How do you win a "War On Terror"?

At the end of WWII Britain faced a huge problem. They had an empire that they couldn't protect. "Terrorist" groups sprang up in Africa and Asia and things started to get ugly. Do you know what they did? They gave the countries involved their independence! It worked too!! Most of those nations are now democratic, fairly peaceful, prosperous and, most importantly, ALLIES of the British.

Campos: Bullish business of war

December 30, 2003

On Christmas day, a young woman whom I will call Susan Lopez Garcia was scheduled to fly from Philadelphia to Bogata, Colombia, accompanied by her husband, her sister and her parents. Eighteen months earlier, she had legally changed her name by adding her husband's last name to her birth name of Susan Lopez. Her ticket had been issued in her married name, which is also the name on her driver's license; however, her passport is still in her maiden name.

The airline refused to allow her to board the plane. According to the heightened security procedures the airline employs when the nation's terror alert has been raised to "orange," it will not allow someone to board an international flight when the passenger's passport is issued in a different name than the passenger's ticket, even when there is an obviously innocuous explanation for the discrepancy, as there was in this case.

This might all be written off by apologists for our current national hysteria about terrorism as the sort of bureaucratic snafu that is the price of eternal vigilance. Yet there is a curious twist in this little vignette about the high cost of freedom: the airline told Susan she could board the plane, as long as she (or rather, her father) agreed to fork over more than $1,000 for a one-way, walk-up ticket, which would be issued in the name on her passport.

How this proposed transaction would neutralize the security risk she supposedly posed remains a mystery. But it does drive home one of the reasons why the war on terrorism will not end in the foreseeable future: because it's in the interest of too many people that it continue indefinitely. Besides creating occasions for such lucrative procedures as that employed by the airline, the war on terrorism has created an immense bureaucracy that, like all bureaucracies, is dedicating a large part of its resources to justifying its continued existence.

What, for example, justifies a national threat level of "high" as opposed to "elevated," or "guarded" as opposed to "low?" What does it mean for Americans to be at high risk for terrorism? Does it mean that we're facing a risk comparable to that posed to us by automobile accidents? (The average American has about a one-in-240 chance of dying in a car accident). Is terrorism as big a threat to Americans as, say, cigarette smoking? (Smoking kills about 9,000 Americans every week.) Or is a "high" risk of terrorism comparable to the risk we face from mad cow disease, i.e., an almost completely imaginary risk, created by a combination of media hysteria and the international vegan conspiracy?

Our Department of Homeland Security doesn't have answers to such questions. It's only taking orders from our political leaders, who long ago discovered that few things are more conducive to pushing dubious policy objectives than declaring wars that can never end, because they are designed to last forever.

The irony of this is that for a generation now, American foreign policy has been haunted by the ghost of Vietnam - a war that America lost because neither the war's goals nor what would constitute achieving those goals was ever satisfactorily defined. Since then, our political elites have engaged in a series of metaphorical Vietnams against, among other things, poverty, crime, drugs and terrorism.

None of these wars can end, because none of them has been defined in a manner that makes either victory or, as Richard Nixon put it, "peace with honor," achievable. Yet that, as our more sophisticated warmongers no doubt recognize, is precisely the point.



Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at [email protected].

Frankly I think that while there have been other goals the main goal has been simply to "get" us.

Has it occurred to anyone here that rewarding terrorist activity might promote terrorism?

occam

Back at the beginning, you asked this rhetorical question...

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Has it occurred to anyone here that rewarding terrorist activity might promote terrorism?

Obviously, your answer to your own question is 'yes'. But there's a few assumptions in here which, though commonly tossed into the air by folks, aren't often much inspected.

Take the notion that one gets more of what one rewards (and less of what one punishes). This is a pretty blunt idea, considered common-sensical to many. It has an expression in psychology as stimulus-response theory, no longer much in favor, as it happens.

But, is it so? Is there clear empirical data you know of to back up the notion? One should think that if the mechanism is sure-fire, then there would be lots of good studies to support it.

And the Israel/Palestine example seems to suggest that such a simple formulation, even if supportable empirically, isn't nearly broad enough to account for all factors, for as you know, 'terrorism' there has remained pretty constant even under a regimen of tit for tat punishment. In that case, would negotiation be 'rewarding'? Would removal of any settlements be exactly the wrong thing to do, acting as a reward?

The concept that negotiation with an enemy is rewarding the enemy is purely false.

You are correct in assuming I am relying on common sense. After getting shocked by electricity a few times, I learned to have more respect for it. Your request for sure-fire evidence is unreasonable because as you point out below; all situations are different.

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You are correct in assuming I am relying on common sense. After getting shocked by electricity a few times, I learned to have more respect for it. Your request for sure-fire evidence is unreasonable because as you point out below; all situations are different.

'Common sense' tells us many things which are not true...the sun spins around the earth...blacks are inferior...women are clearly too fragile and hysterical to operate within the polity...time can't just have begun, there must have been a before...etc, a long long list. My request for evidence was entirely valid, as you were suggesting, rhetorically, that we might/ought to apply a principle or axiomatic truth to the issue, thus some evidence that such a principle or truth is actually valid is in order.

Another similar example of a proffered bit of 'common sense' frequently used as rationale for related policies is "Arabs only respect and understand force". Really? How was the truth of this claim established? Some large multi-disciplinary study which places the claim in a different status from, say, "Women have to be knocked around now and again"? And, if Arabs only respect force, it doesn't even seem worth mentioning unless other groups/cultures, such as Americans, are quite different, responding to other inputs such as reason and charity and good will.

As regards Israel/Palestine, you've skipped over the significant point, which is that your rhetorical suggestion looks to be false in this case. "Terrorism" has not been eradicated, or even reduced. Who is morally less excuseable is a different question (and yes, I'm quite aware of the voices inside Israel speaking against Likkud policies and ideas).

As regards N Korea, I too consider it one of the least happy places on earth and it's leader a dangerous madman. But I know doctors who will argue that the American tobacco industry has killed and maimed enough people to place it in a similar moral category.

You speak of 'sending the wrong message'. As almost everyone on this board who hails from outside the US will tell you (and many from inside), America can be surprisingly obtuse regarding not only what messages it is REALLY sending, and the responses likely, but also regarding what it assumes about itself such that it ought to be simply accepted as the proper source of 'messages'.

IronLionZion, what? Why? Oh never mind...

At the end of WWII Britain faced a huge problem. They had an empire that they couldn't protect. "Terrorist" groups sprang up in Africa and Asia and things started to get ugly. Do you know what they did? They gave the countries involved their independence! It worked too!! Most of those nations are now democratic, fairly peaceful, prosperous and, most importantly, ALLIES of the British.

When people gather in groups to fight against something there is usually a good reason. If you don't talk to them and find out what it is, or if you do, but discount what they have to say, you won't get very far. When you go out and declare "war" on these people you are taking a BIG backwards step.

What could the USA do about them that is not being done, preferably non-violent methods?