When Terrorism Becomes War

by John Thompson

September 13, 2001

The concerted assault of September 11^th on the United States is well beyond the accepted bounds of terrorism. Many people around the world have described the destruction of the World Trade Centre, and the attacks — both delivered and attempted — on the US military and political command structure, as "war" rather than terrorism. They are right.

There is no universally accepted definition of terrorism, especially as terror by itself has been a weapon of war for its own sake and an instrument of government by totalitarian leaders. However, terrorism is widely taken to imply the use of terror tactics by small groups, usually clandestine in nature, for political purposes. It is not a new phenomenon and its antecedents can be found in Classical Greece and Rome, in the Bible, and in the small Shi’ite splinter sect that gave rise to the term "Assassin" in the 11^th Century Middle East.

"War" is easily recognizable to most of us. The tradition of war in the Western World is normally assumed to represent violent conflict between nations, and is a state of affairs that is distinct from "Peace". However, this is a tradition that has little meaning in the rest of the world, and most wars are have always had non-state actors (guerrillas, tribal militias, private armies, etc.) on one or more sides. Yet war remains easily recognizable as being openly conducted by large groups of belligerents who are more focused on real death and destruction than symbolic attacks or extremist protest politics.

Naturally, in any field of human activity as complicated as conflict, all definitions are inexact, and there are no boundaries that clearly delineate between "guerrilla", "criminal cartel" and "terrorist". A single group can be all these things at once. Likewise, the boundary between war and terrorism is also a wide gray frontier.

We take terrorism to be the use of violence for the purposes of political communications and usually to be symbolic in nature. The terrorist who firebombs an airline ticket office is attacking the corporation and country that the office represents and is saying — "take me seriously, I am dangerous and should be heard." While terrorism routinely involves the murder of civilians in ones and twos, or even occasionally in their hundreds, death and destruction on the scale of September 11^th is in another category of violence.

The attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 killed about 2,500 American citizens and caused tens of millions of dollars in damage. The death toll for September 11th is not yet known, but might surpass 10,000. The material damage will certainly be in the billions of dollars and indirect damage to the US and global economies will be in the hundreds of billions.

It should also be remembered that dozens, if not hundreds, of Canadians died in these attacks too. Canada went to war five times in the 20^th Century before being harmed in such a damaging manner.

An attack of this magnitude is far beyond the normal bounds of terrorism, and not just because of the appalling number of deaths involved. The author of this attack had launched a very real assault on the Western economies by attacking the World Trade Centre. The other attacks imply an attempt to damage America’s command structure. This is something that goes far beyond a simple pipe bomb or Molotov cocktail.

Democratic nations can withstand some degree of terrorism. Britain has suffered no real harm to its economy and democratic traditions in coping with the IRA, let alone the Animal Liberation Front. Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and the US have likewise withstood other terrorist groups — even when truck bombs and the destruction of jetliners have occasionally killed hundreds of people. Attacks like that of September 11^th are beyond any degree of toleration.

When the World’s leaders commiserated in the media on September 11^th, President Putin of Russia made an especially telling remark. He called terrorism like this an attack upon civilization. Incidentally, the Russians summoned up the rage and will to crush the Chechens after they started collapsing entire apartment buildings with time bombs.

There had been concern among Western security and emergency preparedness experts over the inevitable use of weapons of mass destruction — biological, chemical or even nuclear — by terrorists at some time in the future. However, nobody outside of the think-tank community had really thought about what might be an appropriate response when such an attack finally occurred.

In the end, terrorists didn’t suddenly appear with anthrax spores, VX nerve gas, or their own atomic bomb. Instead, they used hijacked aircraft with near-full fuel loads to act as improvised fuel-air explosive bombs on selected targets. Instead of having guided missiles of their own, they went back to the very first ‘cruise missiles’ — aircraft flown by suicide volunteers.

The response to an assault of this magnitude does not appear to have been pre-planned. The perpetrators of this attack declared war on the United States specifically, and the Western World generally.

With this de facto declaration of war, the men behind the attack have also put themselves beyond our justice systems. Instead of the restraint associated with police and courts, the response must be the violence of warriors. Let those responsible for the attacks of September 11^th reap the whirlwind that they have sown… they can’t say they didn’t ask for it.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: institute@mackenzieinstitute.com

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