17 January 2002
Byliner: "An Indecent Proposal," by Eric Cantor and Frank Lautenberg
(Authors expose false distinctions between "good" and "bad" terrorism)
(990)
The column "An Indecent Proposal," by Rep. Eric Cantor and former
Senator Frank Lautenberg, appeared on January 2, 2002, in The
Washington Times. Column is in the public domain; no republication or
translation restrictions.
Following is the text:
(begin text)
"An Indecent Proposal,"
by Congressman Eric Cantor and former Senator Frank Lautenberg
[Rep. Eric Cantor is chairman of the Congressional Task Force on
Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare. Former Sen. Frank Lautenberg is
a board member of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a
nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute.]
In his latest videotape, a grim and gaunt Osama bin Laden frankly
admits to supporting terrorism -- but terms the slaughter of innocent
Americans a "blessed terrorism."
And he contrasts that with the deaths of civilians in Afghanistan as a
consequence of "evil" U.S. efforts to smash his al-Qaeda network and
the Taliban regime that was its host. In other words, according to bin
Laden, there is good terrorism and bad terrorism, and the only
difference is the purpose behind it.
Unfortunately, bin Laden is not alone in making such an argument. Even
some people who forthrightly condemn the September 11 attacks -- and
not just in the Muslim world -- subscribe to the idea that one man's
terrorist is another's freedom fighter. They point out, for example,
that nearly every nation and people have resorted to the use of terror
at one time or another in pursuit of their interests -- and sometimes
for very good causes. Isn't terror just another tactic that everyone
deploys in war?
We understand these arguments and appreciate that they carry genuine
intellectual force. Yet we also are convinced that they are
dangerously wrong. Indeed, we submit that it was precisely such
rationalizations that made the attacks of September 11 possible in the
first place.
The men who murdered executives, cooks, tourists, cops, firemen,
rescue workers, flight attendants, secretaries and a host of other
blameless people just going about their lives didn't wake up one
morning and decide that one dead American was as good as any other.
They had absorbed this idea over time, from an intellectual climate
that promoted it. They had heard the word "terrorism" applied to all
manner of violence between sworn enemies. They'd almost certainly
learned that "state terrorism" was any military or police action that
checked their political aspirations.
They'd heard apparently respected writers and intellectuals argue that
killing Israeli civilians, for example, was justified because Zionist
society is a military society. And because they resented America's
influence in the world and opposed certain U.S. policies, it was no
great leap for them to persuade themselves, as bin Laden put it in a
previous videotape, that "the Twin Towers were legitimate targets"
because "they were supporting U.S. economic power."
It is time to tell the truth about terror. Terrorism is not just a way
to describe a revolutionary movement we dislike or violence aimed at
our allies and friends. Not every revolutionary is a terrorist, and
not every terrorist is a revolutionary.
Terrorism is a very specific type of violence. It is the deliberate
killing of innocent civilians in the name of a political cause. George
Washington was a revolutionary, but he was no terrorist. Osama bin
Laden is both.
In its war against Afghanistan-based terrorists and those who support
them, the United States has made extraordinary efforts to spare
innocent civilians. Nor have U.S. agents slit the throats of bin
Laden's relatives or fellow countrymen -- though that would certainly
send a message. Instead, American fighting men and women have been
careful to distinguish between soldiers and noncombatants.
This moral distinction is not a recent invention. It is not an idea
cooked up by powerful countries to undermine political movements they
are trying to suppress. To the contrary, it boasts an ancient and
venerable history, and was developed over hundreds of years as a way
of protecting the powerless.
As early as the Middle Ages, knights were supposed to spare a long
list of noncombatants: women, children, the elderly, the infirm,
members of religious orders. And since the need to protect
noncombatants from wholesale massacre grew even more urgent with the
Industrial Revolution, the result was a series of international
agreements spelling out the importance of civilian immunity.
Now the stakes are greater still. Today's terrorists potentially have
at their disposal weapons of mass destruction. Thousands of unarmed
civilians were murdered on September 11. In the future, millions of
innocent lives will be at risk from fanatics who profess to see no
moral difference between killing a child in a stroller and a soldier
in a tank.
It is time for the civilized world to stop indulging arguments,
however sleek and sophisticated, that seek to justify a form of
warfare whose very purpose is to wreak indiscriminate slaughter on the
unarmed and defenseless.
To those who say terrorism is too much a habit of armed conflict to be
eradicated, we say there is no choice. Slavery once seemed like a
permanent fixture of human affairs as well, but in one of the great
achievements of history, resolute men and women abolished it over much
of the world in a mere matter of decades.
Unfortunately, we may not have that much time today. So long as
terrorists enjoy safe harbor anywhere in the world, they will pursue
ever-more-deadly dreams. They will consider the attacks of September
11 as a prelude to more spectacular strikes against America and other
despised democracies. In such a world, a "good" terrorist is indeed an
obscene proposition.
It is time to expose the truth about terror, and to act forcefully
upon that truth.
(end text)
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
|
NEWSLETTER
|
|
Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list
|
|
|
