Comments on: London can take it

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 23:58:59 +0000

Was that 24 hours after the bin Laden fatwa against the US? Or 24 hours after the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassy bombings? Or 24 hours after the USS Cole attack?
It’s important to be clear about this, because there are people out there who are under the impression that the “war on terror” was declared because the previous criminal justice-based approach to chasing down Al Qaeda–”Chinese wall” and all–had been tried for several years, and had failed spectacularly. Many of those people also note the remarkable decline in terrorist attacks on American targets since the “war” was declared, and hypothesize that there may be more than mere coincidence involved.
Those people would no doubt be less confident in their view if they knew that in fact the “war on terror” had been declared within 24 hours of Al Qaeda’s commencement of its terrorist campaign against the US, rather than after several bloody years of trying and failing to address the Al Qaeda problem through law enforcement means. So if you have any evidence to that effect, then it would certainly be worthwhile to present it.

By: James Wimberley

James Wimberley — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 10:39:24 +0000

Pithlord has it exactly right. The same held for the Basque ETA, the French OAS, the Brigate Rossi in Italy, the Rote Armee Fraktion in Germany: they all adopted military terminology and identified themselves as warriors. The governments they attacked refused the gambit and insisted they were fighting criminals; in the case of the IRA, for over 30 years. Bush conceded the point to El Qaeda in 24 hours.

By: Scorpio

Scorpio — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 21:04:06 +0000

In his own way, Bush is as unglued as Khadaffi or the head of the Iranian government.

By: Pithlord

Pithlord — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 18:17:42 +0000

In the “conflict” with the Provos, the British government always insisted that it was about criminality. It was the Provos who wanted to call it a “war.” That’s usually how these things work: the irregular terrorists aspire to be considered an army and a proto-state, and the existing government wants to deny them that status.
It’s now clear that the Bush administration has taken the opposite tack to justify authoritarianism domestically.

By: Hal Grossman

Hal Grossman — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 17:57:06 +0000

If the “war on terror” metaphor has fallen into disuse in the UK, that’s all to your credit. It would mean that British politics is closer to recovering its sanity than ours is.
The war idea fosters arrest without trial, torture, brutality on the ground in Iraq, NSA eavesdropping, government secrecy, and allegations of treason.
More time has passed since 9/11 than passed in the period from December 7, 1941 to V-J Day. So if we were in a war with Al Quaida, we’re not doing so well.