# Posted 4:19 AM by Patrick Porter  

IS OUR RHETORIC THE PROBLEM? After 9/11, Bush should not have called America's campaign against terrorism a war. This is the view of a range of some powerful minds, from historians John Mueller and Michael Howard to ethicist Michael Walzer, from pundit James Fallows to several of my colleagues.

So its probably a hard task to disagree. However. I would respectfully argue that for all the problems that come with the term, it is a war.

This is also part of a bigger debate, about the role and importance of Bush's rhetoric. Some criticisms of the entire war effort focus like a laser on the words Bush uses to characterise the conflict. If only Bush had not spoken with simplistic rhetoric about war, good, evil, evildoers, God, etc, things wouldn't have gone so badly wrong.

The argument in brief: war gives Al Qaeda a dangerous status. It overinflates their image and exaggerates, wittingly or not, the threat they pose. It makes us irrational in our decision-making and our willingness to terrify each other and be terrified. It makes us bigoted in our self-exaltation and licenses our own brutal behaviour, from Fallujah to Guantanamo, etc. It leads to the 'demonisation' of our own dissenting voices, and enables our own governments to dismantle our civil liberties. Rhetorical commitment to open-ended war loses sight of 'exit strategies' and a proper plan to defuse or end the conflict. We should have treated the whole thing as a criminal, police and intelligence operation, maybe with brief cameos from the military.

This is roughly how the argument often goes. And declaring war does bring certain dangers. It does make effective compromise and open debate more difficult, it does create elevated expectations of decisive victories, and it can lead to irrational choices.

But this argument is so nuanced that it loses sight of some unpleasant core realities. The fact remains that 9/11 was an assault by a network that had the shelter, sanctuary and patronage of a sovereign state. The US had appealed for the assistance of that state against Al Qaeda, but it refused. If the US was serious about disrupting the guests of the Taliban, any responsible reaction must have included a military one. A writ or a police action would have been insufficient. And military operations in Afghanistan meant a state of war.

This is the primal scene of the argument: 9/11 created not just an effort against an outlaw gang, but against a state that supported it. If defending itself by taking the fight militarily to the Taliban was a necessary step, this entailed military action against a sovereign state. Which got the US onto a war footing.

Even if Bush hadn't used the label or rhetoric at all, large-scale military operations in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, broadcast over the world, would still have been depicted as a war in the Arab-Islamic world, and the accusation of 'crusader' would still have been made.

It is not just rhetoric that creates impressions, it is actual behaviour. In other words, it was our policy that placed us at war, not just our words. If that makes sense. To put it more bluntly: either the US should have conducted military operations against the Taliban, or it shouldn't. If it should, then war existed, and in a global media, would have been seen to exist. This wasn't the Malayan emergency that could be fought in the shadows away from global attention. This was the whole world watching to see what the US would do.

Also, its easy to overstate how decisive declaring war was to inflating AQ's status. To be sure, having America name you as enemy number one does confer a certain dark charisma, though not one that historically guarantees success. But declaring war was not the first gesture to give AQ prestige. They achieved a status by inflicting mayhem in the heartland of its enemy that Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan had not done. They did something that decades of preachers and propagandists in the Arab-Islamic world had called for, but not seen: they delivered spectacular, theatrical violence on American soil.

Had a nation-state conducted an attack directly on this scale, we wouldn't be having the same debate. There would be plenty of other issues to argue about, but not whether it constituted an act of war.

As for human rights abuses, being in a 'war mentality' does tempt states into abusive behaviour. Then again, the Bush administration may have been contemptuous of the constitution and Civil Liberties anyway.

The Clinton Administration, not exactly renowned for declaring an apocalyptic war on evil, was guilty of oppressive human rights violations on a range of fronts. This used to be the complaint, in fact, of some of its critics from the left. Warrantless searches, rendition, and imprisonment abroad without trial. I suspect that Bush using strong language is not the prime cause of the increasing bipartisan encroachment by the state on civil liberties.

Should we have declared the end of war around December 2001, and redefined the struggle as a criminal investigation? Unfortunately, America's enemies get a vote on this too. The Taliban were scattered by the first months of Operation Enduring Freedom, but found new bases, regrouped, and returned to the fight. Without Bush's war rhetoric, without the invasion of Iraq, major military activity would still have been forced on the US and its allies in Afghanistan.

Some critics have suggested that the Bush administration should have de-escalated the conflict by declaring victory after this. This is ironic, when that one of the faults of the Bush administration most complained about is its habit of declaring victory prematurely.

Who or what should the Bush admininistration have declared war on? This argument could go on forever. Terrorism is a method and rhetoric, not a finite group, and to declare war on it sets a very difficult standard to meet. Al Qaeda is a candidate, but it isn't just one group but a range of shifting coalitions of affiliates and groupings. To declare war on it now is to declare war on an idea. 'Islamic extremism' is too big and would attract even stronger condemnation. Whatever Bush declared war on, in fact, he would probably have been strongly criticised for it. But whatever the group or concept targeted, the unpleasant facts above remain.

Has war led to other errors, abuses, hysteria or poor judgement? Yes, and not just because of the nature of this administration. War is a chaotic and wild state, leading to miscalculations and unintended consequences, and even the most forbearing and rational state would probably be tempted into some of the moral and strategic errors of Bush.

Abuses of civil liberties during World War Two and the American Civil War also occurred and deserved their criticisms, but this did not obviate the need to recognise a state of war when it existed.

Whatever we should call the enemy, and whatever the risks of declaring war, and despite the disasters that have flowed from Iraq, I see little choice on this issue. A deadly and real enemy with state support had shown it had the will and ability to do things that if repeated serially would make life almost impossible for the world's superpower and, because of global interdependence, most of the world.

Tricky problem though. (8) opinions -- Add your opinion