War on Terror

8 Key excerpts on "War on Terror"

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  Essence of Counter-Terrorism

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • White Word Publications

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter 4 War on Terror The War on Terror (also known as the Global War on Terror or the War on Terrorism ) is an international military campaign led by the United States and the United Kingdom with the support of other NATO and non-NATO countries. Officially, the War on Terror label has not been used since Barack Obama came to office in 2009, though the war in Afghanistan continues. The campaign was launched in 2001 with the US/UK invasion of Afghanistan in response to the September 11 attacks. Since then, other operations have commenced, the largest being the War in Iraq, beginning with a 2003 invasion. Originally, the campaign was waged against al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations with the purpose of eliminating them. The phrase War on Terror was first used by former US President George W. Bush and other high-ranking US officials to denote a global military, political, legal and ideological struggle against organizations designated as terrorist and regimes that were accused of having a connection to them or providing them with support or were perceived, or presented as posing a threat to the US and its allies in general. It was typically used with a particular focus on militant Islamists and al-Qaeda. Although the term is not officially used by the administration of US President Barack Obama (which instead uses the term Overseas Contingency Operation ), it is still commonly used by politicians, in the media and officially by some aspects of government, such as the Army's Global War on Terrorism Service Medal. The notion of a War on Terror has been criticized for lacking a defined and identifiable enemy, thus making it a potential framework for perpetual military action pursuing other goals. Precursor to the 9/11 attacks In May 1996 the group World Islamic Fron t for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders (WIFJAJC), sponsored by Osama Bin Laden and later reformed as al-Qaeda, started

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  Rethinking Terrorism

  Terrorism, Violence and the State

  • Colin Wight(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  In this respect, both are fully adapted to the context out of which they emerged, and in many respects, their flexibility allows them to adapt much more quickly than the dominant state form, which emerged out of a previous era. The context out of which al-Qaeda emerged is globalization, and it is for that reason that the War on Terror can also be considered to be a war on globalization. Contemporary Terrorism and the War on Terror 207 The War on Terror In this section, I want to deal with the War on Terror in a very generic fashion. I have no desire to get into minute detail, attempt-ing to unpack why the war has developed in the way it has, or to attempt to deal with the minutiae of what drove the international system into the currently confused state it now finds itself. There are already plenty of excellent books that cover this ground in a comprehensive manner (Booth and Dunne, 2012; Clarke, 2004). Rather, my aim is to look structurally at the War on Terror as a response to the emergence of a particular kind of contemporary terrorism as detailed in the previous section. Let me begin by situ-ating my position on the War on Terror. When directly compared to the strategic goals of al-Qaeda, it appears to be an unmitigated disaster. Our political leaders seem to be sleepwalking (Clark, 2012) into the very situation that al-Qaeda is attempting to con-struct. However, one wonders, when faced with the possibility, and indeed the actuality, of such violence, what alternatives they have. Part of the rationale for the acceptance of state ownership of violence is the idea that the state will use that violence when its populations come under attack, or a threatened attack. It might be possible to support a War on Terrorism (at least as I have defined it), although a War on Terror is impossible to support. Terror can no more be eradicated than can any other human emo-tion.

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  From Berlin to Baghdad

  America's Search for Purpose in the Post-Cold War World

  • Hal Brands(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  The War on Terror, whatever its effec-332 Waging the War on Terror tiveness as the intellectual structure for U.S. policy, provided struc-ture nonetheless. For U.S. officials, it was a means of prioritizing threats and interests, allocating resources and commitments. What the War on Terrorism has done, commented Rice, is it's given us an organizing principle. From this perspective, the War on Terror was an answer to the diplomatic dilemmas of the 1990s. 69 The apparent moral clarity of the War on Terror was similarly at-tractive. In a manner that must have been welcome after the confu-sion of the 1990s, the moral purpose of U.S. policy again seemed obvious after 9/11. Although revelations such as the torturing of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military personnel at the infamous Abu Ghraib pris-on were no doubt disconcerting, in the four years after the attacks, there emerged no major challenge to the broader moral paradigm of the War on Terror. As during the Cold War and World War II, Ameri-cans could conceive of themselves sallying forth under the menaced banner of freedom and beating back the onrushing forces of evil. Whereas the diplomatic experience of the 1990s had often appeared morally obtuse, after 9/11, it was easy for Americans to feel good about the object (if not the tactics) of their exertions. As a psycho-logical and emotional impetus, this perceived morality was powerful indeed. Just as important, the War on Terror provided the United States with an easily identifiable, and presumably unredeemable, enemy. As they surveyed the international scene in the 1990s, Americans had been unable to find this type of villain. In some ways, the absence had been profoundly disconcerting. During the Cold War, Americans had at least known who and what they were fighting against; the post-Cold War era offered no such certainties. With the emergence of the terrorist threat, the United States once again had a foe against which to contrast its values and beliefs.

