Josh Marshall Dissects Feith's rationale for "war on terror"

[Dover]

Re: Doug Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy recent OP ED piece in the Washington Post (see link below):

snip/...The grafs that follow the above are these ...

The term "war" meant that the enemy could not be thought of as a set of individuals who had perpetrated a particular crime. Nor was the enemy necessarily a single distinct organization. Rather, the enemy was understood to comprise all those who contributed to the terrorist threat to the United States, of which Sept. 11 was just the most serious instance to date. The enemy was thought of as the network of individuals, groups and states that committed or supported such acts of terrorism.
Going to war against terrorism meant going to war against this network. Obviously, those most directly responsible for Sept. 11 -- we soon understood them to be the al Qaeda group based in Afghanistan -- were primary targets. But that did not necessarily mean that attacking al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan had to be the first order of business. The timing and nature of U.S. military and other actions had to be designed to serve U.S. strategic purposes and to take into account what we could or could not expect to achieve militarily.

Here we have the heart of the fallacy, or rather an unknowing dissection of the fallacy by one of its authors. Finding particular points of interaction or cooperation between various hostile forces isn't necessary because everyone constituting a certain sort of threat is bundled together into 'the enemy'. And then once Feith has bundled them, the bundle is dubbed a 'network', thus stating as fact what Feith only sentences earlier thought unnecessary and, by implication, impossible to demonstrate with evidence.

Let's look more closely.

Feith states that we are at war not with individuals (which is certainly true) nor even an organization (which is largely true). Then he makes the key leap. We're not at war with any particular entity or organization, but rather all who pose a particular kind of threat -- which he calls terrorist, but given the context he provides might also be called asymmetric or unconventional.

However that may be, he groups all these possible actors together based on the nature of their threat, regardless of whether they include the same individuals or even members of the same organization. It's simply, if you pose a terrorist threat to the US then we're at war with you.

Then in the next sentence he takes all of these threats -- which he's just classed together notwithstanding whether or not they are collaborating with one another -- and calls them a 'network'. And then in the very next: "Going to war against terrorism meant going to war against this network."

In other words, all those who present a terrorist threat to the United States are by definition in league with each other. If not by definition, then somehow it is assumed to be true almost a priori, without a need for any actual evidence.......cont'd


(scroll down page for this review: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/



Feith's Washington Post OpEd:

A War Plan That Cast a Wide Net

By Douglas J. Feith
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46898-2004Aug6.html

[teryang]

1. Carte Blanche

We'll make war with whom, whenever and wherever we find it expedient to do so. Don't look for a coherent policy, plan or definition of goals, there isn't any. It's a process not a policy. It's the desperate strategy of meaningless belligerence promoted and pursued by a venal group of corporate conquistators bereft of legitimacy.

[NMDemDist2]

2. kicked and nominated n/t

[ixion]

3. the 'war on terror' is nothing more than the 'war on drugs', on steroids

in either case, it is a 'war' against an abstraction, which by definition of the word 'war' is an absurdity, and marks the maturation of a dangerous trend: that of using the word 'war' to mask the true intent of the action, which is to implement a police state and clear the path for US hegemony.

At the core, it's just that simple, IMO.

The 'war on drugs' was a test product, if you will. It was largely confined to this hemisphere, although not exclusively. However the scope was smaller, to be sure. It allowed them to perfect their propaganda techniques, as well as giving the mainstream populace a chance to get used to the idea of an abstract war that will exist for decades.

The WOD is 20 years old next year. For two decades this country has jailed hundreds of thousands of non-violent recreational drug users who were otherwise no more a threat to the US than any other 'law abiding' citizen. These are people who had jobs, had lives, paid their taxes and were overall good people at heart. And now their lives have been ruined by incarceration, which will never allow them to get a decent job again, never allow them to function normally is society again, because of the stigmatism attached to 'ex-con'.

This has been the primary result of the WOD: the ruining of hundreds of thousands of people's lives; as well as the reduction of civil liberties and the Bill of Rights. Drug use, has stayed about the same, as it has for thousands of years. People will always try to alter their reality in one fashion or another. It's hardwired into our nature.

The 'war on terror' is even scarier, because the word 'terror' is far more abstract a concept than the word 'drug'. A drug is a thing, at least. Terror is an emotion, nothing more. Terror is the nexus's of fight or flight. Terror is primordial, and far older than drugs. To say that the 'war on terror' is won is to say that not one person experiences the emotion of terror anymore, by strictest definition.

The 'war on terror' is nothing more than the final step toward implementing a corporate theocracy political infrastructure and a dominionist religious infrastructure, and nothing more, in my opinion.

[BlueEyedSon]

4. More like the war on Communism.

IMHO

[Dover]

5. War for Profit

HUGE profits for defense, security, energy, etc.

See the Woolsey article here in Editorials today.

[BlueEyedSon]

6. War has ALWAYS been for profit

but they had to find a substiture for the red menance after the fall of the USSR.

[Jack Rabbit]

7. JMM has this nailed

The neocons' case for war was fallacious at best and dishonest at worst.

My guess is dishonest. They made the decision to invade Iraq a long time ago and turned the September 11 attacks into a flimsy pretext for going forward. Mr. Marshall does a nice job of exposing the logic -- or rather, the logical fallacies -- behind their arguments.