Coming
Soon!
From Common Courage Press
Recent
Stories
June
27, 2003
Jason
Leopold
CIA: Seven Months Prior to 9/11 Iraq
Posed No Threat to US
David
Lindorff
The Catch and Release of "Comical
Ali"
Ray McGovern
Cheney, Forgery and the CIA
June
26, 2003
Sen.
Robert Byrd
The Road of Cover-Up is a Road to Ruin
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Instructed the CIA to Investigate
Hans Blix
Paul
de Rooij
Ambient Death in Palestine
Chris Floyd
Mass Graves and Burned Meat in Bush's New Iraq
Elaine
Cassel
Wolfowitz as Lord High Executioner
CounterPunch
Wire
Musicians Unite Against Sweatshops
Sheldon
Hull
Squatting in Mansions
Ben Tripp
A Guide to Hating Almost Anyone
Uri
Avnery
The Best Show in Town
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
Ordinary Vistas:
The Photographs of Kurt Nimmo
June
25, 2003
Bruce
Jackson
Buffalo Cops Wage War on Pedal Pushers
Mickey
Z.
The New Dark Ages
David Lindorff
Indonesia's War on Journalists
Dan
Bacher
Butterflies and Farmworkers Confront USDA and Riot Cops
Adam Federman
"Success is Not the Issue Here"
Elaine
Cassel
"Ain't No Justice": Fed Judge Quits, Assails Sentencing
Guidelines
Bill Kauffman
My America vs. the Empire
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
of the Day
You Are Being Watched:
Elevator Moods
June
24, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Supreme Indemnity
Holocaust Denial at the High Court
Roya
Monajem
A Message from Tehran: Is It Worth
It to Risk One's Life?
John
Chuckman
The Real Clash of Civilizations
David Lindorff
WMD Damage Control at the Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/24
June
23, 2003
Marc
Pritzke
Washington Lied: an Interview with
Ray McGovern
Conn
Hallinan
The Consistency of Sharon
Wayne Madsen
Commercials, Disney & Amistad
Edward
Said
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/23
June
21 / 22, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
June 20, 2003
Walter
Brasch
Down on Our Knees
Robert
Meeropol
The Son of the Rosenbergs on His Parents Death and Bush's America
Russell
Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Grannies and Baby Bells
Norman
Madarasz
Pierre Bourgault: the Life of a
Quebec Radical
Gary
Leupp
Bush on "Revisionist Historians"
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies
Marathon: the Finale
Hot Stories
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
June
28, 2003
Warfare, Stuff Happening
& Terrorism
A Guide to the
Mysterious West
By
MICHAEL NEUMANN
Nothing is so robustly American as the condemnation
of terrorism. Here is something that Chomsky
and Donald Rumsfeld can agree on:
"I understand the term "terrorism"
exactly in the sense defined in official US documents: "the
calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals
that are political, religious, or ideological in nature. This
is done through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear."
"In accord with this -- entirely
appropriate -- definition, the recent attack on the US is certainly
an act of terrorism, in fact, a horrifying terrorist crime. There
is scarcely any disagreement about this throughout the world,
nor should there be."
There is something oddly insular about
this last remark. (The 9-11 reference seems inessential; elsewhere
Chomsky portrays terrorism in general as the object of world
condemnation. 1 ) Outside America, excoriating terrorism is,
like polo, a sport for the well-heeled. True, there are few public
defenders of terrorism; the tendency is rather to excuse it as
a desperate descent into madness, a political crime of passion.
But if you go down a few income brackets, to the inhabitants
of refugee camps and shantytowns, terrorism is often celebrated
without reserve or qualification. Millions more, not quite so
destitute, share their sympathies. Don't these people count?
Aren't their views to be tabulated in the assessment of agreement
or disagreement 'throughout the world'?
The question is not rhetorical and the
answer is, as far as both Chomsky and Rumsfeld are concerned,
no. For them, it seems, the best you can say of such people is
that they are addled, perhaps by hardship, perhaps by strange
ideologies or religious fanaticism. This diagnosis, which imputes
mysterious or repugnant mentalities to others, is itself at least
as mysterious. As propaganda it makes perfect sense, but its
implicit moral claims make none at all.
