Terrorism: War or Crime?

That has always seemed to me the most ridiculously easy question to answer. Of course, it's crime, and should be treated as such. Police should do their business, follow leads, use reasonable preventative measures, and we get back to our lives.

But Bush put the kabosh on that thinking a week or so after 9-11 when he said it was War, and that you were either with us or against us. We are still paying, and will continue for some time to pay, for the colossal stupidity of his approach, and for the complicity of both parties and the mainstream media in his childish response.

I live in the U.S. not Britain, but keep having to share British commentary on terrorism because, aside from the stuff on commondreams, alternet and antiwar, I have trouble finding challenges to the War on Terrorism concept (which, it should be noted, is being recast as we speak). Here, Simon Jenkins of the Times and Guardian, writes a column I only wish could have been written by an American in, say, Fall of 2001.

Resisting the "Useful Idiots"

We are still here. We still live, work and play. We can vote. We can travel where we want, meet whom we choose, say what we like. We still enjoy due process of law. The only absurdity is that in the eighth year of the government of Tony Blair we need to remark on these facts.

Urban terrorism can only be treated as a crime. Conspiring to explode devices in public places endangers life, destroys property and causes public nuisance. Like all criminal effects it has causes. A sensible democracy addresses those causes. But since ordinary citizens and even the police can do little about them in the short term, they rightly concentrate on the crime itself. The streets of London are alive with like dangers, with people who shoot, kill and maim dozens of people a year. We fight them all, whatever their proffered and spurious justification.

So what purpose was served last week by police crying, "They're still out there and trying to get you"? What good are daily briefings on "the inevitability" of another attack? Street killings are inevitable too. Apart from the gratuitous damage to public confidence and business, why stoke the very fears, hatreds and antagonisms which the bombers want stoked? Just get on and find the bombers, without publicising their allegedly awesome power to deflect blame from any deficiencies in public safety. Half the British establishment seems to have signed up to the League of Friends of Terrorism.

That some London passengers were sadly killed earlier this month does not put the security of the British state at risk. I have a higher respect for that security than most people seem to do. Britain is not at war just because some Arab says so. No amount of tabloid hysteria -- or tabloid government -- should make it otherwise. No city can be immune to bombs but that does not subvert democracy and engender a state of emergency. Anyone who pretends otherwise is an accessory to the terrorism itself.

Read the whole article...

Also, in last week's Time, Matthew Parris serves up is a sharply observed, bitterly funny take on a special "conspiracy":

I have not the least idea what may be the size, shape and competence of al-Qaeda and would not dream of suggesting (and do not believe) that they are uninvolved.

Nor do I mean to downplay the horrors that have hit London: death and destruction are death and destruction, whoever causes them.

Nor do I want to imply doubt about the scale of the horrors that may lie ahead. Home-grown or foreign-born, at whatever level of competence, and whether a concerted campaign or demented craze, this kind of thing is deadly and difficult to combat.

My purpose is more limited. To alert you to the enormous, insidious and mostly unconscious pressure that exists to talk up, rather than talk down, the efficacy of al-Qaeda. When all the pressures are to talk up a lethal characterisation of the forces at work, we need to be supercool in the way we look at these reports.

... You have read much about the threat of one particular conspiracy. Here is another. There is an unwitting conspiracy between four separate powers [the journalist, the politician, the police chief and the terrorist ]to represent the worldwide al-Qaeda network as fiendishly clever, powerfully effective and deeply involved in the London bombings.

Read the whole op-ed...