Quote Of The Day
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Foreign Policy, Quotes, The War On Terrorism, The World
“Terrorism is a deadly tactic, not an institution or an ideology.”
- British Foreign Secretary David Miliband on the limits of the phrase “War on Terror”
The foreign secretary wrote that since 9/11 the phrase “war on terror” had “defined the terrain” when it came to tackling terrorism and that although it had merit, “ultimately, the notion is misleading and mistaken”.Mr Miliband wrote that the phrase was all-encompassing and “gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda” when the situation was far more complex.
Calling for groups to be treated as separate entities with differing motivations, he wrote that it was not a “simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists, or good and evil” and treating them as such was a mistake.
“Historians will judge whether [the notion] has done more harm than good”, he said.
I think it’s clear it has done more harm, and exactly for the reasons Miliband states. All Bush did by framing this struggle as a “war” is, as suggested above, unify disparate terrorist cells and create a situation where we would always be in a “war” so any actions taken by the President were justifiable since they could always be explained away as trying to protect the American people.
My hope is that Obama changes this nomenclature after he gets into office, but we’ll see. That may be too big of a leap for the American people in the short term.
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January 15th, 2009 at 10:22 am
I agree. A “war on jihadism” or a “war on Islamic fascism” would be more appropriate. There is no doubt that radical Islam is an ideology and an institution. Do we want to declare war on those purveyors of this ideology who have already declared war on us? That is the real question for the secretary, and Obama for that matter, to answer.
However I doubt Obama will change anything. He was one of the few democrats running for president who expressed his belief that there actually is something called “a global war on terror.” It seems president Obama disagrees with you.
January 15th, 2009 at 10:31 am
Exactly, Jimmy. But this “tell it like it is” approach has been met with pretty staunch resistance from progressives and the associated language police. We are at war with people who follow a violent interpretation of Islam, and those people use terrorism as their primary combat tactic.
Justin, would you agree with that?
January 15th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Guys, guys, guys…everybody knows that jihad wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Gitmo, Iraq, coercive interrogation, rendition, etc.. Jihad is merely a reaction to US foreign policy. There is no “enemy”.
Terrorism isn’t even a “tactic” per se, because that would imply a sentient actor that we would have to define as an enemy and therefor fight & kill. No “terrorism”/”jihadism” is more akin to a weather pattern, a natural disaster with its roots in political physics. We simply stepped on the wrong rock and triggered this natural disaster.
January 15th, 2009 at 11:41 am
But…but…if we reduce carbon emissions enough, we can CHANGE weather patterns! It’s all clear to me now–we need to reduce our emissions of tolerance, equality, and free thinking to reduce terror-warming. What a fool I’ve been….
January 15th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
It’s sad to see the British Foreign Secretary reduced to reciting such gibberish. No one has ever mistaken what was meant by the “Global War on Terror.” It’s a war that began before 9/11 but unfortunately was not recognized as a war by either Bush or Clinton offcials until 9/11. How different the past seven years would have been and how many people would still be alive if that recognition had occurred before the attacks?
Now, comfortable as we have become since 9/11 precisely because we have waged an aggressive “war” against al Qaeda, their various franchises and support groups, including conspicously the Taliban, some of us are retrospectively renouncing the very warfare that brought us security. This is not about Iraq, which accurately can be viewed as a distraction from the agreed-upon war objectives of September 2001.
What pray was the September 2001 Congressional resolution authorizing this warfare about if not a war? When we and the UK and NATO have more than 60,000 troops still fighting in Afghanistan — and dying under fire — how can it not be a “war?”
To be sure, the war has many facets: some are purely defensive and precautionary, like airline security; some are law enforcement driven and entail arresting and trying people; some are intelligence driven and entail all manner of covert skullduggery; and some facets are military and entail lots of troops engaging in conventional military operations.
This whole business about “re-styling” the war as something other than a war is, at best, foolishness. At worst, it’s a worrisome sign of emerging war fatigue. If you’re getting tired of the war, you ought to realize that the enemy — and there is a real enemy — may be quiescent for the moment, driven underground, but remains very much in business. If that were not the case, there would be no basis for President Obama to ask 30,000 more US troops to go into harm’s way in Afghanistan.
One certain way to rev up the toxic partisan quarreling of recent years is to forget that this war was launched by Democrats and Republicans in virtual unanimity. The effort to gloss over that is, IMHO, a war fro Democrats to blame Bush and the GOP for everything that went wrong or not quite right withe prosecution of the war. This may be good polituics for them but those of us who fancy ourselves less brutally partisan ought to be clear-eyed about it.
President Obama is about to take over the direction of the war. He will make some changes in it. But it will continue, likely for a very long time.
January 15th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Sorry about the terrible mistakes in that second to last paragraph, which should read:
The effort to gloss over that is, IMHO, an attempt by Democrats to blame Bush and the GOP for everything that went wrong or not quite right with the prosecution of the war. This may be good politics for them but those of us who fancy ourselves less than brutally partisan ought to be more clear-eyed about it.
January 15th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Mr. Milliband needs to listen to his own reteric and see the double talk:
Miliband said in a speech in Mumbai, India, that the phrase joined nations against a common enemy rather than together with common ideals.
What the hell does that mean. Did it “join nations …common enemy or together common enemy. What an idiot and he got the presses interests. I guess he says things that peoples itching ears want to hear!
The islamic ideology isn’t here to protect peoples rights ..it is here to take them away. Get with the program and quit trying to be so politically correct. The ideology is the enemy and those that embrace it are our enemy. The best we can do is work with the moderates to try to stop terror by Going to “War on Terror”!
If the new president does the right thing he won’t be popular and I am afraid he is going to choose popularity and “sell out” this country which by the way isn’t even his country!