Pocket paradigms: Terrorism

If killing Bin Laden was so important, how come we didn't slash the budget of Homeland Security in its wake?

The war against terrorism is the political equivalent of a stock market bubble - hope, hubris and hyperbole parading as fact.

Three thousand people is, of course, too many to die for any reason. But it is also far too weak an argument for the end of democracy.

The media and politicians call what happened on 9/11 terrorism. This is a propagandistic rather than a descriptive term and replaces the more useful traditional phrases, guerrilla action or guerrilla warfare. The former places a mythical shroud around the event while the latter depicts its true nature. Guerrillas do not play by the rules of state organization or military tactics. The essence of guerrilla warfare is to attack at times and places unsuspected and return to places unknown. You can not invade the land of guerillas, you can not bomb them out of existence, you can not overwhelm them with your technological wonders. This was a lesson we were supposed to have learned in Vietnam but appear to have forgotten.

There is one way to deal with guerrilla warfare and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. The trick is to undermine the violence of the most bitter by dealing honestly with the complaints of the most rational.

The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption. Like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums to put ourselves inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to provide either security for our bodies nor solace for our souls, for we are simply attacking ourselves before others get a chance.

Soon after September 11,our leaders and much of our media drew the conclusion that our salvation lay in world dominance, in empire. Within just days we moved from tragic reality to delusional myth. Empires don't have their major military and economic icons damaged or destroyed by a handful of young men with box cutters. Empires don't turn suddenly phobic at everything foreign, everything sharp, every place crowded. Empires don't jettison their Constitution and turn on their own people out of blind fear.

The journalist Bernard Fall early in our Vietnam conflict noted that the French, after their failed battle at Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the same mistakes over and over. Our war against "terrorism" has been in many ways a domestic version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep making the same mistakes over and over because we can still afford to. Or think we can.