Waging war on something described by an abstract noun was never going
to work. A US Naval officer recently said in relation to the "war on
terror": "words matter". Badly chosen words distort policies, smudge
aims, destroy effectiveness. This is what is happening in both wars.

The cut'n'paste use of "non-appeasement" is a good example. Back in
the day, "non-appeasement" had a clearly defined target and the Allied
armies could shot at any "black hat" with impunity. This is what
soldiers are for. I don't like it but, within clearly defined limits,
I accept it. With the war on terror (and drugs) there isn't a clearly
defined target or limit; to pretend there is clearly undermines any
solution. We can see the resultant massive distortions of civil
policies and liberties; equally we can see the endless misery
inflicted by "wars without end".

It is my opinion that conflicts can only ever have political
solutions. See NI for example. Or South Africa. Or Nigeria. Or Burma.
Or Malaya. Or Algeria. I wouldn't ever standdown the forces that
protect however I would appreiciate the poltical party that started
looking at solutions for the current conflicts that smacked of
something other than firepower.

With the "war on drugs", language has been used to create a "war". 
The language used has emphasized the military aspects of the problem;
military problems require military solutions. So, yes, in spite of the
fact that there is no objective enemy,  a war has been created: the
drug producers are the enemy and the citizenry are their auxilliaries.
Armed forces and intelligence outfits which were at a loose end after
the cold war finished, have been mobilized against the enemy.
Firepower has been brought to bear where political solutions can only
ever be effective.

In this respect, the shape of possible solutions to both "wars" look
remarkably similar to me.

Roger.

On 7/9/05, Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
> 


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