I think the war on drugs is a different case in many ways: it's
ultimately a civil war, of the state against its citizens, and an
absolutely assymetric war too in that the users (without whom there
would be no drugs, and hence no war) are generally non-combatants
(unlike the suppliers, who when you go far enough up the chain tend to
be armed to the teeth).

Like the war on terror, the war on drugs multiplies and entrenches
abusive institutions, parasitic extensions of the state; it corrodes
liberties, corrupts language, and distorts social relations, mimicking
the very thing it opposes: this is your state on drugs. If I could
wave a magic wand and stop only one of the two wars right now, I'd
stop the war on drugs; free the people it has incarcerated, pull the
rug out from under the paramilitaries it has funded and supported, and
purge public discourse of all the moralistic bullshit it has
generated. You could rehabilitate countless addicts with the same
money, and perhaps address some of the social circumstances that
encouraged many of them to become addicts in the first place.

Given a second wave of the wand, I'd hesitate before demobilizing the
forces involved in the war on terror. People inflict the damage of
drug addiction on their own lives through their own voluntary actions
- although it's often not apparent to them at the time that this is
what the choices they make on a daily basis amount to (and they might
in any case be too depressed to care). Moralising about personal
responsibility doesn't really address the subtleties of the *process*
of addiction, but whether or not one chooses or consents to become an
addict, the actions that lead to addiction are usually volitional in
the sense that one could always have done otherwise. No-one who was
not in some sense *free to addict themselves to drugs* (and hence free
not to) could become an addict merely through proximity to certain
substances. (Has anyone ever become a nicotine addict through passive
smoking?)

I suppose that the person blown up by a terrorist bomb could equally
well have chosen not to get on that bus that morning, but in general
only a suicidal person would get on a bus they knew was going to be
blown up, whereas people often take drugs that they know cause other
people to become addicted. (All hemlock users are mortal; Socrates
takes hemlock; Socrates is mortal). In any case, the point is that
drugs don't kill people all by themselves - people have to kill
themselves with the drugs - whereas terrorists do. Unlike drugs, which
do not envisage, plan and execute murders through deliberate malice,
terrorists act with conscious and consistent malicious intent. They
are thus an *enemy*, in a sense in which drugs are not; and faced with
an enemy who intends to kill you, you are not free to decline the
offer of their hostility. The war on terror - the war of the
terrorists on us - is an objective fact whether or not we choose to
engage in it, and on whatever terms.

There are many possible forms of mobilization, however, and I can see
the point in an "anti-war" critique that acknowledges, first of all,
that we are willy-nilly at war with the terrorists, but nevertheless
criticises a specific military response on moral and/or strategic
grounds. Alas, that wasn't the critique we got from many of the
leaders of the anti-war movement in this country, who were more
interested in demonizing "BushAndBlair", bandying around nihilist
moral equivalences, and pallying up to apologists for anti-semitism
and jihadism. The root of the problem as far as I can see is the
opportunism of groups like the SWP, who have proved very effective at
seizing platforms based on broad movements and using them to
disseminate their own fringe ideology. Political excrescences like
Galloway thrive in the environment they have polluted.

Ken Livingstone's appeal to the unity of working Londoners the other
day reminded me of Orwell's claim, in war-time, that socialism (as he
understood it) was the only effective way of opposing fascism: only a
movement based on solidarity among the working classes would have
sufficient moral and practical strength to defeat the fascist enemy.
That may have been a little romantic, but it's true that there's a
gaping chasm between the forces mobilized by BushAndBlair and the
forces that a truly democratic opposition to jihadism might have
brought into play. There is a lost opportunity to be mourned there -
when you think of how it might have been after September 11, of what a
real "coalition of the willing" might have looked like, it's clear
that we squandered the best chance we're likely to get of defeating
jihadist terrorism in our lifetime.

Dominic