Don't Let the Neocons Call It a 'War on Terror'

There's never been a global war on terror. It's a sham, a ruse. The conflict that's broken out between Israel and Hezbollah shows us, again, how important it is to articulate that. It's a real war, and it has both neocons and Islamic extremists praying that it will escalate into the global Clash of Civilizations that they've long lusted after.

Bush and Congress gave Israel the green light to pummel Lebanon for a while because "Israel is fighting a brave battle in a dangerous front in the War on Terror." And what can we, as Americans, really say about that? After all, we accepted the idea (some of us grudgingly) that there was a global "War on Terror" ourselves -- why shouldn't Lebanon be the next front?

When the media and our political class accepted the war frame, the hawks got a blank check. Everything that followed -- invasions, illegal surveillance and prisoners held in limbo, are all expected during times of war. Once we went to "war," resisting those policies became an uphill fight. War talk justifies powerful states responding to terrorist or insurgent attacks with disproportionate force. That makes the hawks feel macho and will likely create a whole new generation of potentially violent radicals who hate our guts.

We should have fought the "War on Terror" narrative from the beginning. Calling it a "war" is a numerical error, not an ideological difference. There are a few tens of thousands of potentially violent extremists dispersed around the world. They're not gathered in large groups, and you can't distinguish them from ordinary civilians. That makes it fundamentally an intelligence and law enforcement problem (which may require some military support).

But it goes further than that. There's no global war between East and West because there are no discrete sides. First of all, there's no 'Us.' The Western democracies agree that terrorism is a problem, but they are perfectly divided about how to address it. The United States and Israel stand alone in their "wars," the Russians have their "war" with the Chechens and the rest of the world does what simple logic dictates: investigate terror cells and arrest the participants. Sometimes security forces kill them. They've had quite a bit of success.

What's more, we don't really care about Islamic extremism per se. We are no more allied with the Russians in their war with Chechen separatists than we have been with the Chinese as they've cracked down on Islamic groups in Xinjiang. Where U.S. "interests" aren't involved, we're indifferent.

Much more important -- and so many Americans don't get this -- there's no "them." The image of a well-organized global Islamic insurgency is a fantasy. Al Qaeda was one of a dozen Islamic extremist groups that emerged in the 1990s, and Bin Laden was one of a few dozen influential and charismatic militant leaders. Individual groups were fighting separate, distinctly domestic battles; Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya opposed the Egyptian government, Hezbollah was formed to beat back the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, the Group Islamique Armé rose up to topple Algeria's government, and so on.

All of those conflicts had their own unique contexts and histories, and almost all of those movements had legitimate gripes with some rather unsavory governments. Most Americans couldn't tell you what the struggle between the Philippine government and Abu Sayyaf is all about, and why should they? That battle has little to do with us, as so many of them don't. Some of these "terror groups," remember, were called "freedom fighters" when they were pointed at the Soviets or their client states.

In that landscape, Al Qaeda was unique in one important way: Bin Laden, like his neocon counterparts, saw the world gripped in an existential struggle between East and West. He was jockeying for position with dozens of other movements, none of which were based on a broad, global effort against the United States and its allies. Bin Laden focused on US support for the Saudi government, for Israel, for Egypt's repressive regime (a government that imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands of political Islamists) and he preached that the United States was the head of the snake. First defeat America, and then all those individual, national and very particular battles could be won.