terrorism is an act, not an institution. Winning the War on Terror is as impossible as winning the War on Murder, or the War on Rape, or the War on Whelk-Pestering. We can work to create a world in which terrorism is rare, one where it's not seen as a viable solution (not that the Administration has achieved stage boo of this), but we can't Win. Not without Big Brother, universally applied.
(Oh, wait. I think I just figured out the Plan.)
Will somebody, somewhere, please step up and say Kerry was right? There's no way to "win the War on Terror." That's not defeatist; that's self-evident. Terrorism is not a dragon, which will die when you cut off its head; it's not even a hydra, which will die when you've cut off all its heads. Terrorism is self-generative: after fifty terror-free years, or five hundred, all it will take is a single frustrated kid building a pipe bomb in his basement, or a single oppressed minority to get fed up, and terrorism will live again. Anyone, anywhere, can reinvent terrorism. I could do it this afternoon.
Terrorism is an act, not an institution. Winning the War on Terror is as impossible as winning the War on Murder, or the War on Rape, or the War on Whelk-Pestering. We can work to create a world in which terrorism is rare, one where it's not seen as a viable solution (not that the Administration has achieved stage boo of this), but we can't Win. Not without Big Brother, universally applied.
(Oh, wait. I think I just figured out the Plan.)
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no subject
Date: 2004-10-12 08:09 pm (UTC)The vigils held after September 11th 2001 in Cologne and Dresden. Think what the US was doing in that area fifty-odd years earlier. Two generations can be enough to win a peace. Which makes me all the angrier at the War on Some Terror [ and anybody who claims it's on all terror hasn't been keeping an eye on Noraid recently. ]
Kerry was right
Date: 2004-10-12 10:40 pm (UTC)On that theme, may I add that even if you share Our Only President's obsession with state-sponsored terrorism, such as ... um ... well, not the Madrid business, nor the Oklahoma City, nor the WTC obviously, or um, well, anyway, even if you concentrate on state-sponsored terrorism, eradicating it is not as simple as they present. Even democracies have changed policies in the past; sometimes they sponsor terrorism, often they don't.
I was reading recently an interview with a retired Pentagon muck-a-muck, given ten years ago or so, in which he said that they never fought communism. "We didn't know where it was," he said in paraphrase. "We knew where the Soviets were. Them, we could fight."
,
-V.