Win the WHAT??
Now this is so silly as to be funny, if it wasn't so sad. Suddenly there's this discussion about whether or not the so-called "War on Terror" can be won. As long as it is couched in those terms, this is a stupid and specious issue. Simply put, you cannot fight, let alone win, a war on terror. In a war, you fight enemies. Terror is not an enemy, it is a methodology. Specifically, it is one of the two possible manifestations of asymmetrical warfare. The other is Guerilla warfare. Not only can you not fight a methodology, there is no way for the concept of defeating a methodology to be valid. This would be as if, in 1940, the English and the French declared a "War on Blitzkrieg" or in 1941 the US declared a "War on Air Strikes". Obviously, a methodology, once developed, will be available to any person or group forever. If we want to talk about winning the war that started on September Eleventh, 2001, we have to redefine who it is we're fighting. We are not fighting Terror, or even "The Terrorists". It could be fairly argued that when our tanks rolled into Baghdad, flattening shops and apartments, killing thousands of civilians, we were terrorists that day. And those subhuman idiot animals at Abu Ghraib? Definitely terrorists. So it is clear we have to do a better job of defining just exactly who it is we are fighting. Al Quaida, obviously, and beyond that the extreme fundamentalist branch of Islam that will attempt to harm us. But armed with nothing more than a dictionary, one can tell immediately that not only can a "War on Terror" not be won, it cannot even be effectively prosecuted.
posted by mikey @ 2:29 PM
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