G.A.Geyer: How to turn opponents into terrorists

[question everything]

GEORGIE ANNE GEYER


September 13, 2004

(snip)

But there was another important element that distanced one from critical thought: The terrorists, the Bush war party repeated ad nauseum, hate us not for anything we have done, but because of all the liberty-loving, truth-trumpeting things we are. These rationales have led the Manicheans and Hobbesians among the Bushies to attack John Kerry as (in terms I've heard recently among them) "Senator Complexity" and "Senor Sensitive" and "Mr. Morose." When you recover from such cleverness, you find that these attacks on the Massachusetts senator are being deliberately orchestrated because he strives to see terrorism and terrorists as the complicated, contradictory phenomena they really are.

"First, it must be understood that terrorism is a method and not an ideology," Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke write in "America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order," their splendid new book giving a rich background on these areas of thought. "Terrorism neither occurs in a vacuum, nor is it generally the product of outside agitation or imported ideologies ... Placed in a political context, there can be no military conclusion to a counterterrorist campaign. Even former terrorists agree that the only way to fight terrorism is to address the problems that have motivated their actions."

Or, to cite another recent book, "Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror," by a famously "anonymous" prominent CIA analyst: The Muslim world sees Osama bin Laden not as the terrorist of the West's perverted perception, but as a holy defender of the Koran, a "bandit hero challenging authority and eluding capture" and part of the "continuum of Islamic history."

(snip)

Of course, understanding their thinking does not mean forgiving what they have done; nor does it mean succumbing passively to their very real violence. It does mean – as John Kerry is trying to tell us – that we must understand the wellsprings of their actions, that we must differentiate those insurgents or militants who can be saved by changes in policy, and that we must above all not drive those insurgents into the arms of religious fanatics.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what we are doing.

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