[lbo-talk] Does "War" Imply The Foe Shooting Back?

MM marxmail00 at gmail.com
Sat Feb 13 15:02:44 PST 2016



> On Feb 13, 2016, at 4:55 PM, Carl G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
>
> The Reagan administration came into office announcing that a primary concern of US foreign policy would be a “war on terror,”

Not to quibble overmuch with Prof Chomsky, but I believe the original term that took root under Reagan was the “war against terrorism”, and its precise meaning (both semantically and strategically) was a matter of contestation from the outset. Some additional context and perspective:

Abstract:

This article uses recently declassified records to analyze the American intervention in Lebanon between 1982 and 1984 and the confrontation with Libya between 1981 and 1986. In both cases, the US responded to a terrorist attack with military force. Especially after the attacks in Lebanon, members of the administration started to elaborate a comprehensive strategy to fight terrorism which focused on pre-emptive strikes against states deemed to be supporters of terrorism. The strike on Libya in April 1986 was the first implementation of this strategy and, furthermore, regime change had been attempted both before and after this strike. The article argues that the policy of the Reagan administration in the fight against terrorism was a combination of two factors: the global Cold War mindset and the first elaboration of concepts that would later become part of the Bush administration’s War on Terror. Rather than being the beginning of the War on Terror, however, Reagan’s policy should be considered as a source of inspiration for it, albeit one that was deeply influenced by the bipolar confrontation with the Soviet Union.

Excerpt:

"The policy of the Reagan administration against Middle Eastern terrorism can be considered as predominantly “globalist”, meaning one that relied on the global conceptual frameworks of the Cold War to understand regional events and to take decisions.4 The alternative approach, which was overshadowed by the influence of the globalists inside the administration, can be defined as “regionalist”. It assigns a decisive role to local actors and regional history to understand events and define policy. Especially during its first years in office, the Reagan administration tended to ascribe events in the Middle East to the superpower chess-game, rather than emphasize regional dynamics. Moreover, the globalist approach was in line with the traditional US hierarchy of priorities in the Middle East, which prioritized the fight against the Soviets and their regional allies. The Reagan administration followed this tradition while also sharing two other priorities with past administrations: guaranteeing the security of Israel and defending access to oil sources. This hierarchy of priorities, and thus the prevalence of the concern for Soviet inroads into the region, greatly affected the “choice of enemies” by the Reagan administration as it had for past administrations.5 Starting from the 1960s, successive US administrations had divided regional actors into two main categories: nationalists and radicals on one side and traditionalists and conservatives on the other. The latter group, usually called “Arab moderates”, would generally become the allies of the US and the “West”.6

"The problems faced by the Reagan administration pertained to the changes in the regional context. Starting from the 1970s, conditions in the region had moved farther away from the binary logic of the Cold War while political Islam started to play a growing role in international diplomacy. As Fawaz Gerges has argued, few American policy-makers understood the relevance of these changes, even after the 1979 Iranian revolution.7 Rashid Khalidi is even more explicit on this point when he writes that the “Cold War logic” led superpowers to neglect the reality on the ground and rely on the Cold War chess game to shape policy and local alliances “whether for the United States in Lebanon in 1983 or for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s”.8

"The other major factor in Reagan‟s policy was the declaration of a particular kind of anti-terrorism strategy which, as Lawrence Freedman has pointed out, “could be interpreted either as a reference to a real war or a rhetorical device to mobilize the nation to address some great problem”.9 In this version of the fight against terrorism, there were differences within the administration with the President playing an important role as well. Ronald Reagan, as far as declassified records and memoirs show, was not very involved in the concrete, day-to-day shaping of US strategy in the Middle East which was the result of the convergence (or competition) of the diverse views present inside the administration. George Shultz strove to become the main strategist for the anti-terrorism strategy in the administration, particularly after 1984. His views on how to implement this fight against terrorism, however, were not shared by other members of the cabinet such as Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Other, less prominent figures in the NSC and its staff also played a substantial role, making the picture even more complex.10 This is why it is worth taking into account not just Reagan‟s words and deeds, but also those of other administration members.11

“Shultz's ideas emerged in a series of speeches delivered mainly during 1984, the most important of which was the one delivered at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York.12 In this speech, Schultz argued that the fight against terrorism was a struggle to defend a way of life and a civilization, and that the US needed to use pre-emptive strikes to achieve this goal. This implied the need to extend executive powers in order to strike terrorists and their sponsors in a timely and effective way. Weinberger, on the other hand, feared that any strike of this fashion would be merely an empty show of force without bringing concrete, positive effects on the capability of terrorists to strike against the US.”

- from Toaldo, Mattia, “The Reagan Administration and the Origins of the War on Terror: Lebanon and Libya as Case Studies”, New Middle Eastern Studies, 2 (2012), <http://www.brismes.ac.uk/nmes/archives/767>



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