ABSTRACT
Right after the heinous and devastating 9/11 attacks, high ranking members of the Bush administration, including, Vice-President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and President George W. Bush, himself, began using the phrases “war against terrorism” and later the “global war on terrorism.”1 These officials did not call for war on a country, on a government, or on a regime, or on insurgents or on rebels. They called for war on a thing, yet not a thing really, because terrorism itself cannot be picked up or touched or seen or destroyed. We can certainly see what individuals or groups of individuals or governments or countries can do. Here are a few examples of terrorism, mostly committed by states: (1) Turkey’s murdering over 600,000 Armenians in 1915; (2) Japan’s indiscriminately bombing civilians in Nanking; (3) Nazi Germany’s murdering over six million Jews, gypsies and gays; (4) Stalin’s murdering millions of its own citizens; (5) Pol Pot’s murdering over a million of his own people; (6) the Hutus’ genocidal killing of the Tutsis; (7) the Bosnian Serbs’ ethnic cleansing of Muslims; (8) Serbia under Slobodan Milosˇevic´, killing, raping and expelling Albanian Kosvars in mass; and (9) the despotic Sudan regime’s killing of innocents in Darfur.2 The list goes, unfortunately, on and on, and includes, among others, non-state terrorism, the 9/11 attacks, the 3/11 Madrid attacks, the 7/7 attacks in London, the 7/11 attacks in Mumbai, and the 12/27 assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi in which 20 others also lost their lives.
