Me - At War With Terror

We truly are now at war with terror.

Someone once said we would go to war with terror. We would find where terror was, wage war against terror, and at last defeat terror. To be honest, some of us laughed at that person. After all, who can fight an idea? How can anyone fight a label, an emotion, an intangible?

But whether that person was right – or we simply found the war we went looking for – we are now at war with terror. Every day it seems we hear of this new tragedy, that new affront, those new foes. They scream into the television cameras. Strikes occur to us and our allies, at home and abroad. People really do hate us. And why shouldn’t they? We went to war with terror, and (not entirely by accident) we instead ended up attacking our fellow human beings.

Someone once said he who is without sin may throw the first stone. We who won our country by fighting off an oppressive overseas regime must always remember: One person's terrorist is another person's rebel hero. Why do we think we can call people terrorists? We speak as if we have never done anything wrong, as if we are without sin. Meanwhile no ideology is safe from potentially radicalizing. The world's mature religions have all had some group in their past that hurt people. Sometimes those groups were unhinged splinter factions, sometimes they were the mainstream. Terror is not a person, not a group, not an ideology.

Terror is when people are afraid.

Lots of things scare us. Some people fear more things, other people less. Terror is when someone does something and people feel fear. A so called act of terror is first perpetrated on the tens to hundreds of direct victims, but the real target is the thousands to millions of people who hear about what happened and feel fear. Fear is the primary goal and everything else, even murder, is a means to that end.

For example, consider this textbook case of terrorism. Black people being lynched in the United States of America was terrorism. With each act, a) one or more people died and b) several hundred people or more felt fear. Fear was a tool to keep all other black people in line, to keep them quiet and working … And is it any wonder that people today are protesting about cops shooting black kids? I'm not saying it's intended that way or is done with any intent at all, but that might be how the Black Lives Matter organization sees the matter and that perception is valid.

As an aside, what if murder were the primary goal?  After all, one terrorist might kill a hundred people before they are killed themselves. That sounds dangerous. But consider that, worldwide, hundreds are born every minute. Millions are born every year in our country alone. Mass murder by an individual or small group does not make a dent in any sizable population. Larger groups have tried it (ie the Holocaust) but found the process slow and exhausting. And that's if they're not stopped first, because many have been stopped and don't get remembered. Murder is not the goal. Fear is.

Terror and war hurts everyone.

Terror does a lot as a weapon. Fear spreads like a pandemic, and yet is very precise, only hitting the people who feel they have a reason to fear. When people are afraid they become blind to various realities and possibilities, making them easier to take advantage of. And any act of terror from a small group dealt to a large world power looks like a massive black eye, bringing in support of all kinds. The weapon known as terror is what we must fight above all else, not the people or groups.

Additionally, terror and the act of killing seems to be a self-destructive weapon to the people using it, and I'm not just talking about suicide bombers. People who start out with a violent mental condition (Disclaimer: very few people with mental conditions are violent) do not have a great track record of doing much before the law steps in. As for sane people, many have set out to change the world with terror, only to discover hurting other people hurts you. PTSD is a real and terrible problem for soldiers, and probably wasn't diagnosed before modern times. Terrorist groups that function seem to have a few people at the top who make the decisions, and an endless supply of fighters below them who do the actual hurting. It's no surprise that we target leaders, not soldiers.

We must defeat our fear, not our foes.

Which makes terror both simplistically easy and uncomfortably difficult to beat. We just have to not lose to fear. And what is fear? The basic animal response to fear is flight or fight. When you want to run and hide OR charge forward and fight, that's fear pushing you. To beat fear we have to not act like animals. We will still feel fear. But rather than run far away or march into combat, we must choose a better response. It is our fear alone which tells us there are no better options.

We know running away won’t solve all the world’s problems. But there are also good reasons not to fight. You may remember from physics how force creates an equal and opposite reactionary force. And while people are not so tidy, it remains true that the more force we bring, the more people will rise to fight us. Consider the small scale: Insults are often met with insults. If you punch someone, they might punch you back. If a person commits murder, the victim’s family and friends and society expects the murderer to go to prison and maybe pay with their life.

The larger scale is no different. When we kill one “enemy combatant” another will be inspired to take their place. When we are racist or denigrate a religion, some neutral people from those groups will decide to fight us. When we try to control a “hostile region” with force, the area will become more violent towards us. Force creates an equal and opposite reactionary force, and that's why force is not the answer. These tactics are how we have always fought wars, but we have to change how we fight.

We are not yet winning the war.

This war with terror is not like the wars of old. For ages countries have sent armies to fight each other, and the winner could decide how the loser would be punished. Might made right. But we're not having a border dispute with terror. We haven't made war with terror to seal a trade deal. We can't plunder the riches of terror. All we have done is fight nebulous organizations which continually adapt to get better at causing us terror.

We've gotten better too, but only at killing people. Consider that new weapon in war, the drone. At very little risk to our soldier's life, we can kill many people. But even before it kills a single person, the mere existence of our drones inspire many people to take up arms against us. And remember the fruitless task of simply killing people. We are currently losing the war on terrorists thanks to our own advanced technology.

So should we give up, pull out our troops and isolate ourselves inside our borders? The problem is the people radicalized in response to our force will remain radicalized. The groups formed to oppose us have become stable, and will continue to evolve and become more dangerous with or without our presence. We have to keep fighting now, while changing how we fight, until (following the theory of opposing force to its logical conclusion) the force formed to oppose some force is one we can live with. Consider the local armies we've been training so they can bring peace back to their own countries again. And in the meantime the real war with terror needs to be won.

We fight this war within ourselves.

There are people who act well – and people who act badly – in a war with terror. The people who have helped us control our fear have acted well. They have tried to teach us empathy is always better than fear, and the only thing to fear is fear itself. With their help we can see beyond our fear to the individual humans opposing us, struggling with problems we are ignorant of, problems we are not without some guilt in causing.

Then there are people who pick out a specific ethnic group or religion as the source of all terror, the people whose poll numbers and television ratings go up every time some new attack happens, the people who say they can stop the attacks if only we will pay or trust or vote for them. These people busy themselves telling us who and what and how we should fear. No one needs to name these people. They know who they are. The word for these people is strong but merits saying: war profiteers.

How will we win our war with terror? We must feel empathy for the people who commit those terrible acts, and seek a more complete understanding of why they do what they do. When did we forget the world is not black and white? And we must stop war profiteering, in ourselves first before anyone else. When did we forget war will not end if someone profits from it? But most importantly we must conquer our own fear. When did we forget our flag would remain flying through the night?

We are not fighting the war with terror against any person or group or religion. Soldiers and guns and bombs cannot win this war. We fight this war within ourselves.