Opinion
 

Fighting terror is using terror

By Matt Clement

In all wars, the aim is to terrorize the opponent to the point of submission. Bombs aren't necessary -- psychological warfare can be used to convince the enemy to come to the good side. Like all wars, the current war on terror is essentially using terror on terror. The idea is to terrorize the terrorists using the military and, failing that, with propaganda.

Terror on terror is not new. Reagan launched a war against "peasant terrorists" in Nicaragua; Clinton, fed up with "drug terrorists," authorized the spraying of the weed killer glyphosate on coca plants in Colombia. The current Bush administration is only doing what every administration has done before it. Historically, when a few people (like presidents) are given a lot of political and economic power, they terrorize.

In May 1996, Leslie Stahl of CBS, while talking to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about the effects of the economic sanctions on Iraq, said, "We have heard that half a million (Iraqi) children have died. I mean, that's more than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright said, "I think it is a very hard choice ... we think the price is worth it." Clinton's secretary of state thought this form of terrorism was appropriate in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

Clearly, this was a failed form of terrorism that did not even get rid of the terrorist.

Before the Gulf War, between February and September 1988, Saddam Hussein was terrorizing Kurds with chemical weapons in northern Iraq. At the time, the U.S. Senate attempted to pass a bill that would have cut off loans to Iraq. However, the Reagan and Bush administrations opposed the bill, and in fact escalated financial support and equipment exports to the brutal regime, knowing that their financial support was essentially an endorsement of Hussein's brutality.

Until the first Gulf War, literacy in Iraq was growing, including among women. Iraq was perhaps the most liberal society in the entire region in terms of women's rights, and even women in rural Iraq were allowed to take night classes. In other countries in the region, like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, this freedom still doesn't exist. In these countries, oil revenue is not spent on the people -- it's spent on the king's whims. The rest is invested in foreign banks and treasury bills, principally American. But, Iraq would be vilified while our government turned a blind eye to the harm caused by our obedient allies.

In 1991 Colin Powell, then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said, "I'm running out of demons. I'm running out of villains." In 2000, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said, "The United States has found it exceedingly difficult to define its ‘national interest' in the absence of Soviet power." The world, though not a Garden of Eden, was becoming too safe for people like Powell and Rice.

Then came the destruction of 9/11. This terrorism gave Powell and Rice the demons they wanted with the ability to define our national interest.

This is the background to the current war on terror, which was supposed to be targeted not against Iraq, which had no connection to 9/11, but against a few individuals (like Osama bin Laden), terrorists who could be fought with terror. But, that is the point. Terrorism is not natural to humanity; it is a characteristic of only a few insane individuals.

Clement, a columnist for The Daily Cougar, 
can be reached at dccampus@mail.uh.edu