by Flemming Funch
Excellent article about the "war" on terrorism from Harlan Cleveland. Harlan is an experienced statesman, and I've heard him speak at the World Future Society's conferences. He thinks clearly about things."Terrorism is not a doctrine, like President Harry Truman’s declaration that the United States would protect Greece and Turkey from Soviet takeover. It’s not a purpose, like the postwar recovery of Western Europe assisted by the four-year Marshall Plan. It’s not a deadly disease like AIDS or a chronic condition like poverty, on which metaphorical wars have been declared.
No, terrorism is a tool—“a tool, not an actor,” as Chester A. Crocker, a former US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, puts it in a perceptive analysis of “failing states” in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.
It’s a tool often used in history. Terrorism is usually violent action, often aimed at a few of the innocent in order to terrify much larger populations. The violence has traditionally been directed, by the weaker and less organized, against the stronger and more “established.” It has often been aimed by people who got there first, against other people who came later to muscle the early-arrivers aside: colonial subjects against imperial powers, people of color against dominant whites." And he goes on to explain very well the self-contradictions inherent in trying to have a war against something like that. And what should be done instead.
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