...The “war on terror” re-declared on 9/11 had been declared 20 years earlier, with much the same rhetoric and many of the same people in high-level positions.6 The Reagan administration came into office announcing that a primary concern of US foreign policy would be a “war on terror,” particularly state-supported international terrorism, the most virulent form of the plague spread by “depraved opponents of civilization itself” in “a return to barbarism in the modern age,” in the words of the Administration moderate George Shultz. The war to eradicate the plague was to focus on two regions where it was raging with unusual virulence: Central America and West Asia/North Africa. Shultz was particularly exercised by the “cancer, right here in our land mass,” which was openly renewing the goals of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, he informed Congress. The President declared a national emergency, renewed annually, because “the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” Explaining the bombing of Libya, Reagan announced that the mad dog Qaddafi was sending arms and advisers to Nicaragua “to bring his war home to the United States,” part of the campaign “to expel America from the world,” Reagan lamented. Scholarship has explored still deeper roots for that ambitious enterprise. One prominent academic terrorologist finds that contemporary terrorism can be traced to South Vietnam, where “the effectiveness of Vietcong terror against the American Goliath armed with modern technology kindled hopes that the Western heartland was vulnerable too.”7
Notes [6] For further detail on the first phase of the “war on terror,” and sources here and below, see Alexander George (ed.), Western State Terrorism (Cambridge, UK: Polity—Blackwell, 1991), and sources cited. [7] David Rapoport, “The Fourth Wave,” Current History, America at War, December 2001.
> On Feb 13, 2016, at 3:46 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> Pearl Harbor was December '4441
>
> The Doolittle Raid was in April 1942.
>
> I don't imagine the Japanese were very shocked when the Americans shot back.
>
> Now I don't remember just when news stories began to mention the "War on
> Terror," but I think it was as far back as the 1970s.
>
> And yet everyone was shocked! Shocked! When the Terrorists (on whom war had
> been declared) shot back on Sept. 11, 2001. Silly.
>
> Carrol
>
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