Five year Remembrance: how to end a War on Terror?

Some five years after the most atrocious terrorist attack ever, officials of the US Administration are still busy defending the War that was waged in its aftermath. What they should be spending all their energies on instead is making a defense to end it.

The tragic sequence of events in the past years, including the terrible event in New York, should by now demonstrate in all clarity to everyone that – really – a War on Terror is a contradiction in terminis. It cannot be waged because when you do, it can never be stopped.

Terrorism is not about conquering new land or expanding a country’s economy, or about sorting out old differences between nations, which is what most of the true wars in history have been about. Most of all, terrorism is not about winning any war in the first place. So fighting it in a warlike fashion in actual fact is submitting one self to defeat from the start.

By now, much of what the US Government has done in its fight against terrorism has been declassified as illegal, torturous and ineffective, in short: a demonstration of atrocity that gradually equals the horror it claims to stop, this regardless the actual success in preventing new terrorists threats, which belongs to the realm of crime-fighting (not War).

The only way to end a War on Terror
is by not starting it

Terrorism is the contemporary expression of a people’s outrage against others, against – what they see as – infidels. As long as we continue to counter this simply by adding a terror of our own, we will never get to the point of truly responding to that outrage.

It is time we start to do that. It is time the Western World, the US and Europe together, reconsider every element of our today’s world that feeds the outrage of others against us, and start to make amends. Not by using intimidating language or by associating Muslims with ‘fascists’, or by ignoring the different cultural, economic and political realities in other countries, but by fundamentally questioning all these and other factors which today seem to be the core make-up of the world we wish to defend.

All of us were truly shocked on the 11th of September 2001. All of us would wish for peace – and closure. But such closure will be very difficult to achieve if we are still out to win a battle that we lost already, and not see the real challenge that we should address.