'There is no war on terror'

[gerisullivan]

On his blog, Neil Gaiman wrote, "I never thought I'd find myself agreeing with the UK Director of Public Prosecutions, but I do, vigorously." Then Neil provided the link to this article in the Guardian.

Count me among the vigorous!

The Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald, is quoted as saying: "London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, 'soldiers'. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a 'war on terror', just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs'.

"The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement."

Exactly. And that is as it should be...everywhere.

I cheer Sir Ken's keen perspective and public position on this matter. Huzzah!

I want my country back.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Two of the worst aspects of a "war on terror" are that it has no delimited enemy, and it has no definable end. If every member of Al Qaeda were killed or neutralized, there would still be the Basque separatists, the Tamil Tigers, people who torch abortion clinics, etc. Like the "War on Drugs," by its nature it can never end as long as people are motivated to engage in the targeted action. Bush has said outright that the War on Terror will last a generation.

International terrorists are an unusual brand of criminals, and novel approaches to them are necessary. But treating their pursuit as a literal war isn't novel; it's trying to fit a new phenonemon into an old mold.

[lauriemann.livejournal.com]

Precisely.

There will always be crime. There will always be terrorists of some stripes. That's life. These things will never be erradicated, and that makes the right wing dizzy. They need a definable enemy.

[madfilkentist]

As do people in general, I'm afraid.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I saw that. And blogged it.

B

[musicmutt.livejournal.com]

I think this guy has really hit it on the head. To live in terror of terrorists is their biggest vitory.

Utterly Wrong

[marsgov.livejournal.com]

Treating terrorism as crime will result in failure.

Re: Utterly Wrong

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I disagree. Treating it as warfare will result in failure as evidenced by the debacle in Iraq. Treating terrorism as a war is using a hammer for a screwdriver job.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

"When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a screw."

[joel-rosenberg.livejournal.com]

Is it just me, or is there an obvious fallacy there? If the struggle against terrorism isn't war in the classical sense (and it isn't -- hell, war isn't war in the classical sense, most of the time) that doesn't make it crimefighting in the classical sense, either.

Sort of reminds me of the one about how "you can't make war against a noun," which immediately suggested to me that "Japan" and "Germany" were, well, not exactly adverbs, conjunctions, or prepositional phrases . . .