Terrorism is entirely compatible with
Western morality. It is brutal, but we are quite accustomed to
brutality, quite at home with it. And this is not the false 'we'
of a sermon designed to inspire shame and contrition. It is a
genuine 'we' that joins nearly all of us, the world over, in
a moral consensus. It  excludes only a very few determinedly,
unapologetically impractical, stubbornly high-minded people who
reject all warfare and political violence--even, say, resistance
to Hitler, or an uprising in a concentration camp.
To see this requires no realization of
anything, no further or deeper understanding, no willingness
to adopt unconventional moral thinking. It requires nothing more
than acknowledgement of what our conventional moral thinking
is. The path to acknowledging how morally comfortable
we are with terrorism might as well begin with a more serious
definition of the term.
Defining "Terrorism"
The definition borrowed by Chomsky--as
he undoubtedly knows--is nonsense. It implies that uncalculated
use of violence against civilians--the spur-of-the-moment, unorganized
torching of randomly selected immigrant houses, for instance--is
not terrorism. It implies that threatening intervention in East
Timor or Rwanda would have been terrorist. It implies that those
who flagellate themselves in a religious procession are terrorists,
as are those who threaten sinners with hellfire. It implies that
the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and invasion of Normandy were terrorist
campaigns. It implies that virtually any attack against terrorists
is also terrorism. (The same can be said of threatening any such
attacks.) And it also implies that the Buddhist monks who set
themselves ablaze to protest the Vietnam war were terrorists.
Terrorism is not any old violence or
threat of violence, for any old political purpose. This is clear
if we go back to a time before the word had become quite such
a battleground. When, in 1957, the Algerian rebels set off bombs
in at bus stops, in cafés, in a casino, and in a stadium,
hardly anyone denied that this was terrorism. Nor did anyone,
except perhaps some French colonialists, deny it when the OAS
set off bombs in Algerian shops, or rolled a gasoline truck down
on an Arab quarter. Airline hijackings were considered terrorism
by virtually everyone except some of their perpetrators.
'Terrorism', when polemics are set aside,
normally involves attacks against civilians. The attacks are,
if not utterly random, in some sense arbitrary. The particular
victims may be carefully selected; years may go into the planning.
But the victims were selected because they were representative
members of some large group, not because of their individual
traits or positions in society. Anyone in the café or
stadium, and in many other cafés or stadiums, would have
made just as suitable a target. In fact the point of the exercise
was to transmit just this message: it doesn't matter who you
are or where you are, as long as you belong to the relevant population.
In some cases, that population may include everyone in a country,
because the idea is not so much to attack a particular group
as to show that one is incapable of protecting its citizens.
(Even several populations of several countries may be the target.)
But some element of randomness used to be thought central to
the tactic. If a particular individual was targeted, a police
informer or government minister, that was assassination, not
terrorism. And you could not commit terrorism against soldiers,
unless perhaps their army was entirely uninvolved in operations
against you.
Some attacks on civilians strain against
this definition, because they don't seem random enough. What
if there is an attack on dormitories for defense industry workers,
or housing on an army base? How about the attack on the USS Cole,
where it is a stretch to suppose that the victims were in some
way fighting a war against their attackers? But a definition
is not to be discarded simply because there are problem cases:
we wouldn't discard a definition of "car" because it
didn't tell us enough about Ford Rancheros or three-wheeled vehicles
like the old Isetta or Messerschmitt. Terrorism, at its core,
seems to involve 'random' attacks against civilians, for any
purpose, even apolitical. If the aim is to take the heat off
the coke business, or scare people away from competitors' products,
does that mean we're not dealing with terrorism?
One of the few mistakes Chomsky's definition
doesn't make is insisting that the goal of terrorism is to instill
terror. What the word tempts us to think would be obvious is
instead false. Suppose you plan a random attack on civilians
who don't scare easily, who will respond instead with righteous
indignation. You might not intend to terrorize the population;
maybe you simply want them to make rational calculations about
the success of their government's policies. You would still be
a terrorist. Terrorism does not presuppose any political or psychological
objectives, much less particular ones.
"Terrorism", on this account,
can be defined as random violence against non-combatants. "Non-combatants"
need not be civilians, but must designate those not involved
in hostilities against the attackers: workers in defense industries
are one of many borderline cases. "Random" means only
that the victims are selected, not because of their importance
as individuals, but because they are representative of some larger
population.
