A Note on "Terrorism"
From Chet Richards of D-N-I.net and his new book’s introduction, (which looks like it will be a good read as well.)
I will use the word “terrorism,” faute de mieux. As far as I know, there are no true terrorist groups operating in the world today. These would be organizations in the business of killing civilians, presumably for fun or profit. All so-called terrorist groups have other aims, ranging from crime to national, ethnic, or religious liberation. They all kill people from time to time, but they use the violence to serve their primary purposes. Lumping them all together as “terrorists” is a form of mental laziness, and failure to think clearly about their various purposes will not serve us well. All uniformed military forces, for example, kill civilians, and most wars kill more civilians than military, either accidentally or through famine and disease. Sometimes, though, it is deliberate. The Nazi atrocities to control partisans and guerrillas, and our own bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were attempts to exert influence by killing civilians. Yet we generally do not refer to members of state military organizations as “terrorists.”
I don’t agree with everything he says here. Killing civilians to exert influence is terrorism when committed by non-state forces and therefore its not inaccurate to declare some folks terrorists.
State militaries killing civilians for the same reason generally fall under the term war crimes, though some have used the term “state terrorism”. As Robert McNamara said in The Fog of War, regarding the strategic bombing of Japanese cities:
LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
But saying that your opponents are terrorists is a form of laziness, one normally used as an excuse not to address the reasons underlying the terrorist’s actions. After all, “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” is a refrain almost every government uses.
All that usually means is that they’ll rationalize some sort of reclassification for the “terrorists” once they’re willing to talk, whether it be the African National Congress, Sinn Fein/IRA, or the “tribal insurgents” the US is now arming to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq. After all, the Sunni Arabs the US is arming and funding were terrorists themselves right up to the point the US decided they needed their help.
Richards is correct in that there really isn’t a better term to use, though, and that’s quite unfortunate, because people generally shout “terrorism!” to avoid rational debate over how to deal with groups they oppose.
