It is an error to confuse terrorism with war, despite the lethal means they share. According to General Schwartzcopf, war requires "killing people and breaking stuff." But that is where the similarity between war and terrorism ends.
Terrorism as Annette Baier describes it in Moral Prejudices is "violent demonstration." Thus terrorism entails a perverse but real mutual trust between the terrorist and the terrorized dominant culture. The terrorist must trust the dominant culture to report the terrorist's killing in their media and listen to the terrorist's demands. The terrorized people must trust the terrorists to stop their murdering once the terrorists' demands are taken seriously. The goal of the terrorist is to kill, to make the news, to make the dominant culture finally listen to them, so they can finally influence the policy of that dominant culture. "See, I'm not kidding," says the terrorist, “listen to me or I will keep on breaking stuff and killing people."
The goal of war on the other hand is very different. As Hobbes states in the Leviathan, "the virtues of war are force and fraud." So to trust one's enemy is a military blunder in war, where it is a requirement in terrorism. War, unlike terrorism, is the utter rejection of the enemy's policy-making language in favor of one's own. As Clausewitz understood in On War “…war is a form of social intercourse…. 'an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will." The goal of war is to replace the language of the defeated with the language of the victorious. In war the winner makes the policy, the loser suffers it. The will of the winner, in war, though always tenuous, is yet supreme.
Still, despite the different ends of war and terrorism, in Clausewitz's terms, both are "simply the expression of politics by other means." Which is to say, both war and terrorism occur in language. But they use language very differently, with very different goals. The successful terrorist interjects into the conversation; the successful warrior supersedes the conversation.
Again, one of the greatest differences between the speech of war and the speech of terrorism is that the speech of war requires no trust from one's enemy. In war, speech is solely for the sake of military gain. In terrorism, however, both the terrorist and the terrorized must speak within the same basic circle of discourse — to some degree the same cultural language. So, the goal of the terrorist is to get into the conversation, not to eliminate it. The ironic reason for this is the terrorist is always in some way at least a peripheral member of the terrorized group. "I'm not kidding Mom; I will break this lamp if you don't listen to me." So says the terrorist.
Article comments
1 - gonzo marx
interesting Thoughts here...worth a fresh read on the morrow...
i had always delineated a soldier as being one that sought strategic and military targets, while trying to keep collateral damage among ccivilian populations at a minimum...
whereas a terrorist shunned military targets in favor of striking civilians to promote fear and attempt blackmail
much to ponder...
Excelsior!
2 - Dave Nalle
So, if I read this right, you're basically suggesting a war of extermination against all moslems?
Dave
3 - BB
A nice essay on semantics doc... but.
"The enemy that today bombed London, is an organized group of cells of soldiers, in numerous nations, who together hope to crush Western culture.
This is indeed a Crusade, but it is a reverse Crusade; a war waged by Muslim intolerance against Western cosmopolitanism."
Talk about extremism and what an inflammatory statement! So you have proof of this?
If you are going to write stuff like this you had better back it up with the facts, not rhetoric.
Forget about the boogeyman. And BTW, eat your heart out Jason.
So let's raise the bar from fear to paranoia. The muslims are coming! The muslims are coming!
If we are to believe your hypotheses we might as well just nuke 'em all now and be done with it.
This post is a deplorable piece of pseudo-intellectual poopey-cock posing as a serious work.
It is clearly designed to exploit recent events and to promote the writers own bias and incite hatred and fear.
Appalling and shameful.
4 - theSliver
Somewhere along the lines I missed where you managed to show that the people that planned and implemented the bombings yesterday were soldiers pursuing a military objective and so supporting your argument that this is a war and not a classic terrorist conflict?
No one knows at the moment who did this but even if it was extremist Islamists there is absolutely no evidence that they're structured or organised in anything like a cadre or military system.
These are small knots of people that come together in various ways and are organised by others in no particular way, there isn't even a cell structure all that there appears to be is an agreed aim. To punish the West for existing in and exploiting (in all meanings of the word), those places they hold sacred.
Whatever the motives for publishing this piece they can hardly be realised, those that think Islam is the fault already think it, those that know it isn't won't be deflected and those that don't know either way won't be influenced because its so shrouded in folderol and ravings that it fails to convince.
5 - PseudoErsatz
So, if not reporting acts of terrorism would actually bring about the decline in terrorist attacks, could MSMs be indirectly responsible for the bombings?
6 - carmine
Davie,
The goal of war is not nor ever has been killing people or genocide. The goal of war is to overthrow one policy maker and create new policies with new policy makers. The means of war is where the horror is, killing and breaking. War waged badly creates larger numbers of civilian deaths. War waged well kills fewer but accomplishes the same goal. From the perspective of whether or not the radical Islamists are waging an effective war against us, the answer is Yes. They kill fewer and still are working assiduously and effectively to change Western Policy makers, see Spain.
7 - Big Time Patriot
"The goal of war is not nor ever has been killing people or genocide."
Interesting point. Then where do you put Hitler killing Jews in this argument. If it was not a goal of the war, what was it? An act of terrorism perhaps? Hitler terrorist, London Bombers soldiers, an interesting twist perhaps?
8 - Big Time Patriot
I think you are overlooking a couple crucial aspects of why protecting out country from terrorists is NOT what we normally consider a "war"(in the everyday sense of the word).
In a war, we generally have an enemy, generally another country or in the cases of civil wars a clearly identified segment (sometimes more than one at a time) of a country. Is the "War on Terror" a "War on Al Qaeda"? If so, lets label it correctly, we could WIN a war on Al Qaeda (although the present administration has not achieved that yet). If its not a war against Al Qaeda is it "A War on any Moslems who act or speak against American interests"? A little harder to sell as a slogan or as an achievable goal. I believe your definition is somewhere in between, but what EXACTLY do you think our war is? Surely our soldiers sent into harms way deserve some clearly expressed thinking on this issue.
Which brings me to a second point, a "winnable" war must have a goal that can be achieved. It may take a while (the hundreds year war is an example) but sometime the war WILL end. If you want to be able to claim to have "won" the war you SHOULD know going in what you are trying to achieve (see George Bush - Iraq quagmire for the dangers of repeatedly shifting your reasons for war).
If you have a vague goal of stopping any terrorist act ever happening again, you are starting a war which CANNOT BE WON. What kind of moron would start a war like that or even get suckered into a war started by someone else under such terms?
Here is the key underlying reason your argument seems to follow into hollow rhetoric. You say "Islamic fundamentalists" are at war with us.
What EXACTLY is your definition of an "Islamic Fundalmentalist". If you were writing a declaration of war against them, how would you define them so we can be sure we defeated THEM and not someone else who looked similar and was nearby?
Declaring war is easy, in this case declaring who EXACTLY the war is against is a bit tougher and thus our chances of ever "winning" this war become just so much vague rhetoric.
9 - Kory Johnson
Everyone knows that the "war on terrorism" is a fraud and, now, what are we going to do about. This legal genocide (war) must be put to an end!
10 - Kory Johnson
visit my blog-site on more "war on terrorism" fraud