CNN.com is running a post of mine about what we choose to remember about the
Boston Marathon bombing. (For some reason, the editorial staff changed the title to “How did Boston Marathon attack change you?” when it’s really about how we choose to let the attack change us. Oh well.)

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Steve Coll has a good piece in the New Yorker about the importance of Al Qaeda as a brand:

…as long as there are bands of violent Islamic radicals anywhere in the world who find it attractive to call themselves Al Qaeda, a formal state of war may exist between Al Qaeda and America. The Hundred Years War could seem a brief skirmish in comparison.

This is a different category of issue than the oft-criticized “war on terror,” which is a war against a tactic, not against an enemy. The war against Al Qaeda implies that there is a structurally unified enemy organization. How do you declare victory against a group that refuses to enforce its trademark?

In this, the war against Al Qaeda (which is quite preferable to a war against terror — and I think Steve agrees) is similar to the war on cancer. Cancer is not a single disease and the various things we call cancer are unlikely to have a single cause and thus are unlikely to have a single cure (or so I have been told). While this line of thinking would seem to reinforce politicians’ referring to terrorism as a “cancer,” the same applies to dessert. Each of these terms probably does have a single identifying characteristic, which means they are not classic examples of Wittgensteinian family resemblances: all terrorism involves a non-state attack that aims at terrifying the civilian population, all cancers involve “unregulated cell growth” [thank you Wikipedia!], and all desserts are designed primarily for taste not nutrition and are intended to end a meal. In fact, the war on Al Qaeda is actually more like the war on dessert than like the war on cancer, because just as there will always be some terrorist group that takes up the Al Qaeda name, there will always be some boundary-pushing chef who declares that beefy jerky or glazed ham cubes are the new dessert. You can’t defeat an enemy that can just rebrand itself.

I think that Steve Coll comes to the wrong conclusion, however. He ends his piece this way:

Yet the empirical case for a worldwide state of war against a corporeal thing called Al Qaeda looks increasingly threadbare. A war against a name is a war in name only.

I agree with the first sentence, but I draw two different conclusions. First, this has little bearing on how we actually respond to terrorism. The thinking that has us attacking terrorist groups (and at times their family gatherings) around the world is not made threadbare by the misnomer “war against Al Qaeda.” Second, isn’t it empirically obvious that a war against a name is not a war in name only?

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At the Reagan Airport (would I be jumping the gun to start calling it the Obama Airport already?), Clear has a little square of space right before the security inspection stations. For $200/year, you can skip the long lines and go for the exceedingly short line to Clear. There the uniformed employees will compare some of your body parts (iris and fingerprints) with the information on the Clear card you present. Once you’re through, you can go straight to the Conveyor of Transparencies where you rejoin the hoi polloi so that the TSA can make sure your shoes aren’t on fire.

What I don’t get is why Clear has to give you an extra special biometric scan. Why can’t they just do what the TSA folks do: Look at your drivers license, look at you, and wave you on through? All I can figure is that Clear’s market research showed that people would be more willing to pay to cut in line — which is what Clear is really about — if there’s a pretense that it enhances security.

As far as whether all the fancy-shmancy biometrics — heck, my face is the only biometric I need! — actually increases security, if I were an evil do-er, I’d just bribe a Clear airport employee. They don’t go through security clearances the way TSA folks do, at least according to the Clear employee I asked.

[Tags: airports security tsa terrorism line_cutters ]

June 22, 2009: Clear just went out of business.

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President Bush’s first official response to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto was to call it a “cowardly” act. Despicable, horrible, anti-democratic, ungodly, of course…for this particular murder we could exhaust the vocabulary of condemnation. But of all the possible negative adjectives, “cowardly,” seems one of the least appropriate. Why did Bush resort to that particular term of opprobrium? And what does it say about how we’re framing the “war on terror”?

Bush routinely characterizes terrorist acts as cowardly. In October, 2000, Bush called the attack on a US destroyer in Yemen cowardly. On September 12, 2001, he called the attacks the day before cowardly. He called the 2002 Bali explosion cowardly. He (through the State Dept.) called the 2003 Mumbai bombings cowardly. In 2004, the White House called the murder of Iraqi Governing Council Chairman Izzadine Salim cowardly. Bush called the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samara in 2006 cowardly. Hell, his father called the Pan Am bombing of 1988 cowardly,. and as vice president, in 1983 he called those behind the Lebanese bombing cowards.

But, if cowards are those who shirk their duty out of fear for their own safety, terrorists who blow themselves up are not cowards: They do their (perceived) duty without regard to their personal safety, as everyone from Bill Maher to Peter Preston of The Guardian have pointed out. Even if we believe that they do so because they think they’re going to be rewarded in the afterlife, by that logic we would have to call even the bravest faithful Christian soldier a coward, too. And that clearly wouldn’t be right. You don’t have to be soft on terrorism to think that “coward” is just the wrong term here.

It makes a little more sense when Bush is talking about the terrorist leaders, not the actual suicide bombers. For example, Osama Bin Laden “assures [his followers] that . . . this is the road to paradise — though he never offers to go along for the ride,” Bush said in October, 2005. Of course, Bush himself isn’t at the front of the troops in Afghanistan, and when Bush dared the enemy to “bring it on,” he was safely away from where it might be brought. (Osama Bin Laden, on the other hand, has led soldiers in combat.)

So, why hurl the “coward” term at terrorists — leaders and followers — when there are so many other terms they deserve?

Part of it is simple name-calling: We don’t want suicidal terrorism to appear glamorous so we say it’s cowardly. Spin.

And Bush’s special psychology is undoubtedly at work. During the Vietnam war, Bush failed at the same military role in which his father had performed heroically. Characterizing others as cowards perhaps helps Bush Jr. strut past his own weakness. This may be part of Bush’s disdain of “nuance,” which itself may part of a nature that is terrified by temptation and the lure of shadows. But since Bush is not the only one to think of terrorists as cowards — for example, Bill Clinton called the terrorist attack in Yemen cowardly — more is at play than personal psychology.

The best I can figure, Bush and the other leaders who routinely refer to terrorists as cowards are working from a schoolyard metaphor. Terrorists are the kids who whack you on the back of the head and run away instead of putting up their dukes and fighting. They fight the way they do because they lack the courage to stand their ground.

But this is a mistake. Terrorists don’t use terrorism because they’re cowards. They use it because it’s a relatively effective technique for fighting military powers that have overwhelming conventional strength. To fight terrorism, we need to be clear-headed about it, not indulge in a nostalgia that wishes the terrorists would just come out and fight like men because we know how to beat them on yesterday’s battlefield.

Then there’s the plain old machismo of it. Both sides in this struggle have accused the other of being girly-men. Bush in 2005 said that Zarqawi has called Americans “the most cowardly of God’s creatures.” In April 2006, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir in a tape called Bush a coward. How much of our blood has been spent proving America’s bravery…to a bunch of people we keep saying are cowards?

“Coward” is just a word, but there are consequences to our insistence on applying it to people who are out to murder us. It misjudges their motives and worldview, which can lead to us misjudging their intentions and plans. Worse, in a single word it presents our own worldview in which the old frame is still operative: We are fighting a war, wars are fought by armies, armies fight in the open, and soldiers who don’t are cowards. The language of cowardice is thus part of the language of war that is deeply — and perhaps disastrously — inappropriate for the deadly struggle in which we are engaged.

[Tags: bush politics terrorism.]

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