TCH News

Issue date: 12/11/06 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: Time Magazine Terrorism

Nearly 3,000 Americans died in the September 11 attacks, the worst act of terrorism ever committed on American soil. So to war with terrorism the US went. Storming the Middle East with trumpets blaring and guns blazing, the cavalry charged in to liberate a people from their terrorist oppressors. With Saddam Hussein toppled and democracy brought to an exploited people, the Americans should have been greeted as heroes, as liberators. They managed to pull it all off with only a scant estimate of 50,000 Iraqi civilians dead. (Some estimates put the number much higher.) Even if it is not called terrorism, the acts of the US military walk a very thin line with terrorism.

"It's a gray line. This is one government invading another; I don't know whether you could define it as terrorism. I think that's something intelligent people could debate," said Stacie Golin, SCCC Professor of Sociology. The US Military defines "the damage and destruction of targets or personnel not considered as lawful military targets" as collateral damage. The dead do not have time to argue semantics. Bullets are indiscriminate. A bomb will not differentiate between a civilian and an insurgent. This responsibility still falls to human judgment.

Many Americans make the argument that it is hard to define the enemy because we do not truly know who we are fighting. An insurgent could be anyone, at anytime. Comparisons to the Vietcong's use of children in warfare are drawn. Is this justification for deliberately destroying Iraq's infrastructure? At what point does wanton bombing of health care and educational facilities turn from a tactical military decision into a full out act of terrorism? Does the arguing of semantics really change anything?

A 2004 UNICEF report stated "at least 200 children are dying every day. They are dying from malnutrition, a lack of clean water and a lack of medical equipment and drugs to cure easily treatable diseases." It is not insurgents who are dying because of strategic bombing; it is the very people who were trying to save. How does this act differ from a terrorist tainting an American water supply?

A particularly devastating attack on Fallujah in 2004 left 2,085 Iraqis dead. Collateral damage included an emergency hospital, a medical supplies warehouse, and over 30 medical personnel. In a tactical decision, the US cut off water and electricity to the city's 300,000 citizens. The attack left the city with "catastrophic" health conditions and the US prevented the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (the Iraqi Red Cross) from entering the city. Eyewitnesses claimed most of the casualties to be women and children, not to mention the children who died in the wake because of starvation and dehydration.

"My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators," said Vice President Dick Cheney during a "Meet the Press" TV broadcast on March 16,2003. Liberators, freedom fighters, war on terrorism, war of terrorism. The simple changing of words brings about vast changes in connotative meaning. Words have an incredible power to manipulate and arouse feeling. The US liberated Iraq. The US has assaulted Iraq with malicious acts of terror. The two sentences have immensely different connotations, but could they both not be used to describe the same thing? Does calling it an act of liberation free the US government from responsibility? Does arguing semantics make a difference? To quote Stanley Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket, "The dead know only one thing; it is better to be alive."

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