President Bush did not invent "the war on terrorism," but he has given it a tendentious riff with his resort to a particular rhetoric of vivid presentation: the war is morally unambiguous, the villains are transcendentally evil, and the cause mirrors the temper of contemporary American society.
And what more could the pundits and the op-ed cowboys ask for?
Because this is a unique kind of war, then everything goes. There are no rules here. A terrorist can be anyone, and he can be anywhere. To pursue and catch him, the American military will be justified in going from Afghanistan to Malaysia, from Iraq to Pakistan, from Indonesia to Colombia and, potentially, from anywhere to anywhere else in the world. And because the terrorist is a shadowy figure, it follows that the war against him must be equally shadowy.
With each terrorist apprehended these days, we are told more are hiding elsewhere.
They are part of an "international conspiracy" that has conveniently come to be known as Al-Qaeda, whose members seemingly are so inept that not only do they videotape each other shooting the breeze, plotting attacks, gloating over their successes at dinner parties, writing down (in English, no less) plans to manufacture Stealth bombers and, as a news report in the LA Times had it Jan. 30, jotting down "diagrams of American nuclear facilities, water treatment plants and landmarks." They also leave these videos and notebooks lying around, as to attest to their perfidy.
Since this war is so vague and the enemy so elusive, we never know when we have won; and since we do not now that, then the war theoretically can go on forever. It is called off when those conducting it choose to do so. Moreover, this is a war that, as events since Sept. 11 show, started out as black and white with "us against them" but has now taken on shades of gray.
And this war will not come to an end real soon because, don’t forget, new terrorists are being found daily in "terrorist hideouts in Afghanistan" and "dingy apartments" in Singapore, demonstrating the ubiquity and extraordinary reach of "international terrorism" — to which now the generic term Al-Qaeda has been given.
In fact, officials in President Bush’s administration, who have become so infatuated with their martial whimsy, last week identified new "terrorist groups" in Colombia, Turkey, Lebanon and Palestine that could be future targets because "they have displayed anti-US sentiments."
In a report to Congress last Wednesday, CIA director George J. Tenet named as one such the Revolutionary Armed Force of Colombia as a group that "poses a serious threat to US interests in Latin America because it associates us with the government it is fighting against."
Another group identified as a potential target in "the war against terrorism" is the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Front in Turkey. Tenet took issue in his report with the fact that the group "has publicly criticized the United States and our operations in Afghanistan."
Tenet went on to name Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine as terrorists. "If these groups feel that US actions are threatening their existence," he wrote, "they may begin targeting Americans directly."
Tenet’s report also criticized Iran (Oh, yes, that would be the country representing the third leg of the tripod known as "the axis of evil") for its apparent "acceptance of Al-Qaeda fighters coming over its border from Afghanistan — the very same Iran, you will recall, that in the aftermath of Sept. 11, volunteered its support in helping US pilots if they needed to land inside the country, was helpful in talks in Germany that set up the interim government in Kabul, and allowed US food shipments to Afghan refugees through its borders.
And so it goes on.
The battle never ends. It is to be waged sometimes against one country, sometimes against another. Such a war, unlike conventional war, does not have a terminus. Its strategists are like mad mathematicians toiling to take pi to a final decimal point.
All of which has worked to George Bush’s advantage. After Sept. 11, the American president, the very legitimacy of whose election had been in doubt, and who was seen by the public as an inexperienced "frat boy," even as figure of fun, was suddenly transformed into a "war president’ and a national hero who is every American’s commander-in-chief.
Bush is a leader on a roll. For him to end his war on terrorism would be for him to diminish his popularity ratings. You can thus be sure that identifying and "ferreting out" real or imagined terrorist groups around the world will, like Halley’s comet which periodically lights up the sky, continue off and on for years to come.
Welcome to the first decade of the 21st century.
