Winning the War on The War on Terror

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 03:19:00 -0400

Does it matter that the Obama administration is now involved in “overseas contingency operations” rather than “fighting terror”? Is it important that our Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, refers to man-caused disasters rather than terrorism? And how about the news made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, when she was asked about the elimination of the phrase war on terror : “The administration has stopped using the phrase and I think that speaks for itself,” Clinton said. “It was controversial here [in Europe].”

The New York Times often used quotation marks around the war on terror during the Bush administration. National Public Radio commentators sometimes referred to “the so-called war on terror.”

The rhetorical struggle isn’t just about the war on terror, of course. It’s about the very notion of terrorism. To modify Burleigh Taylor Wilkins’ excellent definition, terrorism is violence against the property or lives of noncombatant civilians, whose purpose is to promote the terrorist’s cause by preventing moderate solutions or provoking extreme countermeasures. But when someone commits such an act, he usually graduates to militant status within a couple of days, if not immediately. Several months ago Judea Pearl, the father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, asked the question this way: “When will our luminaries stop making excuses for terror?”

It appears that those luminaries have won the war on the war on terror . Scores of innocents will continue to be killed by terrorists but their lives will no longer be part of a narrative that we understand as the fight against terrorism.

In the secular liberal tradition beginning with Hobbes, the greatest human passion was said to be fear of violent death. With some modifications by Locke, the social contract minimizes that fear when we give up certain natural rights to the civil government in return for the protection of our rights to life, liberty and property. Civil government, Locke continues, is appointed by God “to restrain the partiality and violence of men.”

The terrorist has never accepted these Enlightenment cultural norms. He rejects the modern liberal tradition at its heart because he has overcome the fear of violent death. He recognizes nothing in this tradition that would prevent him from imposing his will”to the point of murder”on whomever he chooses.

Nietzsche illuminates this mode of thought in his devastating critique of the secular, rationalist tradition. In The Genealogy of Morals he calls the social contract a “sentimental effusion.” The origin of the state is really in “some horde or other of blond predatory animals, a race of conquerors and masters which [is] organized for war and [has] the strength to organize others.” Whether these “predatory animals” are blonds or brunettes isn’t the point. The issue is that Nietzsche identifies the will to power, not fear of violent death, as the deepest human passion. Exercising that will becomes the key to freedom, not restraining it in order to exercise a limited menu of natural rights in a safe, bourgeois society.

Liberating oneself from a commitment to truth”“that Christian belief, which was also Plato’s belief, that God is the truth, that the truth is divine ,” as Nietzsche writes ”was his next step. It’s revealing that Nietzsche finds this freedom outside of western culture, in the twelth-century Shi’ite sect known as “the Assassins.” They had discovered the secret formula for liberation centuries earlier. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” he writes of them. This secret made them free spirits, which they expressed by acts of terror against Crusaders and fellow Muslims. No matter that they were violating Surah 4.92“93, which forbids the killing of fellow believers. Their glory was to die after assassinating their victim.

Azar Nafisi’s gives Hizbollah’s endorsement of a similar philosophy in her memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran . “The Islamic Republic [of Iran] survives through its mourning ceremonies,” she quotes Hizbollah’s leaders as saying in the late 1980s. Its ceremonies had an “orgiastic pleasure,” she says, where people mingled publicly, their bodies touched, and emotions flowed. “The more we die,” the slogan ran, “the stronger we become.”

Islamic statements that embrace death can be gathered all the way back to one of the Muhammad’s closest companions, the first Caliph Abu Bakr. One of his commanders is said to have sent a message to a Persian commander and his army on behalf of the Caliph, warning them to convert to Islam for their own safety: “I have come to you with an army of men that love death, as you love life.” Abu Bakr was embracing martyrdom in battle, as Muslims understand it, but hardly advocating the killing of innocents, especially the killing of fellow Muslims. For that we need to go to Sayyid Qutb, the modern, ideological father of the Muslim Brotherhood. For Qutb, Muslims who promote a social order that neglects Shariah are living in a state of ignorance, or jahiliyyah , the term given to the unenlightened mindset of the polytheistic tribes during the birth of Islam. Righteous Muslims must wage armed struggle against such ignorance, he wrote. A true “Islamic community . . . has a God-given right to step forward and take control of the political authority,” he writes, “so that it may establish the Divine system on earth.” For the terrorist, this injunction silences all rational and ethical questions that might be raised by philosophy, Islamic tradition, or the Qur’an. Even sympathetic commentators on Islam, such as John Esposito, call such thinking a “theology of hate.”

Benedict XVI’s speech at Regensburg in September 2006 brilliantly grasped the moral and epistemological issues confronting Islam and Christianity, with their strong beliefs in God’s sovereignty:

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Winning the War on The War on Terror