The old-fashioned definition works quite
well. It covers most airline hijackings, the bombings in Israel,
Chechnya, Bali, and elsewhere, the campaigns of the Mau Mau,
the Algerian revolution, and the contemporary revolt in that
same country. No doubt some ideologues may for various reasons
want to stretch the term, but it will be quite enough to show
that in its old-fashioned sense, it designates practices that
fall well within the scope of our morality.
State terrorism
States certainly can commit terrorist
acts. They can do so, not only by police and paramilitary repression,
but also in wartime. If airstrikes are called down on randomly
selected schools, housing projects, or hospitals, that's terrorism.
State terrorism was once a standard element
in warfare. Gradually, and for a while, it became a bit less
acceptable. From roughly the end of the 17th century, when it
became bad form to take cities and slaughter the civilian population,
on through the end of the First World War, it was by no means
inevitable that war involved the indiscriminate murder of civilians.
As H.G.Wells predicted in The War in the Air (1908), this would
change, and really it was the Nazis who changed it. The world
was shocked when, in 1937, Nazi aircraft dropped 100,000 pounds
of bombs on the Spanish town of Guernica, killing 1,500 people,
about a third of the population. This is sometimes considered
the defining moment of modern state terrorism. But in the course
of the Second World War, allied governments and their populations
alike decided that these tactics were really quite a good idea:
hence the saturation bombings of Germany and, of course, their
incendiary and nuclear equivalents in Japan. And so it came to
pass that the burning children alive was once again reinstated
into warfare.
Do we still consider state terrorism
acceptable? It's not clear. Many people disapprove of the saturation
bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo, and of the use of atomic
weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But, in the first place,
much of this disapproval depends on the belief--as far as I know,
correct--that the bombing campaigns were based on mistaken assumptions
about the effectiveness of such actions or their alternatives.
What then if the assumptions had been correct? what if the bombings
were essential to ending the war without even greater loss of
life? In the second place, if virtually no one has advocated
state terrorism regarding any post-World-War-II situation, it
may be because never, since then, have Western powers been seriously
threatened. (The Chinese may have been a formidable opponent
in the Korean War, but no one saw them as a threat to the American
mainland.) So it is not at all clear that we do reject, in principle,
state terrorism, and with it the deliberate targeting of civilians
for political ends.
On the other hand, leftist accusations
of 'state terrorism' often stretch the expression far too much.
If, as I suspect, Israeli raids on Palestinian cities and camps
disguise deliberate but arbitrary killing of civilians as "collateral
damage", that too is terrorism. But no amount of genuinely
collateral damage indicates terrorism, nor does destroying civilian
infrastructure in order to cripple an enemy's military capacity,
nor is it terrorist simply to wage unjustified war. Though the
US may have engaged in terrorism during the Vietnam conflict,
it is not clear that it has done so since then. It is not clear
that it ever actually wants to cause civilian casualties, that
it intentionally targets civilians at random. Why should it?
The US sticks to easy military objectives. It hasn't fought without
crushing air superiority since at least the Second World War,
in other words, ever since air power mattered. It has no military
reason to kill civilians, and it probably doesn't want to. It
leaves that sport to the individual initiative of its lower ranks.
But let's suppose we are so moral that
we will always reject state terrorism, even if it proves the
only way to stop the triumph of some future Hitler. (Would that
be the moral choice?) Does that mean we are indeed in another
moral universe from those exotic folk who cheer terrorist attacks?
Not at all.
Warfare
Obsessing about terrorism creates a serious
moral imbalance. It obscures the plain fact that ordinary, legal
warfare typically produces horrors with which terrorism can rarely
if ever compete. The most respectable actions of the most respectable
nation may be utterly free of any terrorist taint. They may conform
to the laws of war, international law, and the Geneva convention.
They may show impeccable respect for the strictures of human
rights organizations, the resolutions of United Nations, and
the wishes of Lady Di. But conventional, squeaky-clean, NGO-approved,
UN-sanctioned, Geneva-Convention-friendly high explosive frequently
turns human beings into a bloody mist, or blows off half a face,
or empties its eye-sockets. And it is not just that this can
happen to innocents, including children. It is also that we know
this will happen to them. All of us know it when we support or
participate in a war.
