Special Interest Group on CRAP

I recently was around someone who used the term “war on terror”. I almost started ranting, but decided to pause and think about why that term bugs me so much. Sometimes it’s better to think before you speak.

I was reminded of it again when I heard a talk by Thomas Barnett from the TED conference. He used the term “holocaust” to describe what is currently going on in Sudan, and had an excellent explanation for why the US and the world is so impotent to do anything about it. It also explains why our existing military is so useless in the “war on terror”.

The United States has the greatest military imaginable now, but it doesn’t provide us with our national security. This is not really a failure on their part, because they have been built up in a way that was optimized to fight the wars we saw in the past. Unfortunately their capabilities are only a small part of what contributes to national security. As Barnett points out, the US military consists of a force that is young, muscular, well armed, and slightly pissed off. They want someone to pick a fight with and they want to kick ass. George Bush wishes he was one of those. Both are unfortunately useless in the face of terror, because terror is a political movement that can only be fought as a political movement. At the moment our president is a politial eunuch.

Using the military to fight the “war on terror” is like using a flamethrower to treat skin inflammation. Calling it a war is in fact kind of silly, because most people think wars should be fought with armies. In the 1960s, it was popular to use the term “war” to describe other social movements, such as the war on poverty or the war on drugs or the war on illiteracy. If you think about it, the military would be useless for these wars as much as it is useless in the war on terror. Some people were upset by the use of the term “war” to describe the initiatives, but the terminology was chosen to motivate the public, and the only thing they could get motivated about was war.

We’ll probably never eradicate terror, but we can do many things to reduce it. Getting most of the world pissed off at us is certainly not an optimal strategy, because it just creates a fertile ground for recruiting terrorists, and devalues the value of our words. We need some leadership in this country, and we need a foreign policy that addresses the political forces of terror. It’s time we have a president who can translate will into useful actions. It’s time we treated the war on terror more like the war on poverty, and it’s time we had a security force that was tuned for security instead of being tuned for the the old wars.