The "War" on "Terror"

Aren't "quotation marks" fun? You can "do" so many things with them. What does it really mean to put something in ""? Am I being funny? Sarcastic? Serious? Am I actually quoting someone? All good questions. I'm not sure which is right. What I do know is that today I want to talk about the "War" on "Terror."

War conjures images, most of them ugly and horrific of distant battlefields strewn with the bodies of heroes and villains. In this sense we are indeed at war. American soldiers are fighting and dying in faraway places. They do so heroically, combating an enemy that is determined and propagates a mythology of evil.

However there is more to this than the traditional war being fought. The "War" on "Terror" is much more than a bang-bang fight. It is a battle for the hearts and minds of millions of people spread throughout the world. We could go on killing Muslim extremists in perpetuity and never win this war, which is why the "War" on "Terror" is neither a traditional war, nor is it being fought against "Terror" - whatever that means.

Like the Cold "War," the "War" on "Terror" will not be won with guns but with ideas. Our democratic and capitalist society, despite its flaws, was greater than a Communist society for decades and it is greater than the oppressive theocracies facing it down today. Though our might may stem from our bombs, our greatness does not. Winning this war will require showing the people of Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and many other countries that the United States isn't about oppression. We're not at war against Islam and the such. We're very good at killing the bad guys; we're not nearly good enough at convincing the people of other countries that we're trustworthy.

What about "terror?" Are we fighting terror? Are we fighting terrorists? When we talk about the War on Terror, what do we actually mean? Again, we can find comparisons in the Cold War. The terrorists against whom we claim to be fighting are evil people, deserving of what is coming their way. However, many of our enemies aren't necessarily awful human beings. The goatherd who picks up a Kalashnikov in Afghanistan may simply be buying into an ideology of hatred that he is bombarded with daily by the real bad guys, the Osama bin Ladens of the world.

People then, are simply the manifestation of the idea that we are actually combating. Many - though certainly not all - of those people find themselves in terrible socioeconomic conditions. They feel oppressed by the United States, sometimes justifiably, other times only in their imaginations. They fail to see that the people recruiting them are far more oppressive and evil than we could ever be, but their plight is understandable, even if it isn't justifiable.

To win this "war" will take far more than the billions of dollars and thousands of lives it has already cost us. It will take wholesale reanalysis of what we're up against and how to best combat those people. I'm not alone in thinking that Osama bin Laden and his ilk would have a lot more trouble finding recruits among a group of people who were well-educated and incorporated into the world economy, who had a say in their own government and who were allowed the freedoms we enjoy in America. To win this war we'll need our guns, but we'll also need a whole lot more. We'll need to understand the enemy and we'll need to unravel the fabric of his mythology with our goodwill while making sure our guns are aimed at the real bad guys and not the people trapped in the middle.