Terrorism and the Language of War
Matthew Yglesias’ argument against responding to international terrorism in the manners and metaphors of war makes sense to me. He writes that in approaching terrorism within the framework of war, “you partake of way too much of the terrorists’ narrative about themselves.” He continues:
It’s their conceit, after all, that blowing up a bomb in a train station and killing a few hundred random commuters is an act of war. And war is a socially sanctioned form of activity, generally held to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people. What we want to say, however, is that this sporadic commuter-killing isn’t a kind of war, it’s an act of murder. To be sure, not an ordinary murder—a mass murder—but nonetheless murder. It’s true that if al-Qaeda were something like the “blowing up train stations” arm of a major country with which we were otherwise at war, it might make the most sense to think of al-Qaeda as fitting in with spies and saboteurs; criminal adjuncts to a warrior enterprise.
I suppose if we didn’t think of ourselves as at war with terrorists, then we might be less likely to go to war against countries under the banner of that war on terror. That would be a good thing. I suppose as well that this debate about language would be less of an issue if we didn’t generally hold war to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people. That would be a good thing too.
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I generally agree with Yglesias’s remarks about the language employed by the Bush administration, although I’m hestitant to say that we think of war as “a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people.”
Americans may think war is legally and morally acceptable, but we do not think the point of war is to kill people. Most Americans, I would argue (most politicians as well), would argue that the point of war is to save innocent people.
Probably so, which is why war is considered a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people: the stated objective is to save lives. I’m not sure Yglesias was arguing that the point of war is to kill people, but rather that killing people is accepted in the context of war.
I think the difficulty is that we are being presented with an either/or fallacy, summed up as follows:
“Either terrorists are criminals, or they are soldiers.”
There is a missing third category: they are terrorists.
The difficulty is that we have allowed instinctive understanding of the third category to lapse, and thereby limited ourselves to the binary view.
The category “terrorist” is to be understood as something beyond the pale (another notion modernity has largely erased from our vocabulary); such that, while a civilized society does not impose cruel and unusual punishment on a captured terrorist, that restraint is an expression of that society’s wish not to dirty its own hands rather than a belief that terrorism doesn’t warrant a far worse punishment than the most creatively evil sadist could ever devise. An understanding of beyond the pale at that level of intensity is called for.
A criminal wishes to violate the rights of individuals; he doesn’t wish to destroy the entire society in which he lives because he lives by leeching off it. Were it destitute and destroyed, he’d be little better off than anyone else.
The definition of the soldier is harder, but here the Geneva Conventions are instructive. A truly lawful combatant — what a soldier ought to be — has certain attributes:
- He fights in uniform
- He bears arms openly
- He refrains from attacking non-combatants
- In attacking his combatant enemies, he reduces, as much as is practical without sacrificing the objective of victory, the probability and intensity of collateral damage to non-combatants
- He reports to a structured chain-of-command
- That chain-of-command is topped by the legitimate, lawful government of a nation-state
- That government has enacted laws circumscribing the behavior of the soldier
- Those laws include prohibition of bad treatment of prisoners, with protections proportional to the lawfulness of the captured combatants
- That nation-state is signatory to the Conventions
The code of the soldier, only slightly further ennobled, becomes that of the chivalric knight.
Now a “terrorist” is diametrically opposed to the soldier by being something (in one sense) of the same type, but on the exact opposite end of the scale.
- He fights disguised as a non-combatant
- He bears arms secretly
- He intentionally attacks non-combatants and takes his position amongst non-combatants so that when his enemy attacks him, damage to non-combatants (even his own supporters) is maximized
- In attacking, he increases, as much as he can, the probability and intensity of collateral damage to non-combatants
- He reports to no structured chain-of-commmand and has no government per se except perhaps as a funding source
- When he captures prisoners, they may be combatants or innocent bystanders, and far from treating them with protections proportional either to their non-combatant status or the lawfulness of their behavior as combatants, he saws their heads off with a knife on video
Now certain kinds of pirates; e.g. the Barbary Pirates, at one time, occupied this same beyond-the-pale category, and might summarily be hanged at capture. They were placed in this category because, by preying on the engines of civilization itself (in the form of commercial vessels) and capturing crews to be sold into slavery, these pirates were less like criminals, leeching from a society they hoped would continue, and more like terrorists, conducting unlawful attacks in hopes that the society would crumble.
The terrorist is not, intrinsically, mere vermin, mere refuse in the shape of a human being. But his actions reduce him to exactly that: By them he voluntarily renounces his share in humanity and the rights accorded thereto. The common criminal renounces some of these rights (liberty, property) and usually temporarily. The terrorist renounces them utterly.
Again, the prohibition on mistreatment of the terrorist is not because his crimes don’t merit it; it is because we are above dirtying our hands that way.
A summary hanging is the most civilized balance, then, between what the terrorist deserves and what we should be willing to give, and our refusal to use it or something comparable, when it does not come from a practical desire for actionable intelligence in time of war, represents a regress of civilization: A visible expression that terrorism really isn’t that bad, isn’t worth expressing the ultimate social disapproval.
So let them be properly hanged without comment or histrionics, and buried with no fanfare thereafter. They don’t merit civilian court because they don’t rise to the level of common criminal (which is far less nasty than terrorist, but far less noble than soldier). They certainly don’t merit confinement in a place like Guantanamo, which is dressed up to be fit for lawful combatants, for captured soldiers, which they are not. But I suppose that can’t be avoided. Still, their ultimate status should not be that fit for either a soldier or a criminal; they are in a third category, and must be treated differently as a result.
Yglesias acknowledges, and I agree, that terrorism requires a response beyond traditional law enforcement and an either/or binary, though he doesn’t see war as the suitable means of response. I am of the opinion that while just wars are theoretically possible, meeting their criteria is a practical impossibility given some contemporary circumstances. I see more hope in trying to address the reasons that and conditions in which people become terrorists in the first place, although in this route we may be less powerful. My hope lies more in others. I have a follow-up post of sorts touching upon this hope.
Excelsior above doesn’t understand the practical effect upon whole populations of STATE TERRORISM in the 20th and 21st centuries. Most of his highly abstract categories above have been expunged and discredited by GOVERNMENTS which have created an atmosphere of terror, suspicion and enormous deprivation, in which whole populations have had to live under conditions of enormous deprivation, which have adversely traumatized their youth.
I know, I once lived in a country whose government practised relentless “state terrorism” conducted by the police and the armed forces against its Tamil minority. I’ve had the experience, as a Peace Corps Volunteer, of going to a police station in Sri Lanka to help spring a youth who’d been arrested and tortured because he’d forgotten his national identity card on a trip.
“Terrorist” is a relative term, whose meaning has changed over the course of many centuries. The Romans would have called the Zealot rebels against their authority in ancient Judea “terrorists”; the British definitely DID call the “minute men” who fought their troops from behind tree trunks “terrorists”; but almost NOBODY ever calls the “soldiers” of duly constituted government “terrorists” when they rape, murder and commit mayhem in “occupied territories.”