The war on what, now?

There are a few subjects that will inevitably recur on this blog, as they underlie many of my interests and passions. One of these subjects is that of freedom, so from time to time I’ll comment on ideas, people and organisations that promote freedom, and those ideas, people and organisations that strive to oppress.

My first victim is one of the latter: the so-called “War on Terror” waged by the United States of America (by which I mean the government thereof). I won’t go into too many details; most of what I could say here has been said before. Rather, I’d just like to reiterate a few key points.

My first recommendation is to read the Wikipedia article I linked to above; it offers a good primer for further contemplation.

Secondly I’d like to present a couple of choice quotes from this rant on the topic, which largely echo my sentiments:

Terrorism is a tactic. It makes no sense to launch a war against a tactic.

No, it certainly doesn’t, especially when many of your own military tactics, such as those employed in the initial shock and awe assaults bear such frightening similarities to the tactics of terrorism, which you so claim to despise. Hypocrisy aside, however, the quote says it all: you can’t wage a war against a tactic. You can’t defeat a tactic, because a tactic is an idea.

The only way for a tactic to be ‘defeated’ in any sense is for its proponents to reject it as a valid course of action, and I don’t see this happening anytime soon. Combine a people sufficiently passionate about a cause to fight and die for it with a population insufficient to match their enemy man-for-man, and terrorism will continue to present a very appealing opportunity.

The other problem with declaring “war” against a tactic, of course, is that there's no reasonable point at which the subjects of the war-making government can expect that “war” to end.

This presents the biggest problem of all: when a nation is at war, its citizens are generally more willing to sacrifice their freedoms in the short-term in the hope that supporting their government will help end the war quickly. In short, they become much easier to manipulate.

This is always a worry, but it is especially so in a war that has no attainable goal, and therefore no visible end. The United States is oppressing its own people in the name of a war that they can sustain for as long as it serves their purposes.

I find it terrifying that they’ve managed to get away with all this so easily, and for so long, but when you look a figures like these, it at least becomes a little easier to understand how they pulled it off.