Rhetorical essay linking historical wars to modern terrorism and U.S. counter‑terrorism perspectives

24 War is no longer limited to soldiers in uniform battling each other. War now includes terrorists who do not wear uniforms, do not represent a sovereign state, and use civilian airplanes and motor vehicles to crash into buildings in order to kill their enemies. Despite these changes in war, many pacifists who cling to the notion that war is immoral continue to forget that soldiers, not sermons, stopped Islam from advancing into Christian Europe at the Battle of Vienna in 1683. It was not sermons, but soldiers, who freed the American colonists from Great Britain’s rule in 1781, and soldiers, not sermons, truly emancipated America’s slaves in 1865 and liberated the survivors of the Nazi death camps in 1945. Counterterrorism is the predominant form of contemporary war. One might say that, after the attack on New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, Americans divided themselves into the September 10th people, the September 12th people, and the September 13th people. The September 13th people blame the United States for the events of September 11th and think that the proper U.S. response is to abandon American “arrogance” and American support of Israel. The September 10th people reject these notions, but think that terrorist acts are crimes that should be countered only by our law- enforcement and intelligence communities. The September 12th people believe that today’s terrorists want to destroy Western civilization, and that acts of terrorism are acts of war that we must counter with mainly military responses. When it comes to terrorism beyond our borders, passages from an article I published in 1979 about the Iran hostage crisis come to my mind: The essential question—and it will cause us great pain in every sense if any of the hostages are harmed or are still being held when these words are printed—is the extent to which the Western world in general, the Third World in particular, and the United States HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023540