The Cusps of Warfare
I've been in a desultory sort of discussion at SW Anderson's blog (Oh!pinion) about how we, America, or even we, the targets of terrorists, should respond to terrorism. Tonight I worked out some of my frustrations at not seeing a path to a solution with any clarity by writing far more than I had intended in a comment. I'm not even going to try to say what I was writing about; I don't think SW will mind if I reproduce the text of my comment here. (For the rest of the discussion, follow the link above.)
One thing that someone has said about hate-crime and terrorism, which make them seem to have so much in common to me, is that retaliation against some one who has done wrong is transferred to some group who represents the evil doer, either actual or perceived.
There are many reasons for the transference. Perhaps the evil-does (real or perceived, mind you) is not actually identifiable. Perhaps the evil-doer is not immediately available. Perhaps one evil-doer has killed 2,000 people so more punishment is called for.
With country-to-country war, the transference is understood and its the army's that fight each other until one government capitulates to the demands of the other. This is actual warfare.
Then there's metaphorical warfare. The war on drugs, the war on poverty, and now the "war on terror". There is no enemy army that is identifiable, no country whose army one can attack, no government representing the terrorists who can be forced to capitulate, no terms of surrender that make any sense at all. How can you tell when you've won the "war on terror"?
And so some group, "terrorists", must now be identified as the enemy in a "war" that has no direction and no concrete goals or endpoint. A handful of "terrorists" destroyed the twin towers and killed over 2,000 people — some response was needed that was bigger than 7 suicide terrorists who were already dead anyway. So, we invaded Iraq which, by any stretch of the imagination, was quite an escalation over tit for tat, and eye for an eye.
Threatening to destroy a family whose son is a suicide bomber is just such a transference unless we know that the family inculcated hate into the mind of the bomber as SW suggests — then they might be culpable. Otherwise, it's just blaming the group for the individual.
Threatening to bomb one region of Pakistan after another until they find and give us bin Laden sounds rather like the Gestapo in occupied France killing one Frenchman a day until the town reveals the hidden Jew. After the war, when the winners and losers are known, such things become war crimes, not proportionate response.
The answers in this present case are not clear to me, so like a good liberal I fret over these paralyzing issues. What little I know from history seems to suggest that every time in the history of warfare when it became possible to kill larger chunks of people at one go it took some time for the combatants to settle on a rationale that made them feel comfortable doing it.
The history of World-War II had at least two such interesting cusps. The first was when it became all-out war instead of army-to-army war and the Allies fire bombed Dresden, as an example, or Germany bombed London. The rationale was that it was suitable to make a target of war production facilities and such, but everyone knew it was just an excuse. In fact it was an effort to terrorize the enemy populace, to break their will to fight.
Then there was discussion when the atom bomb became a reality and Roosevelt and Churchill were both adamant that it must be used. How to justify killing all those "innocent" people? Tit for tat: in the long run fewer people (allied soldiers and others) would die if we killed a few million in one go with the A-bomb and shocked the enemy (early "shock and awe") into capitulating. Ta da!
Now that we have global guerilla war with WMDs, it seems that another such cusp is upon us. Perhaps I'll just quite worrying, re-watch "Dr. Strangelove", and learn how to yell "Let's Nuke 'Em!", whomever they happen to be.