As Long as We Don’t Start Calling It a “Police Action”

In an interesting development, the British government has decided to stop using the term “War on Terror”:

Development Secretary Hilary Benn will risk the wrath of Tony Blair’s closest international ally by warning that US rhetoric has given terrorists a “shared identity”.

Mr Benn is to say openly that President George Bush’s phrase “War on Terror” strengthens small disaffected groups with widely differing aims by making them feel part of something “bigger”.

He will confirm that British ministers and civil servants have decided to stop using the term.

Speaking in New York, Mr Benn will also urge leaders such as President Bush to find common ground with potential enemies rather than relying on “hard” military power.

[snip]

“In the UK, we do not use the phrase ‘War on Terror’ because we can’t win by military means alone, and because this isn’t us against one organised enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives,” Mr Benn will tell a meeting organised by the Centre for International Co-operation.

“It is the vast majority of the people in the world – of all nationalities and faiths – against a small number of loose, shifting and disparate groups who have relatively little in common apart from their identification with others who share their distorted view of the world and their idea of being part of something bigger. And by letting them feel part of something bigger, we give them strength,” he will add.

[snip]

“It can certainly win the battle – but without soft power, we cannot win the war that will deliver better governance, sustainable peace and lasting prosperity. The fight for the kind of world that most people want can, in the end, only be won in a different battle – a battle of values and ideas.”

The new British approach obviously contrasts with the U.S. approach, which emphasizes the need to view the struggle against terrorism as a military issue instead of as a law-enforcement issue. Here, for example, is Dick Cheney in 2004:

For many years prior to 9/11, we treated terror attacks against Americans as isolated incidents, and answered – if at all – on an ad hoc basis, and never in a systematic way. Even after an attack inside our own country – the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, in New York – there was a tendency to treat terrorist incidents as individual criminal acts, to be handled primarily through law enforcement. The man who perpetrated that attack in New York was tracked down, arrested, convicted, and sent off to serve a 240-year sentence. Yet behind that one man was a growing network with operatives inside and outside the United States, waging war against our country.

For us, that war started on 9/11. For them, it started years before. After the World Trade Center attack in 1993 came the murders at the Saudi Arabia National Guard Training Center in Riyadh, in 1995; the simultaneous bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in 1998; the attack on the USS Cole, in 2000. In 1996, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad – the mastermind of 9/11 – first proposed to Osama bin Laden that they use hijacked airliners to attack targets in the U.S. During this period, thousands of terrorists were trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. And we have seen the work of terrorists in many attacks since 9/11 – in Riyadh, Casablanca, Istanbul, Mombasa, Bali, Jakarta, Najaf, Baghdad, and most recently, Madrid. Against this kind of determined, organized, ruthless enemy, America requires a new strategy – not merely to prosecute a series of crimes, but to fight and win a global campaign against the terror network.

It is possible, of course, that both sides are right — or neither. While generally agreeing with the idea that the struggle against terrorism should be conceived as a war, Ken Anderson has argued persuasively on this blog that an effective counterterrorism strategy requires a mix of law-enforcement tools, warfighting tools, and tools that fit neither paradigm.

Still, Benn’s point is well-taken that the U.S.’s overheated rhetoric of war obscures the importance of understanding terrorism and “fighting” it at the level of ideas. We can kill all the terrorists we want, but until we address the causes of terrorism, anti-Western anger will — however wrongly — simply continue to produce more.