It has been quite troubling to me the extent to which we have begun to use the term “war” to refer to the events of Tuesday. I commented that this cedes a power to the terrorists they do not have if they have merely committed a “terrorist act” of whatever magnitude. Our hyperbole, seemingly a way to articulate the extent to which we feel overwhelmed, blows back. Even more troubling has been our configuring our intended response as a “war on terrorism” and calling for a “declaration of war” from the Congress. Apart from the justification it provides for what is euphemistically called “collateral damage” (which I discuss below), I’m not sure it makes much sense in helping us to envision the nature, the scope or the difficulty of taking appropriate action, to speak of declaring war on the abstraction “terrorism”. (Semantic difficulty suffuses our other “wars” as well — the war on crime, the war on drugs, the war on cancer even — but in a far less malignant way.) Phil Agre is concerned as well:
“Referring to the attacks on the east coast as “war” gives expression
to our emotions about them, and feels proportional to the magnitude
of the atrocity. But if the definition of “war” has shifted beneath
us, then a declaration of war is an even graver matter than it used to
be. Let us take a moment, then, to ask what we are getting ourselves
into. The Bush administration started using the language of “war”
well before they were willing to say who they thought was responsible
for the attacks. That in itself is probably not unprecedented; the
idea of something mysteriously blowing up is hardly new. What is less
precedented is the lack of any clear suspect who was either a foreign
nation state or a domestic organization…What does it mean as a *political* matter to declare war on a network?
This, it seems to me, is the greatest danger of all. The only moral
justification for war is to preserve the conditions of democracy.
Revenge is not a sufficient motive, except insofar as it preserves
the conditions of democracy by serving as a deterrent. Otherwise the
matter should be treated as a crime and handled by the institutions
of the police and criminal courts. Are the conditions of democracy
in fact under threat? It is possible that they are, and I would
expect the government to present enough evidence of such a threat
before placing the country in a condition of war. The question of
justification is particularly important in the present case given
the dubious conditions under which George W. Bush assumed the office
of the president. His continued rule is also a significant threat
to the conditions of democracy, even though his methods were largely
nonviolent.”
Agre’s essay, Imagining the Next War: Infrastructural Warfare and the Conditions of Democracy, does not appear to be online yet, but when and if he posts it it will probably be at the Red Rock Eater Digest site. Addendum: here.