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  George W. Bush's Foreign Policies

  • Donette Murray, David Brown, Martin A. Smith(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 Every aspect of the ‘War on Terror’ has been extensively critiqued and explored, from the restructuring of the wider Islamist terrorist movement to the counterterrorist contributions of leading states, such as the UK, international organizations and coalitions of the willing, as well as the attitude and actions of the Bush White House itself. Subsequent analysis has sought to emphasize the continuities between the Bush and Obama administrations, even as Obama’s supporters (much as Bush’s did before them) sought to place clear blue water between what they perceived as their predecessor’s toxic legacy and their own actions. 4 By considering two key aspects of the developing ‘War on Terror’– a term instinctively adopted in the initial hours of 9/11 but with a longer historical tail dating back to the Clinton and Reagan administrations – this chapter seeks to 108 The global ‘War on Terror’ highlight the problematic nature of both the means and ends adopted by the Bush administration to combat the threat of al-Qaeda and ‘terrorism with a global reach’. In the case of the means, it should be remembered at the outset that a ‘war’ based approach was arguably the only logical choice in the frenetic hours after such an unprecedented attack on US soil and sovereignty, to emphasize the severity of the threat facing the US. However, such a commitment – to a higher profile for the military as an instrument of response and the underlying percep- tion of an administration willing to do everything necessary to ‘win’ its declared war (to ‘take the gloves off ’ as CIA Counter-terrorism Director Cofer Black famously declared) 5 – would ultimately be damaging to both the perception and reputation of the Bush administration, as well as providing further grievances for the Islamist community at large to feed off.

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  The Replication of Violence

  Thoughts on International Terrorism After September 11th 2001

  • Suman Gupta(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  A war against an abstraction that seems to include different experiences and tangible effects and contexts is one that causes little demur. This is a war that can be easily condoned because of its very fuzziness, because it is not clear what such a war consists in – what its means are, what exactly the specific targets are, etc. In a sense such a war is glibly accepted largely because one cannot possibly be sure in what sense this is a war; a war against an abstraction has all the metaphoric power and yet all the sense of underlying security that a loose use of the word ‘war’ with regard to abstractions (such as ‘war against crime’, ‘war on unemployment’, ‘information war’, ‘gender war’, etc.) has instilled in a period of relative stability. The problem here is that for the United States, as was amply clear, the ‘war against international terrorism’ was not actually going to be a war against an abstraction; it soon got translated into a more con-ventional military affair, directed from one political state (the United States) against an international agent (Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups) and more crucially, and in keeping with conven-tional notions of war, against another political state (Taliban-ruled Afghanistan), possibly even against a number of other political states (all those who ‘harbour terrorists’). Collaborating with this was a somewhat different affair from collaborating with a broad war against an abstract ‘international terrorism’. This disturbed a whole Terrorism as War and War Against Terrorism 27 series of unilateral and multilateral agreements and understandings (overt and tacit) that existed between specific states, and a whole series of relationships that existed in the civil and cultural spheres that political states have to be sensitive to.

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  Lessons and Legacies of the War On Terror

  From moral panic to permanent war

  • Gershon Shafir, Everard Meade, William Aceves(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This sweeping characterization of the enemies of the War on Terror includes groups that carried out local acts of terror but had not attacked the United States, as well as “extremists,” a category that includes adversaries that may have never employed terrorist tactics and, in certain cases, have been hostile to al Qaeda’s itself (Gerges 2005). Furthermore, the extension of the war into Iraq has intensified an external amplification cycle between the United States and al Qaeda and served as a major recruitment tool for terrorism in Iraq, Western Europe, and elsewhere (Benjamin and Simon 2005).

  C Disproportionate response

  The simple act of naming the official response to terrorism a war set the stage for a disproportionate response, as the metaphor of war monopolized national discourse. Though he promised to employ diplomacy, intelligence, law enforcement, and “every necessary weapon of war,” President Bush placed these instruments in the context of a war aimed at the “disruption and defeat of the global terror network.” Since 9/11, a variety of terms were used to label the U.S. response, ranging from “war against terrorist groups of global reach,” “War on Terrorism,” to “battle against international terrorism,” but the one that has caught on is “War on Terror.”

