The meaning of 'terrorism'

What is the meaning of terrorism - the word, not the sociology? (After all, this is a blog, not a dissertation in political science.)

The Bushists and their wingnut bloviators have used it to mean:

1. Violence directed at Americans


2. Any criticism that makes them sufficiently angry (which is to say, virtually all of it)

These self-centered definitions excuse them from having to subject their own behavior - and our own as Americans - to even the Golden Rule. We're Americans, we don't do terror, we're special.

It's typical of Republicans to build a rhetorical universe in which they win by definition and facts don't matter. Governments find this blurring of distinctions useful - witness the Greek government following the same path the Bushists have taken domestically. Forests or SUVs, fire can be a terror weapon, but I think a crime needs to meet specific and narrow factual criteria to be called terrorism.

The meanings of words do matter, as Republicans used to tell us when they were crawling into every orifice Bill Clinton had (ouch!) and bleeding out like a three-pepper Thai dinner. The word terrorism has a real, specific meaning: violence for political ends that targets innocent people. There's still lots of room for argument about what target and innocent mean in this context.

In WWII, the Nazi bombing of London was, we all agree, terror bombing. We've all seen movies of the plucky English and Winston Churchill still plying the streets between Luftwaffe raids. What then about the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo? Or the nuclear holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which possibly saved my grandfather's life)? We Americans often rationalize these horrific swords from the sky against infant and soldier and toothless elderly alike as attacks on the military infrastructure close to their incinerated homes. In truth, we know that we chose to kill all those people for minor direct military gain. And maybe Hiroshima was even the right choice at the time; war grays every boundary, and its terror did give tremendous indirect military gain by intimidating the Japanese into surrender.

Does the use of terror bombing against primarily civilian targets count as terrorism in a war that's already in full swing? We've been in the age of total war for well over a century. Southerners still hate Sherman for it. Moral or not, the norm of both "civilized" and "uncivilized" forces is to accept significant collateral killings. Most of us who are not pacifists agree that WWII was a just war, yet its collateral killing was worse than any previous conflict, and we and our allies always rationalized collateral killing and often (Curtis LeMay...) embraced it.

There is of course a very real difference on the subject between America and al Qaeda, just as there was between us and the Nazis. We have used technology to make our weapons ever finer and more discriminating, not in every instance (e.g. cluster bombs) but to a large degree (however, don't believe the missile videos from the First Gulf War were anything but cherry-picked). The real terrorists of al Qaeda, on the other hand, have used technology to be more and more indiscriminate.

We Americans are also likely to fall back on the Japanese perfidy at Pearl to ease our consciences, even though that was an attack on a legitimate military target, which means the perfidy was their use of diplomacy as a tool of war. They talked to cover a sneak attack that launched an aggressive war of choice. They, like Duhbya, felt they had no choice, or at least that was their rationalization. They, like Duhbya, pretended to seek peace long after the decision to make war had been made.

The attack on the WTC was obviously terrorism. While there's no doubt that a nation's economy is critical to any war effort, civilians engaged in their ordinary jobs are not a legitimate target. The same goes for Iraqis in Baghdad trying to earn a living.

The attack on the Pentagon on 9/11 was a little different. The Pentagon is the nerve center of our military and thus a legitimate - but still outraging - target. Only an infantile wingnut could claim that I don't want to defend it and the men and women who serve our country there and elsewhere.

My point is that understanding the world is important to achieving what we want to achieve. Blurring distinctions such as this only helps the political cause of American right-wingers and Bushists, who seem determined to efface any distinction other than us vs. them.

Of course, the attack on the Pentagon used a terrorist weapon, and I don't mean air attack. It intentionally murdered innocent civilians, typical of al Qaeda operations.

Logically, the attacks on the marine barracks in Lebanon, on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, on the Blackhawk in Somalia, and on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen were all attacks on military targets. Heinous and wrong, sure, but acts of war not of terrorism.

The import of all this is that the GWOT, as many others have proven over and over again, is a misnomer, and not just because Saddam was not a terrorist against us. The notion of a global war on terror is not even coherent, especially given the too-ironic use of fear in selling it.

What the PNAC neocons and the Bushists would like us to believe is that we're fighting at least a global war on jihadism (in the extreme sense of jihad). Of course, Iraq doesn't fit that formulation either - or didn't until we whacked the hornets' nest.

But, of course, if Duhbya could understand distinctions such as this, he could have understood the hostilities between Sunni and Shi'a in time not to provoke the hornets.