Terrorism: Politics by Other Means.

• Author: Howell, Llewellyn D.
• Position: Brief Article

THE BOMBINGS of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were not new events for Americans nor were they the most proximate instances of terrorism that the U.S. has encountered. The surprise for all was the rapid and extra-legal response by Washington. For the first time, the U.S. had entered into the ongoing war against terrorism on the same grounds as employed by the terrorists.

The missile responses against terrorist-linked facilities in Sudan and Afghanistan were thought of by many as somehow "uncivilized." There was no warning. These military attacks were undertaken without submitting them to the formal American processes of war-making. Sovereign territory was invaded without regard to consideration of the nations involved.

The rules of war have been undergoing a process of degradation since World War II. As war has shifted from being between nations to being conflicts within nations and between ethnic, racial, cultural, and religious groups, the enforcers of the rules of war--national governments and international organizations--have been powerless to intervene. The rules have fallen one by one.

Weapons with field testing (or actual use) include chemical and biological agents. Civilian women are the explicit targets of rape and sexual molestation, with the clear intent of destruction of cultures and their will to fight on. Captured soldiers are subject to mass execution and burial in unmarked graves, lost forever to families and societies.

Terrorism is merely the downward linear extension of such conduct. It is indeed a degradation as relations among human beings deteriorate in an inexorable regression toward the primitive.

Military historians often note the argument of Prussian Gen. Carl von Clausewitz, who, in his three-volume On War (1911), contended that "war is ... a continuation of policy by other means. It is not merely a political act, but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a conduct of political intercourse by other means." It is just as easy--or perhaps easier--to argue the opposite, as English philosopher Thomas Hobbes did more than four centuries ago, that the primitive and natural state of man is violence. Government and the rule of law is the civilizing veneer, the more "developed" state of man. War is not a "continuation of political intercourse," but, rather, a falling back from political acts to acts of base violence. The use of terrorism is, in this line of thinking, a further...