These should be recognized as trivial
truths. Instead, it is beginning to seem as if any 'standard'
military action must be above reproach, as if the proverbial
old-school Wehrmacht officer who plays by the book, who hates
Hitler, hates "ziss shtinking varr", should bring tears
to our eyes. Presumably in less sentimental moments we realize
that the most scrupulous warfare is an atrocity when the cause
is unjust. But we still, sometimes in an agonized Wehrmacht-officer
way, congratulate people who kill and mutilate when we think
it's all in a good cause.
Though we should stop trying to convince
ourselves that we have gentler attitudes, we shouldn't change
them, either. It is indeed sometimes wrong to kill and mutilate,
but it is also sometimes right. It matters whose side you're
on, whether you're a Wehrmacht officer or his opposite number
in the allied forces. We may believe that there aren't many worse
things than inflicting the horrors of war on other human beings,
but certainly there are a few: letting Hitler win would have
been one of them. You can say that, in such situations, 'there
are no right actions', or 'this is a lesser evil, but still an
evil', or 'killing is never justifiable'. But the last one just
doesn't seem to be true. As for the first two, if we ought to
have fought Hitler, how is that--lesser evil and all--not right?
Common sense suggests that our morality, at least, approves of
such warfare.
So our conventional morality, even restricted
by the concerns expressed in international conventions, does
sanction horrible violence. Does it sanction violence against
civilians? Before answering this question, it might be worth
considering whether it should really loom as large as it does
today. Of course it suits those who possess powerful conventional
armed forces to suppose that killing other soldiers somehow can't
count. But this is a bit odd: if it is bad to kill a civilian,
can it be so much better to kill that same person once he is
conscripted to fight, perhaps in a hopeless cause against an
enemy he has virtually no chance of threatening, much less harming?
It's all very well to say that the guy's rulers are to blame
for his broken limbs and torn flesh, but blame is generous. The
people who actually inflicted the injuries could also be to blame.
Certainly it's hard to see much difference between an impotent
conscript soldier forced to fight a hopeless battle, and a civilian
human shield. We can say, with a shrug, that these people shouldn't
have been put in harm's way. Yet we knew they were, we knew they
had no choice, and we decided to inflict the harm. You would
think this would at least give us pause, even when the civilian
becomes a soldier.
But suppose soldiers are, for some reason
that has escaped me, fair game. What then about deliberately
targeting civilians, not as an act of state terrorism, but as
part of a 'strategic' bombing campaign with a military objective?
Most people would allow that war industries can be attacked,
even if they employ civilians. When the US bombed a 'germ warfare
factory' in Sudan, the objections centered on the claim--as far
as I know, correct--that it was no such thing, not that it would
be wrong to bomb a real germ warfare plant. And the strategic
bombings of German war industries are almost never considered
some sort of war crime. Since such industries almost always have
a civilian workforce, civilians must sometimes be considered
fair game as well.
Is this a side issue, a small matter?
It's not clear why--thousands of civilian lives could be lost,
and quite possibly the people working in these factories, the
people we think it ok to kill, are just trying to feed their
families. Many thousands more may die when military objectives
necessarily involve the destruction of a country's infrastructure.
But suppose these are trivialities. What then of the civilians,
including young children, we kill "by accident"? What
do we really think we're doing in these cases?
Stuff Happening
When we put our stamp of approval on
the mutilation of children, we place a great deal of weight on
good intentions. What matters isn't that children were mutilated;
what matters is that our hearts are in the right place. We aren't
bloodthirsty like the other guys. But you would think
that good intentions get us only so far. Past a certain point,
as the law itself affirms, you are responsible for being a dumbass,
for believing your own lies, for ignorance and negligence. This
is a responsibility that American neo-cons, for all their chirping
about "moral compass", take pains to evade. And leftists
are eager to help them, to look for evil motives with a desperation
that suggests, should such motives be lacking, everything is
ok.
To put it in official language, American
officials tirelessly explain collateral damage with statements
like this:
"It was inevitable there would be
regrettable civilian losses. Our forces made every effort to
minimize innocent casualties, often to the point of putting their
own lives at risk."
Doesn't a good effort, after all, make
all the difference? Americans and Israelis alike are baffled:
can't the "towel-heads" understand this?