  The designation of the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks as war even when the classic conditions of warfare do not obtain had a profound amplifying potential. The War on Terror is akin to other metaphorical wars declared by earlier presidents. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson was the first President to make such a pronouncement by declaring war on poverty, and President Nixon followed suit by waging war on drugs in 1971, both non-tangible and non-state enemies. The gravest danger of metaphorical wars is that they may be transformed into actual war. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the way the United States was drawn into the invasion of Iraq (see Section Four, below).

  D The life cycle of the GWOT

  The catchphrase “War on Terror” was burnt into American consciousness on September 20, 2001 and came to define the Bush–Cheney Administration. When Presidential candidate Senator John Kerry argued in October 2004 that the term War on Terror was inappropriate since the threat of terrorism, though real, has been exaggerated, he was forced to back down (Are We Trapped 2006: 6). Ironically, as he prepared to leave the Pentagon in 2006, Donald Rumsfeld openly questioned both terms of the expression. He suggested that the term war “creates a level of expectation of victory and an ending within the 30 or 60 minutes of a soap opera. And it isn’t going to happen that way.” He also added: “Furthermore, it’s not a War on Terror.” Rather it is “a struggle or a conflict, not against terrorism but against a relatively small number, but terribly dangerous and lethal, violent extremists.” Consequently, “I guess I don’t think I would have called it the War on Terror.”11

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  The George W. Bush Foreign Policy Reader:

  Presidential Speeches with Commentary

  • John W. Dietrich(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2

  The War on Terrorism

   

  On September 11, 2001 President Bush was in Florida at an event promoting education reform. Upon learning that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center in New York, his first thought was that the pilot had suffered a heart attack. Upon hearing that a second plane had crashed into the other trade tower, his views sharply changed and he recalled thinking, “They had declared war on us … we were going to war.”1 After a chaotic day of further attacks and rapid planning, Bush spoke to the country on the evening of 9/11. In his short speech, Bush declared what would become a guiding principle of his presidency: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”2 During the presidential campaign, Bush’s lack of foreign policy experience and possible dependence on advisers were major issues. Strikingly, Bush made this momentous declaration without significant consultation with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, or Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

  The attacks of 9/11 and Bush’s response to them radically altered his presidency, U.S. foreign policy, and the lives of millions of people around the world. In the coming months, Bush and his advisers began to plan out the war, rally the American public, build an international coalition, and fight the first phase of a global War on Terrorism.

  Why War?

  Terrorism—defined as premeditated, politically motivated violence typically perpetrated against civilians—is not a new phenomenon. Historically, it has been used primarily by weaker groups that would otherwise lose conventional battles. In the past, Americans had been victims of sabotage, hijackings, hostage takings, assassinations, and other terrorist acts. In world and U.S. history, terrorist acts have generally been handled as crimes, prompting police investigations and legal cases. Prior to Bush’s presidency, no U.S. president had declared a “war” on terrorism. Bush’s use of this term was an important signal of a new, more aggressive policy and reflected four key ideas: 1) 9/11 was viewed as part of a trend in terrorist actions, not an isolated incident, 2) key observers agreed that the al Qaeda terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden represented a new, more dangerous kind of threat, 3) Bush believed that 9/11 highlighted the ineffectiveness of past antiterrorist actions, and 4) Bush felt a personal, visceral hatred of the terrorists.

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  Uniting America

  Restoring the Vital Center to American Democracy

  • Norton Garfinkle, Daniel Yankelovich(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  141 Chapter 8 Fighting the War on Terrorism Francis Fukuyama In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States embarked on a “War on Terrorism” that within eighteen months unseated two regimes halfway across the world. The war to remove the Taliban regime and oust Al Qaeda from Afghanistan was broadly supported around the world, but the war to topple Saddam Hussein in Iraq was highly controversial and made America’s role in the world one of the chief issues in global politics. The unilateral man-ner in which the latter intervention was undertaken set off a huge backlash, particularly in the Middle East and among America’s Eu-ropean allies. Some contested the legitimacy of the U.S. action, others the judgment of American officials. The underlying terrorist problem will now have to be dealt with in the broader context of an effort to rebuild relationships that were fractured by the Iraq war. America’s hard power is unquestioned, but much of the world questions the legitimacy of the use of that power. Recalibrating the balance between power and legitimacy will be an important task for the United States in the second term of the Bush administration. It is clear that neither the existing structure 142 Security and Liberty of international institutions nor the unilateral exercise of U.S. power will be adequate to deal effectively and legitimately with the kinds of security threats that now exist. Global order requires a different approach to the exercise of American power, as well as new institutions. But the architecture of these institutions will be complex and their possibility dependent on active spon-sorship by the existing large players in the international system. THE NATURE OF THE THREAT The “War on Terrorism” was from the start a misnomer, and it has proven to be a misleading way of characterizing the problem facing the United States in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

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