Terror as accident

Simon Jenkins has a tidy view of the world. If you support the war on terror, you risk opening the gates to the purveyors and the justifiers of torture - of torture as a necessary way of fighting that war. Of course, one can turn his reasoning round. If you don't accept torture as a weapon in the war on terror, you allow those who would murder the innocent en masse and at random to plot and plan more freely; you let them keep to themselves information that would be most useful to blocking and preventing what they plan.

Jenkins overlooks - as does this reversal - the faculty of making relevant distinctions. One can support a war against terror and not accept torture (the choice, in effect, of the Obama presidency, whatever its currently preferred language about this). Indeed, one may support the one and reject the other on the same grounds - that both terrorism and torture are crimes against humanity that undermine the politics of democratic societies and violate the rights and the lives of human beings.

To the end of obscuring what is a clear distinction, Jenkins deploys the usual rhetorical devices:

The massacres in New York, Bali, London, Madrid and Mumbai were horrible but politically insignificant. They lacked even the IRA's policy-changing programme. They were a howl of rage from a deranged fanaticism, threatening lives and property but not the security of any state. They are best treated as accidents of globalisation.

Objectify and minimize: terror to be treated as an 'accident' of globalization, as mere rage and derangement. He could equally treat torture as an accident of the war on terror or, by tracing out causal continuities, as itself an accident of globalization; he could see it as rage and derangement. But Jenkins wouldn't. He wouldn't dream of writing of the use of torture by Western governments in such terms, and rightly not.

For a section of the Western commentariat, real threats, carrying the weight of moral responsibility, only ever come from (loosely speaking) 'us'. Those attacking 'us', on the other hand, can be objectified and minimized. New York, Bali, London, Madrid and Mumbai - Jenkins himself begins a list of infamy that could be extended - but 'politically insignificant'. The lives taken, the bodies broken, the families bereaved - 'politically insignificant'. So you say. It is good that not all the friends of democracy think so.