They understand only too well. "Collateral"
means secondary or subordinate. Well, to what were the civilian
losses secondary or subordinate? Why, to the military ones. Does
that mean the losses accidental or unintended? No. If you go
to the supermarket and buy what turns out to be a package of
contaminated powdered milk for a food bank, that's an accident:
though the outcome may have been in some sense 'inevitable',
no one had any reason to suspect it. But everyone knows for certain
that in a war, some children will find their limbs are now bloody
stumps: it is not only 'inevitable', but expected. It may be
an accident that any particular child is maimed, but far
from purely accidental that children are maimed. At most
it is accidental in the sense that, if I use drift-nets, I catch
dolphins: I don't intend to catch dolphins, I don't intend to
catch any particular dolphin, but I know damn well that dolphins
will be caught.
Or, to give an example using humans:
suppose Joanne decides she wants to kill Jack by running him
over in her Lincoln Navigator. She knows he goes to a movie at
the Paramount every Friday night. She plans to drive into that
movie line at high speed. She will hit him and, as she knows
full well, some of the people standing behind and in front of
him. She also knows full well that, when she hits them, they
will be killed. She executes her plan. Well, guess what? She
is guilty of homicide, not only of Jack, but of anyone else she
kills. It's literally collateral damage, but it's not accidental.
Both morally and legally, it counts as deliberate.
Collateral damage fans will repeat that
their forces make all efforts to avoid civilian casualties. But
this claim distorts the real situation. Joanne may make all efforts
to avoid killing the other people in line, too, but she knows
damn well that she will kill them all the same. And this isn't
like a car manufacturer who knows that, despite his best efforts,
he will produce defective cars in which people will die. The
car manufacturer doesn't kill anyone. He doesn't even impose
a risk on anyone; he sells risky cars. The government and the
public, individually and collectively, decide how to manage this
risk. The victims of collateral damage have no such choice. A
much greater risk is forced on them. And someone is killing them,
knowingly killing them, because it would be a bit inconvenient
to do otherwise.
Reasons
You would think that, if we accept this
sort of brutality against civilians, it is only when we think
there is excellent reason to do so. Not at all. We're pretty
relaxed about standards for killing and mutilating civilians.
For one thing, we don't seem to require great certainty that
the acts in question really are necessary. Take for example the
great American meditation on the Vietnam war. It is conceded--not
universally, but widely--that the war was some sort of mistake,
involving too much fear of communist expansion, or too much faith
in various South Vietnamese saviors, or too much confidence in
air power, or misguided schemes to win hearts and minds. Few
people claim that these mistakes were unavoidable, that America
had no inkling its policy was headed for trouble. Yet most American
critics of the Vietnam war see it only as a 'tragic mistake'.
And for most of these critics, the tragedy was primarily the
loss of 50,000 American lives, not the loss of one to four million
Southeast Asian lives. There is no hue and cry to punish those
who made what--were we speaking of a plane crash or a tainted
food scandal--we would think of as criminal errors. Instead,
we hear that it's not easy to be a president, or a general, or
a state department analyst, or a commanding officer, or a marine.
Give the guys a break.
This attitude is not peculiar to the
Vietnam War. If you look at analyses of World War I, there is
almost a general consensus that it was the work of idiots. But
they're just idiots, and the whole era is often seen through
a pleasantly misty veil of indulgence for bygone naïveté.
(The returning soldiers were not so forgiving, but their indignation
doesn't come down through history.) In short, we don't really
feel that you simply must not make mistakes when it comes
to reasons for war. On the contrary, we are very charitable about
such mistakes. A few million innocent deaths? Life is full of
uncertainties...
It's not just that we countenance the
death and mutilation of innocent people on the basis of foolishly
mistaken factual beliefs. It's also that we don't require a very
serious reason for such actions. Opinions about the Korean war
illustrate this. We scarcely know the circumstances that led
up to it. We do know that it concerned, well, Korea, not an invasion
of California. Why did the US have to fight there? We're not
sure; according to MASH, there didn't seem to be much of a reason.
But that's good enough. The war may have been 'senseless' in
some vague way, and it's important that Our Troops had to endure
the mud and cold and 'Chinese human wave attacks'. But war is
war. A terrible thing, to be sure, but no crime, even when the
objective is nebulous. There may be strategic reasons not to
have nebulous objectives--this is an important post-Vietnam strategic
doctrine--but not moral reasons. When it comes to justifying
the mutilation of innocents, nebulous reasons will do.
