Although there have been military operations in several different parts
of the world, the 'War on Terror' label was applied primarily to US and
British operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The counter-terrorist
justification for the invasion of Iraq was always weak; all it really amounted to was
an additional reason why Saddam Hussein should not be permitted to
develop weapons of mass destruction, i.e. in case they became even more
dangerous by falling into the hands of terrorists. When the US/British
invasion had established that Saddam Hussein's arsenal of chemical and
biological weapons had indeed been destroyed (confirming the UN
inspection team's reports), it was argued instead that the invasion gave
Britain the opportunity to defeat jihadists in Iraq instead of waiting
for them to come to Britain. Whether the people of Iraq would think this
was a good trade-off is another question. The invasion certainly hasn't brought a just and enduring peace to Iraq. According to UN figures, "7,818 civilians and 1,050 security forces died in violent attacks across Iraq in
2013 - making last year the bloodiest in Iraq since 2008".
The rationale for invading Afghanistan was a lot more straightforward:
the Taliban were in power and they were harbouring Osama bin Laden, so
the only way to get bin Laden was to overthrow the Taliban and set up a
new, more legitimate government instead. There was no possibility of
negotiating with the Taliban - say, for example, getting them to hand
bin Laden over - because this would mean, well, negotiating with the
Taliban. It's certainly true that leaving the Taliban in power would
have had very bad results, and that the degree of democracy and
political freedom the Afghan people currently enjoy is a big improvement
on the situation in 2001. Whether the democratic and egalitarian
reforms brought about by the occupying forces are permanent - whether
the Taliban's exclusion from power is permanent, even - is another
question. A decade-long war which has killed 3,000 US and allied troops
and somewhere around 20,000 Afghan civilians may turn out not to have
been the best way to flush out bin Laden or to encourage reform in the
Afghan government.
It may also turn out to have been illegal. In international law, it is
almost impossible to justify an aggressive war, particularly one which - like the
invasion of Iraq - was explicitly embarked on to achieve political goals
(the disarmament and/or removal from power of Saddam Hussein). There
are provisions in international law for a legal invasion: the "Caroline" argument justifying anticipatory
self-defence dates back to 1837. More recently, it has been argued that the UN Security Council should approve of invasions carried out to prevent large-scale loss of life, under the "responsibility to protect" doctrine (formulated in 2005) - although the decision in R2P cases rests with the UN Security Council.
It
is not impossible to make arguments like these cover Afghanistan or
Iraq, but it is very difficult. There were UN resolutions calling
on Iraq to disarm; however, most people did not see those resolutions as
justifying war, let alone a war carried out by a self-selected alliance
of nations without the approval of the UN Security Council. The legality of the two wars - in terms
of whether it was legal to declare war (ius ad bellum) - is highly suspect. And, as we know, the legality of the wars in terms of how they have been conducted (ius in bello)
is also very questionable; at best, the wars have been scarred by
numerous war crimes, from Abu Ghraib to the most recent drone strikes.
At worst, the aggressor nations have been guilty of state crimes.
But what is state crime? The International State
Crime Initiative defines it as
"organisational deviance" leading to "human rights violations": in
other words, "organisational deviance" (collective wrongdoing), within a
government organisation, which leads to people being harmed. State crime
is conduct which breaches human rights and which, wrongly, has organisational backing from within a government (an individual soldier going rogue can't commit
state crime).
"Deviance" is a key word here. Deviance is a process, not a state: an organisation becomes deviant by deviating, going morally off course. It's
not unknown for a government to be led by somebody who openly flouts
the law, laughs at international agreements on human rights and
generally acts like Dr Evil; it's not unknown, but it is very, very
unusual. When business executives commit crimes they usually reach the
point of breaking the law through many small steps - turning a blind
eye, making excuses, blaming the competition - and governments are no
different. When government ministers commit state crimes, they usually
believe that they have to commit them. Or that it's OK this once.
Or that the end justifies the means. Or that another government would
do it if they didn't...
In business, a
tightly-regulated company is an environment where a culture of wrongdoing is
unlikely to develop. An unregulated company, running on personal
relationships and word-of-mouth instructions, is a 'permissive
environment' for organisational deviance. It's the same with governments: some
of them are permissive environments for organisational deviance, some
aren't. A government which acts on the basis that the head of government
is above the law; or that there's a war on (when there isn't); or that
terrorism represents a pressing emergency threatening the very life of the nation
itself... any government like that is a very permissive environment for
organisational deviance and state crime.
Can we talk of state terrorism? Some would say not: terrorism is by definition the tactic of a non-state group. Others (myself included) would prefer to avoid the word 'terrorism' altogether, and talk about 'organised political violence' by non-state groups and 'human rights abuses' by the state. But if we are going to use the word 'terrorism', should the actions of state organisations be excluded?
Changing
the subject slightly, there's a big problem with the generally-accepted
academic definitions of 'terrorism'. There's a consensus right across
the literature: terrorism means indiscriminate attacks on civilians and
'symbolic' targets, carried out with the aim of inducing terror and
changing political behaviour - by intimidating the general public and/or
by influencing the government. Some terrorist groups certainly fit the bill some
of the time: Al-Qaida is only the most obvious example. But there wasn't
very much that was 'terrorist' (according to the textbook definition)
about the activities of the Red Brigades in Italy or the Provisional
IRA in Ireland or the Palestine Liberation Organisation. "Armed
struggle" groups don't bomb newspaper offices or murder police officers
or assassinate their opponents because they want to terrorise the general
public, or even because they want to intimidate journalists and police
officers and politicians; they do it because they believe they're
fighting a war and those targets represent their enemies.
If the textbook definition of 'terrorism' doesn't describe actual flesh-and-blood terrorists, what does it describe? In
political discourse, the word 'terror' goes back to the French
Revolution. The first 'Terror' was an eleven-month clampdown on
political opponents, involving mass executions of enemies of the regime;
between September 1793 and the following July, tens of thousands died
on the guillotine. Subsequently the word 'terror' was widely used to
describe indiscriminate killing by governments, particularly in the
aftermath of an attempted revolution - the Hungarian "White Terror" of
1919-21 is only one example. When the development of military aircraft
permitted it, "terror bombing" was carried out in World War II (Dresden,
Hamburg), during the Spanish Civil War (Guernica) and in Britain's
colonies (Mesopotamia, a.k.a. Iraq). There's no
textbook definition for "terror bombing" - or "state terror" - but when
you look at the textbook criteria for terrorism (indiscriminate attacks
on civilians and 'symbolic' targets, carried out
with the aim of inducing terror and changing political behaviour) both
Dresden and Guernica seem to fit quite well.
To
sum up: governments are much more likely to use terror tactics than most people who are called
'terrorists'. State terror is a state crime (in war it's a war crime),
and as such it can only happen on the basis of 'organisational deviance'
- a phrase which here means 'a government collectively thinking that
it's above the law'. And counter-terrorism - which often brings with it concepts of 'emergency' and 'exceptional situations' - makes a fertile breeding ground for organisational deviance in
government.
