What we don't know about terrorism

HIS BOOK Worse Than Watergate, former Nixon presidential de John Dean argues that the American people know little about terrorism and the U.S. war against it. Much of this, he contends, is because the Bush Administration does not want us to know. The Executive Branch's wish to keep information from the public may be the bulk of the problem, but we, as American citizens, have not been asking the questions, either. We need to.

Our failure to identify terrorists and to distinguish between what is terrorism and what is not strikes at the heart of matters dealing with the Abu Ghraib prison abuses. The Administration argues that "terrorists" are not subject to the strict controls of the Geneva Convention as they apply to "prisoners of war." In the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, the President has stated explicitly that the Geneva Convention applies to the war in Iraq (therefore, these are not terrorists that we are dealing with), and the war in Iraq is part of the war on terrorism (therefore, these are terrorists that we are dealing with). Which is it?

Bush and his cohorts have obscured the terminology and treated the initiated war against Iraq as simply an arm of the war on terrorists, despite their many post-Abu Ghraib disclaimers. Neither U.S. forces nor the American public have a clear idea of what it is that we are fighting against. There is no clear terminology, strategy, objective, or thinking.

Let us look for a moment at the terminology problems provoked by George W. Bush and their implications in developing strategy. There are three assertions being made about terrorists that have gone without response, despite their continual ambiguous and profligate use: terrorists are evil, hate freedom, and are uncivilized. What, exactly, is the President talking about? Do we care? We should; American soldiers and many more Iraqis are dying based on pursuit of people with these traits.

Let us take them in turn. How do we determine if someone is evil? If a terrorist is someone who is identifiably evil, we have to be able to recognize either evil itself or evil acts. Evil is a religious term. There is not a concrete characteristic of human being identified as evil, as we might have with, say, black hair. Somewhere in evil there is a devil, a supernatural being or force that motivates humans to counter some definition of what is good. If what we have against Al Qaeda is that they are evil, then this is a religious war.

Next question. What is freedom such that someone can hate it? It surely must have to do with the specific nature of freedom. How does freedom appear to Muslim radicals? lit appears primarily as an overturning of strongly held tenets of inculcated religious beliefs. No matter what those beliefs are, especially with regard to the treatment of women in Islam, the imposition of Western or American "freedom" on Islamists appears as a limitation, or elimination, not as being freer. The terrorists do not hate freedom. They hate--for whatever reason--the Western version of the political environment fostered in another culture. This argument, too, makes the war on terrorists a religious war.

Are these terrorists uncivilized people? To claim that terrorists are uncivilized makes several assumptions. The first is that there is a single spectrum to civilization. The second is that whatever the proper attributes of the civilized are, they are absent in the terrorists. A third is that the actions of terrorists are purely behavioral; that is, motivation is not a factor. The reasons for terrorist acts are not considered; only the animalistic state of the terrorist enters into the equation. For the terrorists to be "uncivilized" in these circumstances implies that we are sophisticates and the terrorists are a lower form of life, only reactive, without legitimate purpose. If nothing else, this is arrogant thinking, and it certainly does not identify terrorists.

Awash in these simplistic characterizations of the enemy, we have not publicly addressed the most critical of the practical questions about the war we are pursuing and paying for. What is our ultimate goal? Surely it cannot be to capture or kill all terrorists and potential terrorists! We naturally are caught up in the effort to head off the next attack. This means determining who the potential attackers are, where they are, and what their plots are. Then we have to foil those plots. Keep in mind, though, that these are plots in the thousands, ranging from suicide bombers with backpacks to a dirty bomb aboard one of Al Qaeda's reported 20 freighters. Plots can be coordinated but do not need to be. There can be a plot per terrorist. Are we intending to track them all? How?

What is the Department of Homeland Security expecting to deal with? Is our strategy to stop the individual terrorists or to defend all the facilities? If we capture them, where will they be kept? Bring them all to the U.S.? Guantanamo? How will we handle them legally, especially given our experiences with Abu Ghraib?