'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

[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 . . .