Lest this account seem too cynical, compare
our wooly moralizing about war to the crystal clarity of our
moralizing about, say, raping an eight year old girl. Now that
provokes real anger, an outrage which brooks no blather about
mistakes or intentions, no shrugs about the vicissitudes of life.
It's something we take very seriously. Why the difference?
It's not that a sex crime is somehow
a matter of 'private morality'; a government which inflicted
child-rape would be hated beyond imagining. But we do lower our
standards when it comes to politics: because we expect countries
to act like vicious beasts, the mutilation of children in war
does matter less to us than a single mutilated child found in
an empty lot. And it's not simply that the brutalities of war
affect us less. It's also that we cannot help thinking they are
sometimes, under not very stringent restrictions, justified.
The other guy's atrocities horrify us, not our own.
Terrorism
In short, here's where we stand on mutilating
children:
1) If it's deliberate, part of a bombing
campaign to demoralize a civilian population, its morality is
perhaps somewhat questionable. We shouldn't do such things when
we're not fighting a really big war against an enemy who seems
to threaten our survival. But if we are, it might be ok.
2) If it's not deliberate, it's fine.
It's ok in any war we have any fairly good reason to fight given
possibly false but not too ill-founded beliefs about the world.
In such circumstances it's quite acceptable to take actions which
we know with moral certainty--certainty for all practical purposes--will
mutilate children.
In other words, the crucial point about
collateral damage is not that it mutilates children and is therefore
wrong; it's that it mutilates children and may at times be right.
There really isn't any question about this. Even if every war
the US has fought since 1945 was wrong, we can easily conceive
of wars that are right, or at least in which we were right to
participate. Most of us think that such wars have actually occurred.
And such wars involve just the sort of collateral damage we're
talking about.
This is why there can't be any serious
issue about justifying terrorism. Yes, it sometimes mutilates
children for political purposes. This is clearly wrong if done
in an obviously bad cause, or for very stupid reasons. But--I
am not in a position to change or judge almost universally accepted
moral principles--otherwise it can certainly be ok. That's why
we so often cause it to happen.
Why then, would any of us, even Chomsky,
feel entitled to find terrorism morally repugnant? Imagine trying
to make such a claim. You say: "To achieve my objectives,
I would certainly drop bombs with the knowledge that they would
blow the arms off some children. But to achieve those same objectives,
I would not plant or set off a bomb on the ground with
the knowledge that it would have that same effect. After all,
I have planes to do that, I don't need to plant bombs."
Ah, the mysterious West.
Like war and killing and playing soccer,
terrorism is sometimes justified, sometimes not. One would hope
that it would be justified only on the strongest of reasons,
but, if our attitudes to war are any guide, this isn't the case.
Pretty good reasons will do fine. Perhaps Bin Laden's reasons
for 9-11 were so very stupid that he committed a great crime.
Perhaps the terrorists who ravage Algeria today are so insanely,
profusely brutal that their evil is patent. But there are very
few other cases as clear-cut. What is absolutely clear, clear
beyond any shadow of a doubt, its that we all accept the mutilation
of children as a suitable means to certain political ends. No
self-induced, self-serving revulsion against terror will change
this.
The Palestinians have often said that,
given an army like Israel's, they would never engage in terror.
Perhaps they would be as scrupulous as we are, or ten times moreso.
One thing is certain: could the Palestinians trade terrorism
for conventional, legal, approved warfare, thousands more innocent
human beings would be reduced to bloody lumps of flesh. Why this
would be morally preferable is not entirely clear to me.
Michael Neumann
is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario,
Canada. Professor Neumann's views are not to be taken as those
of his university. His book What's
Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche has just
been republished by Broadview Press. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca.
Notes
(1) "Some [problems with anti-terrorist
strategies] came up in December 1987, at the peak of the first
war on terrorism, that's when the furor over the plague was peaking.
The United Nations General Assembly passed a very strong resolution
against terrorism, condemning the plague in the strongest terms,
calling on every state to fight against it in every possible
way. It passed unanimously."
-- " The
New War Against Terror" October 18, 2001,
Chomsky's strategy is to
proclaim the whole world agreed that terrorism is a plague,
and then to portray the United States as terrorist: "Everyone
condemns terrorism, but we have to ask what they mean. ...i [sic]
use the term in the literal sense, and hence condemn all terrorist
actions, not only those that are called "terrorist"
for propagandistic reasons."
Weekend
Edition Features
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|