Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

We do not actually know who all of our "enemies" are, because President Bush and neocons have given us such a gaping definition. They inform us that a terrorist can be anyone from an impoverished private citizen to a president and can live in any nation from the United States to China. In addition, anyone who sympathizes with the "Islamic" terrorists' anti-American resentment and frustration while condemning their crimes, as I do (and Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have both done), is himself guilty of terrorism. A terrorist need not even commit an act of violence; in the eyes of some neoconservatives, mere principled opposition to America's domineering foreign policy is enough to render someone a terrorist sympathizer. That would make at least four billion individuals "enemies".

Did the unrelenting opposition which Pope John Paul II expressed to the Iraq war make him an enemy of the US? Hannity was apparently unable to consider that difficult question. His employer, the corporate- and government-controlled Fox News media firm, cleverly ignored most of the great Pope's warnings about the war as irrelevant in the face of the "grave threat" from Saddam Hussein. Similarly, the recurrent appeals of Pope Benedict XVI for universal nuclear disarmament, greater cooperation with the UN, and increased foreign aid and economic development are anathema to the totalitarian-minded neoconservative establishment. Our government-censored media conglomerates do not dare brand the Pope a terrorist sympathizer, nor can they disseminate criticism from such a well-respected moral authority without seeing public support for American foreign policy decline. So Fox News fights the Pope and the vast majority of other peaceful "terrorist sympathizers" by simply paying no attention to them. And even in a world of various independent information sources and outlets, this psychological warfare trick proves effective. As the late Pope John Paul himself remarked, "If it doesn't happen on television, it doesn't happen."

But what about all the other real "Muslim" terrorists that, for the purposes of President Bush's administration, do not exist? What about the incessant drug terrorists in Colombia, who have been sneaking meth and dope into the US? What about the cruel mutilators in Uganda? What about the "Islamic" radicals in France? What about the terrorists in Kenya and Nigeria? Many of them also oppose Western policies, yet we have not seen fit to challenge them. Are they also our enemies, or not?

The question of counting terrorists is naturally tied to the question of where they are located, which is even hazier. The whole world is their "battleground." This imprecision, again, results from looking at terrorists as warriors, instead of as civilian criminals. Terrorists are everywhere: in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan, in the jungles of Colombia, in the synagogues of Israel and the mosques of Indonesia, walking the city streets in Kenya and South Africa. They reside everywhere from Tokyo to the sparse stretches of countries occupying the Sahara desert. Terrorists display great variety in their locations and individual characteristics--just like civilians, because they are civilians. We cannot fight a military war against terrorists because it would necessitate destroying and damaging homes, shopping malls, mosques, synagogues, universities, farms, hospitals, banks, government and business offices, roads, phone and electricity cables, whole villages, entire cities--everything! And the US under President Bush has already attacked most of these targets in Afghanistan and Iraq. Taking the neocon logic to its conclusion, we would have to demolish the whole world in order to definitively "defeat" terrorism.

Given their ambiguous nature, number, and location, terrorists are "the enemy we know" in a rather limited sense. By treating "Muslim" terrorists as warriors, the US has put itself at a severe disadvantage. History testifies that a vague and imprecise war is liable to continue indefinitely and cannot be won.