Terror war not winnable

By Atticus Morris
The Guardsman

The so-called war on terror is a fundamentally flawed endeavor, unwinnable by its very designation as a war.

Webster’s dictionary defines war as “a state or period of open or declared armed fighting between states or nations,” and also more vaguely as “a struggle between opposing forces.”

Whatever the precise definition of the word — and good luck finding one — terrorism is not a state, a nation or a force. Rather, it’s a strategy for raising awareness through the use of violence for a cause that might otherwise be ignored.

Acts of terror are publicity stunts. In this case, the opposing force is an ideologically radical interpretation of Islam looking for publicity. The U.S. is fighting a massive public relations campaign — one which has continuously crippled this country through a series of PR disasters from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to the plight of Palestine.

To win this campaign, the U.S. should challenge the validity of our opponent’s message, destroy the platform used for its transmission or both.

A lesson can be learned from the way the British have dealt with terror in Northern Ireland. By marginalizing events like the Feb. 22 Irish Republican Army car bombing of a courthouse as merely criminal, the state is able to seize control of the narrative and effectively dampen the overall impact of such attacks.

Limiting publicity strips much of the fear from these acts and diminishes at least some of their appeal to would-be terrorists. Reacting hysterically is like granting attention to a misbehaving child. Such a reaction only reinforces the behavior as a valid means of achieving what is sought.

For proof of this, look no further than Israel, which has been fighting a “war on terror” for decades. After many campaigns and much bloodshed in Lebanon and Gaza, it has lost any credible claim to moral high ground and failed to stop the terrorism. In fact, Israel suffered from a significant rise in the number of terror incidents this January, according to a Feb. 4 report released by the Israel Security Agency.

It really shouldn’t be difficult to understand the futility of using the threat of violence to intimidate those already willing to sacrifice their lives. U.S. attempts to stamp out Islamic ideological terrorism by blunt force are as effective as extinguishing a grease fire by dousing it with water.

Over the last eight years, the U.S. has invaded countries, scrapped parts of the Geneva Convention and granted its government unprecedented powers to spy on the populace in hopes of winning this war. But are we winning?

As with the war on drugs, conflating this kind of open-ended campaign with war in the traditional sense makes it impossible to set clear markers by which success can be evaluated.
Obama has sent tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan and yet Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber, easily boarded his flight on Christmas Day.

Similarly, our color-coded warning system, which apparently defaults to yellow, or significant risk, has yielded very little in the way of tangible results.

Technologically advanced though the U.S. may be, the leaders of this country haven’t yet figured out how to bomb an ideology. What we can and should be doing at every opportunity is utterly discrediting the ideology of radical Islam. By mischaracterizing the fundamental nature of this conflict, we assure that we cannot win it.