Today’s Wall Street Journal contains a column by Daniel Henninger arguing that the war on terror is going to be as long a slog as the Cold War, and that we’d better create Cold-War-style institutions if we hope to win it.
Even as the ashes of the World Trade Center were raining down on New York, the right had begun piling long-cherished projects — like the neoconservative dream of regime change in Iraq — onto the new war-on-terror bandwagon. The essential maneuver here has been to take what could and should have been a very specific war the U.S. had to fight with the people who attacked us — a war on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida — and expand its scope and definition. The first step in this process was turning the “war with al-Qaida” into the “war on terror.” Never mind that “terror” is a notoriously ill-defined word; never mind that a “war on terror” is a war without clearly defined goals or well understood conditions for victory.
That’s the whole point: First, declare war on terror; then, label whoever you want to fight as a “terrorist.” That lets you keep the war going as long as you want; that lets you redefine it on the fly. It also helps you distract people from seeing that we haven’t done a very good job of prosecuting the real, specific war on al-Qaida, whose leader we still have not killed or captured.
Back to Henninger, and his definition of our new Cold War-style destiny: “The threat is the proliferation of the technical knowledge beneath weapons of mass destruction, and the existence of people willing to use these technologies against large civilian populations or whole nations. That, in sum, is terrorism.”
This is an extraordinary paragraph. Why in the world is Henninger resorting to such convoluted language? “The proliferation of the technical knowledge beneath weapons of mass destruction”? Is that what we’re fighting?
Note that Henninger’s definition — which seems practically tailor-made to cover historical events like Hiroshima and Nagasaki — bizarrely excludes the 9/11 attackers themselves: Their weapons were box-cutters, and it took no particular arcane technical knowledge (beyond some basic piloting lessons) for them to transform innocent jetliners into machines of terrible destruction.
But Henninger has to write this way if his definition of the war on terror is going to cover the Bush administration’s Iraq adventure. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. And we now know with near-certainty that Iraq had essentially no weapons of mass destruction and posed no imminent threat to the U.S. Ahh, but somewhere in Iraq was “the technical knowledge beneath” such weapons, and in time that could be turned against us.
It’s a slippery slope, Mr. Henninger. Once you leave behind the clear-eyed truth that al-Qaida attacked the U.S. and al-Qaida is who we should be fighting, there is no end to the mischief you can get the nation into. President Bush cast us in a global war with the Axis of Evil; suddenly, thanks to 9/11, we were fighting Iran, Iraq and North Korea, too. Now, according to Henninger, we are at war with nothing less than “the proliferation of technical knowledge”!
Alas, wars undertaken against the proliferation of knowledge don’t have a very good track record in human history — just ask the book-burners of the Reformation. You could lock away all the nuclear-bomb formulas and recipes for sarin, you could shut down the entire Internet, you could plunge half the world into the Stone Age — and angry, dispossessed or malicious people could still figure out ways to kill and destroy on a frighteningly large scale. The real war is against ignorance, not knowledge.
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