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(1) There can be no war on terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, or at most a strategy of assymetric warfare. A "war on terrorism" makes as much sense as a "war on sneak attacks" or a "war on blitzkriegs."
(2) There can be no war on terror. War is terror.
Thus, it is obvious, from a moment's reflection, that the dominant political narrative of the past six years is-and has to be-a lie.
Al Qaeda was a specific organization that attacked us on 9/11. As a non-state actor, there could be no war on al Qaeda, either. We could, however, obliterate them from the face of the earth-either the smart way or the dumb way-if we had any interest in doing so. We did not.
Since I began front-paging last weekend, I've been working off of an underlying theme-that opposition to the Iraq War-however important-is not the key to a genuine realignment, but only one part of the puzzle. I wrote several diaries about the importance of economics, and this is, in a way, yet another one of them, because it's about empire and neo-feudalism. But it moves the two subjects substantially closer together.
The thesis here is simple: We are not fighting to defeat terror(ism), but to spread it. We just want 100% market share, that's all. And until the Democrats are willing to stand up and say this, in no uncertain terms, our realignment will not be complete. So if you think stabbing MoveOn in the back was bad, we have much, much farther to go than just putting that shit to rest.
Impossible as this may seem, there is a precedent for it-the abolition of slavery. Although the Republican Party originally emerged in opposition to the political power of slave states, it was not clearly committed to abolition when Lincoln won the presidency in 1860. And yet, five years later, when the Civil War ended, so, too, did slavery. Many things came together to make that transformation possible, but the key dynamic, without which all else would have failed, was that the forces of slavery were put on the defensive, and ultimately discredited themselves, even in the eyes of a white northern power structure that was still deeply stained by its own racist assumptions. And this is the key for us as well-we must place the forces we face on the defensive, and do so so decisively that they, too, ultimately discredited themselves, even in the eyes of those in high places who share certainly deeply-held prejudices in common with them.
I take as my text a recent story on Alternate that updates a story that Project Censored selected as the #1 censored story for 2002-2003-a story for which I was one of five people who wrote about it.
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