Yesterday I saw a talking head on television waxing indignant over Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York. One of the things he was angry about was the fact this man, a terrorist, engaged in killing American soldiers, was able to come over here and say his bit.
We have to be careful not to let the passions of war run away with careful definitions. Admadinejad waging war on our soldiers is not terrorism. That is what enemy combatants do, they fight. To blow up an American armored vehicle is not terrorism. To shoot down an American heliocopter is not terrorism. It is war.
Now Admadinejad is a terrorist — say a bunch of Iraqi civilians at a bus stop are blown up, civilians deliberately targeted in order to demoralize the opposition — that is terrorism. If that is why he is being called a terrorist, then that is accurate, and be my guest. But this fellow on television was calling him a terrorist, it appeared, for no other reason than that he was fighting us.
But the problem with defining terrorism carefully this way is that it sometimes includes people we don’t want included. When Lincoln let Sherman conduct his infamous march to the sea, what was that? When the Allies firebombed Dresden in the Second World War, what was that? According to Paul Johnson, in his magnificent book Modern Times, the bombing of Dresden was pointless carnage. Unless the point was to wage war directly on civilians in order to demoralize all of Germany — but that makes it terrorism.
Terrorism is a particular tactic (and a reprehensible one), and this means that it is not being used all the time, whenever there is armed conflict. There are times when it is used and times when it is not used. We should not allow word terrorists to become, as the bumper sticker I saw puts it, what the big army calls the little army. As it shakes out, terrorism is a tactic that little armies frequently use, on a geo-political scale, and large armies sometimes use, on a tactical field scale.
But in order for terrorism to work effectively as a tactic, it has to be public. It has to be avowed and embraced by the groups using it. One group can be as murderous as another group, but if it does not, in the famous terrorist phrase, “claim responsibility,” then it is not engaged in terrorism, only murder.
Take the difference between the government of Israel and the Palestinian terrorists opposed to Israel. The reason the Palestinians terrorists rightly have that label of terrorists attached to them is because they have no problem with a mission to blow up a pizza joint with a bunch of teenagers in it, and to make a video beforehand about what you are going to do. And because Islam does not have a just war tradition like the Christian faith has, they have no problem theologically avowing their terrorism. “What is wrong with this ‘terrorism’?” they would say. All infidels, not just the soldiers, are in the house of war. Have at them. Whatever works.
Anybody who believes that Israel is incapable of killing a terrorist, along with his family and immediate neighbors, has not been paying careful attention. But, as with the United States, the extra deaths are not used as a tactic — they are deliberately hidden and set aside. If you doubt what I say, just wait for the next time the Israeli government announces beforehand its intention to bomb a six-year-old’s birthday party. You will wait a long time.
If the United States military tags a wedding party, or a mosque, or there is some form of egregious “collateral damage,” and the whole thing blows up in the media, will a representative of the State Department come out at the press conference and say, “Yeah, well, there’s more where that came from. Shock and awe, baby.”
Terrorists would avow it, even if they didn’t do it. Non-terrorists evade it, even if they did.