> I've been struck from the first how the advocates of the police
> solution have absolutely no sense of how that might actually work out
> in detail - no strategy, no personnel, nothing. It's like you want to
> offer some alternative to war, but when pressed to articulate it, you
> flail.
I think you've put the finger on the problem: there aren't any alternatives to war at this point, because every time a pacifist opens her or his mouth, there is a chorus from all sides of "Hey, take your head out of the clouds."
Everyone -- left, right, and center -- thinks that war is useful sometime, someplace. Never know when you might need to fight someone, so you have to keep your powder dry. Then everyone is surprised when wars keep breaking out.
Of course, where terrorism is concerned, the definition problem has to be confronted first. Wikipedia (s.v. "Terrorism"):
"Terrorism is a tactic of violence that targets civilians, with the objective of forcing an enemy to favorable terms, by creating fear, demoralization, or political discord in the attacked population. 'Terrorism' is also used as a pejorative characterisation of an enemy's attacks as conforming to an immoral philosophy of violence, in a manner outside of warfare, or prohibited in the laws of war .
"The use of the term terrorism or terrorist is politically weighted, because of the universally negative connotation of harming civilians. A nation that supports terrorism may then tend to dissociate itself from the term, by using neutral or even positive terms to characterize its combatants — such as fighters or freedom fighters — both of which can be ambiguous terms for describing terrorist actors."
The first part of this definition -- "a tactic of violence that targets civilians" -- is what leads many people to the idea that ordinary police and courts could be used to counter terrorism; after all, violence against civilians is ordinarily handled by the civilian courts. And I think the European countries in which terrorists were active in recent decades mostly relied on their civilian courts and police (with the Brits vis-a-vis the IRA a notable exception).
But the second paragraph of the quote, which points out the political weight of the term, raises the problem with the police approach: one person's terrorists are another person's freedom fighters. An approach which used a UN police force would have to deal with this ideological component. The UN as it presently exists isn't set up to do this very well -- it's a recipe for deadlock and vetoes in the Security Council. So, as many people have pointed out, the UN needs major changes -- which won't happen tomorrow or the day after.
In sum: I don't see any way to use the UN as an alternative to the Bush-style "cowboy" "war on terrorism," sad to say. We've got to work out a practical alternative.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ After the Buddha died, people still kept pointing to his shadow in a cave for centuries—an enormous, dreadful shadow. God is dead: but the way people are, there may be, for millennia, caves in which his shadow is still pointed to. — And we — we must still overcome his shadow! —Friedrich Nietzsche