The fundamental flaw in the War on Terror
By 
Shan-ul-Hai •
August 1, 2008
It seems to me that the entire idea of a “war on terror” is fundamentally flawed. Typically, a war is waged between two specific entities; terror, on the other hand, is an entire concept. You can’t fight an ideal by sending guns and launching bombs. You can’t fight an ideal by killing civilians and occupying territory. You can only fight such an ideal by building schools and helping the public… but, unfortunately, that doesn’t give us instant results.
So far, we’ve been trying to beat “the terrorists” into submission. The problem is that “terrorists” is far too vague of a term. How do you find a terrorist camp? How do you distinguish a terrorist from an average civilian? You can fight a war against Al-Qaeda, you can fight a war against the Nazis, and you can fight a war against Slobodan Milosevic… but how can you fight a war against an abstraction?
Every time we kill an innocent person, that person’s family members are that much more likely to become “terrorists”. Even when we kill a not-so-innocent person, we still fuel the hatred that we’re trying so hard to ignore. In the months (or years) it takes for us to invade a country, our enemies manage to flee to a completely different place. Now if we go into the Pakistani tribal areas, we’ll just see another Iraq… we’ll find ourselves engaged in a bloody war with many civilian casualties and the extremists will escape in the time that it takes for us to clean up our own mess.
Then who will we bomb next? How far do we have to go before we realize that we’re following the same shoot-first-fix-later approach that led to the downfall of Rome and Britain?
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solid post - good points all. a point that stuck out more than any other:
“Every time we kill an innocent person, that person’s family members are that much more likely to become “terrorists”. ”
- very true. in addition to making us terrorists. in fact, noam chomsky made a great point (as he usually does) that the U.S. should be considered the world’s largest entity of terror if you look at the definition of terror as defined by the world court. a definition, i might add, that the U.S. doesn’t accept, on account of their own terrorist actions.
anyway - keep up the good work. you’ve got yourself a new reader