Chrenkoff on the "nuisance" of terrorism

Chrenkoff weighs in on Kerry's unfortunate view of terrorism with these cogent comments.

The blogosphere's alive with the sound of musings - or, rather, teeth gnashing. Today it's about John Kerry's remark that "we have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance." I think I understand what in his very tortured and nuanced sort of way Kerry was trying to say, and what he said had a very 1990s nostalgic ring to it: look guys, terrorism, like death and taxes - and the poor - will always be with us, so the best we can do is try to go back to how it was a few years ago, with a few bombs going off here and there, mostly killing some black people and some Muslims in obscure parts of the world most of us couldn't place on the map. In other words, an explosives-laden Palestinian killing Jews at a pizzeria or an explosives-laden Kashmiri separatist killing Hindus at a bus stop - who cares?; an explosives-laden boat once in a while ramming into a US warship on duty overseas - bad but manageable; an airliner ramming into a US skyscraper - definitely bad. In Kerry's ideal world we would go back from the definitely bad to who cares, or at worst, to the bad but manageable.

John Kerry is right in a sense that terrorism cannot be completely eliminated; the best we can do is to marginalise the phenomenon. But he's wrong that we can ever return to previous normalcy - there is no "place" to "get back to" anymore. S11 might not have changed Kerry, but it certainly changed the international state of play. In the past, terrorism was used as a limited tactic to achieve limited objectives (unification of Northern Ireland with the Irish Republic, statehood for the Basques, elimination of the "Zionist entity" in favour of a Palestinian state); S11 was not the first, but certainly the most emphatic statement that for some, terrorism would now be used as a total tactic in a total war against the West to achieve a totalitarian objective of a global theocratic super-state. Too bad for Kerry that an Islamist genie is out of the bottle now - to turn terrorism back into a nuisance would require us to completely eliminate the spirit that animates al Qaeda and its cheerleaders and followers. And that will be neither easy nor quick.

Kerry's people can attempt to spin this any way they want, but it's not going to go away.