The War on Stuff, and also Things.

The War on Stuff, and also Things.
By Henry.

Before I start with the argument proper of this piece, I feel I should explain myself to pre-empt any misunderstanding of my intention. This commentary looks critically at certain policies currently active in the United States, and to varying degrees in other countries; I am an Australian and have never lived in or visited America. However, this is not going to be a diatribe against “those dumb Yanks”. There has been a lot of that sort of thing recently, from people within the country as well as outside of it, and it helps no one. This is not an attack against the American people, or even on their current government. It’s merely my view on certain attitudes that have informed policy-making, and though it particularly focuses on the US, much of my argument applies to humanity in general. With that out of the way, we can begin.

Currently many countries in the world, including my own, are involved in what is known as the War on Terror, a campaign spearheaded by the Bush administration, starting after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. While I am sure that all the nations involved are sincere in their desire to prevent terrorism and punish those responsible, it is America that provides much of the driving force and America that most strongly pushes the concept that it is a war. This idea is not limited to terrorism: America is currently waging, within its own borders, a so-named War on Drugs, part of its general War on Crime. While all three of these things are terrible evils the world could do without, the idea of declaring war on them makes as much sense as waging war against wet weather.

There is in fact a distinct danger in using the term, especially when it comes to the War on Terror (which is now also called the War on Terrorism, perhaps because people realised that Terror was a feeling and you could no more battle against it than you could wage a War on Feeling Guilty About Eating That Last Piece of Pie). The extremists who carry out these vicious attacks on innocent people are not soldiers or generals; they are criminals, of a particularly ambitious and ruthless kind, but nothing more. Suggesting that they are otherwise grants them an air of legitimacy, of valid struggle, and could possibly convince undecided, persecuted people that joining the cause of terrorism has some aspect of duty or nobility. It may seem like a purely semantic argument, but when dealing with fanatics, words and symbols are of the utmost importance.

More pertinently, drugs, crime and terrorism simply are not the kind of problems that can be solved by attacking them. Wars, if they have any use, are best for achieving simple, straightforward goals: one army defeats another, territory is seized, a government is overthrown. But there are no generals here whose capture would halt the conflict, no one country or city where our enemy is located and no ultimate leadership to remove. Drugs, crime and terrorism are with us because of desires that are inherent to human nature. There will always be someone who wants to take the easy way out by using narcotics. There will always be those who want more money than they can make by following the rules. And there will never cease to be people whose hatred for something they cannot understand will motivate them to disregard, entirely, the lives of others. Remove any one of these people and others will take their place. Yet governments – and not just the current American one – persist in the idea that these societal ills can be resolutely beaten, and in the meantime serious blunders are made.

In the War on Terrorism, one of the more unfortunate casualties has been Iraq. Now, I must make myself clear: Saddam Hussein was an abhorrent individual and a tyrant of the kind that no country should have to suffer. His abuses of human rights were well known and should have been punished. But his presence in Iraq kept a myriad of violent factions under strict repression, and his absence has allowed them to explode, leaving the country in a far worse position than when Hussein ran it as an oppressed, but functional, society. The mistake of the Americans was not in removing this man, but in having no adequate replacement for his dominance. Put another way, a man standing on a high stool with his head in a noose may be in an uncomfortable position, but his situation becomes much worse when the stool is removed. Yes, Hussein was a complete stool, but when the Coalition forces kicked him out there was no support left for Iraq and it has been slowly choking ever since.

There are similar difficulties with the War on Drugs. It is a basic economic principle that the harder a product is to obtain, the more a supplier will charge for it; making drugs illegal makes them hard to obtain, and yet they are not in any way a rare commodity. Without anything to replace the illegal toxins that so many people crave, addicts are given no other option but to be more circumspect about how they obtain them, and to pay more money. Meanwhile the even more nebulous War on Crime results in many arrests and convictions, with the result that criminals are locked up amongst each other with little else to do but wait to be released into a society where they are labelled as failures.

So should America, and the rest of the world, give up and let the people who do these things run rampant? Of course not. It is merely a question of the right attitude to take to the struggle. One thing must be remembered: we cannot defeat these people. It sounds grim, but it’s true. We can try to prevent them, to restrict their actions, to punish them for their transgressions, but doing so is not a goal, it is a process, and an ongoing one. Our array of options are, at the most basic level, reduced to two: make things easier, and make things harder.

Making things easier means helping those who could become perpetrators as well as their potential victims. It involves reaching out with compassion and, more importantly, understanding to those whose position in life puts them at risk. It means we have to make it easier for people living below the poverty line to get themselves an education and a job. It means making resisting crime and drugs easier, and standing up to the people who cause them safer. It means putting money, real money, into schools and hospitals and social welfare programs. And when people do turn to drugs or criminality, we have to make rehabilitation an easier option than recidivism. Overseas we have to make resisting extremism and hatred easier, and that means increasing the alternatives. This would involve money too, but more essential is letting people retain their culture, religious beliefs and customs. We cannot dole out money with the string of “Become Like Us” attached. More vital than cash is tolerance, the idea that retaining their identity is not incompatible with friendship. We may even be able to reach out to those officials and politicians liable to corruption by making doing their duty more attractive than looking the other way.

Making things harder is the more traditional approach, and the one that seems, at first, compatible with the idea of a war. It is the part of the solution we have already put into place. Quite simply, we make it harder to be a criminal or a terrorist. We arrest them, impede them, take away their resources. We make it so hard that the small time crooks give up trying to compete. Unfortunately, this leaves us, in true Darwinian style, with only the more ruthless and effective criminals left. And then we continue, and put more effort into making it harder still. We go after the people complicit in making crime easy, and we make their lives harder. Terrorists, with their fanatical devotion and tendency towards patient planning, are a greater challenge, but they’re criminals all the same; greater subtlety and effort is required, but the same principles. We must make those on the other side of the law work as hard committing crime as we do fighting it, and we must give them no rest. It may sound like “making things harder” is the simpler of the two strategies, and in a way it is, but without the effort put into “making things easier” it is pointless. The two have to work together, or there’s just a man with a stick and no carrot.

Once again, this is not a quick solution, nor one that will succeed entirely. It is the nature of the problem that we can only respond to the ills that exist. There will always be fanatics; we must reduce the number of people who will listen to them. There will always be crime; we must shave its profit margin. There will always be drugs; we must make them an unappealing prospect. And I am sure that, as I write, people far smarter than me, with degrees in economics, sociology, psychology and international studies, are working on ways to make the vague hope I show here into workable realities. But the first step, the very first, is to alter our perceptions and leave behind the idea of War, a word that invokes violence, subjugation and conquest, as well as – if you’re on the right side – an easy solution. Wars imply enemies, and we have no need of more enemies. We need to make it easier for others to see themselves as our friends, and harder to come up with a reason not to.

First published 24 February 2008.