What we don't know about terrorism.

• Author: Howell, Llewellyn D.
• Position: World Watcher - Column

HIS BOOK Worse Than Watergate, former Nixon presidential de John Dean argues that the American people know little about terrorism and the U.S. war against it. Much of this, he contends, is because the Bush Administration does not want us to know. The Executive Branch's wish to keep information from the public may be the bulk of the problem, but we, as American citizens, have not been asking the questions, either. We need to.

Our failure to identify terrorists and to distinguish between what is terrorism and what is not strikes at the heart of matters dealing with the Abu Ghraib prison abuses. The Administration argues that "terrorists" are not subject to the strict controls of the Geneva Convention as they apply to "prisoners of war." In the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, the President has stated explicitly that the Geneva Convention applies to the war in Iraq (therefore, these are not terrorists that we are dealing with), and the war in Iraq is part of the war on terrorism (therefore, these are terrorists that we are dealing with). Which is it?

Bush and his cohorts have obscured the terminology and treated the initiated war against Iraq as simply an arm of the war on terrorists, despite their many post-Abu Ghraib disclaimers. Neither U.S. forces nor the American public have a clear idea of what it is that we are fighting against. There is no clear terminology, strategy, objective, or thinking.

Let us look for a moment at the terminology problems provoked by George W. Bush and their implications in developing strategy. There are three assertions being made about terrorists that have gone without response, despite their continual ambiguous and profligate use: terrorists are evil, hate freedom, and are uncivilized. What, exactly, is the President talking about? Do we care? We should; American soldiers and many more Iraqis are dying based on pursuit of people with these traits.

Let us take them in turn. How do we determine if someone is evil? If a terrorist is someone who is identifiably evil, we have to be able to recognize either evil itself or evil acts. Evil is a religious term. There is not a concrete characteristic of human being identified as evil, as we might have with, say, black hair. Somewhere in evil there is a devil, a supernatural being or force that motivates humans to counter some definition of what is good. If what we have against Al Qaeda is that they are evil, then this is a religious war.

Next question. What is freedom such that...