A Thinking Reed

Some thoughts on terrorism

Written by

Lee M.

in

For some time now the loudest voices in the debate over how best to respond to the threat of terrorism have tended to be on the extremes. On the one hand, the Bush administration and most conservatives have taken the general line that the terrorists are simply evil nihilists who have no discernible political goals. On the other hand, the far left tends to see terrorism as an understandable (if not justified) response by the poor and downtrodden to injustices perpetrated by the U.S. in the Middle East and elsewhere.

I personally don’t completely buy either of these arguments, though I think there are elements of truth in both.

I believe that President Bush’s view that terrorists are merely evil people who hate freedom is overly simplistic, but so is, I suspect, the view that the terrorists are simply desperate people responding to American malevolence. While that is no doubt true in part, it downplays the role that Islamism as an ideology plays in all this (not to mention good old-fashioned original sin!).

Al-Qaeda and their ilk aren’t simply “anti-colonialists in a hurry” or some such. They have a (deeply repellent) vision of what they want their societies to be which is twisted and mixed-up with a kind of Arab nationalism all coupled with some legitimate greviances. For instance, they don’t just want an end to injustices against Palestinians, they want the Middle East cleansed of “Jews and Crusaders.” The fact that many of the actual terrorists have not, in fact, been desperately poor people but rather educated and relatively affluent is telling, I think. (For more on the roots of Islamism I would recommend the book Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman. Berman thinks that Islamism is actually an Islamic mutation of European fascism.)

That said, I still think the best approach is patient law enforcement work to ferret out and disable terrorist cells, combined with military strikes only when necessary (for instance, I would judge Afghanistan to have been a justifiable war, but not Iraq) and a reduction of our presence in the Middle East, where we have, in fact, been guilty of wrong doing.

Comments

2 responses to “Some thoughts on terrorism”

  1. jack perry

    Reading your comment and the interview: my only disagreement is that sponsoring terrorism ought to be considered an act of war using proxy combatants; thus states that sponsor terrorism make themselves legitimate targets of open military action. Although I did not support the invasion based on the Bush administration’s expressed rationale, I thought Iraq could be a legitimate target due to Hussein’s sponsoring terrorism (bounties for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, for example). My understanding is that a post-war Senate intelligence committee report went a long ways towards documenting this. The administration didn’t really try to make that case; indeed they seemed to conflate the general terrorism sponsored by Hussein with that of 9-11.

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  2. Lee

    I guess I have two thoughts on that – first, I’m not sure that sponsoring suicide bombings against Israel constitutes a casus belli for us. Secondly, I’m not sure that giving money to the families of suicide bombers rises to the same kind of state support for terrorism as, say, that provided by the Taliban to al-Qaeda, something which I think clearly justified the US in going after the Taliban.

    The reason I wasn’t in favor of going to war in Iraq was always that I didn’t think the threat grave enough to justify the costs – both in terms of casualties during the war (both ours and Iraqi civilians) and fears of getting bogged down in a long-term “nation building” project after the fact. Though of course I think Saddam’s regime richly deserved to be sent to the ash heap of history!

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