Is Anything the Moral Equivalent of War?

Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, | Tom Dispatch:

Ever since 2001, when President George W. Bush launched an endless “global war” not on al-Qaeda but on a phenomenon, or perhaps simply a feeling (“terror”) and those who could potentially induce it, America’s all-too-real conflicts have become, as TomDispatch regularRebecca Gordon writes today, ever more metaphorical. In a sense, they have come to seem so distant from our shores and lives (unless you happen to be a member of the country’s all-volunteer military or a family member of such a volunteer) as to be little short of fantastical -- or nonexistent. Who here even notices when, as in recent weeks, American military personnel again hit the ground in Yemen, or the Pentagon considers loosing its drones on jihadists in the Philippines, or U.S. raids occur in Somalia, or civilians in significant numberscontinue to die in a Syrian city under American air strikes? The answer is essentially no one.

Washington’s conflicts in those distant lands couldn’t be more real and yet here in the United States they have largely been replaced by a single fantasy bogeyman: Islamic terrorism. It matters little that the actual danger to Americans at the hands of such terrorists is vanishingly small. Fear of them (and the need to feel “safe” from them) has filled American screens and minds for years, helping fund our national security state at levels that might once have staggered the imagination and prepared the way for the election of a truly strange, even fantastical president. 

Think of it this way: as Washington has engaged in a set of disastrous spreading conflicts across the Greater Middle East, the population of this country has been gripped by the strangest of war fevers -- a demobilizing set of militarized fantasies largely focused on our own potential destruction that have distorted how we look at our world in dangerous and crippling ways.  Rebecca Gordon, who has been writing about America’s “forever wars” and the fantasies that accompany them for some time now, considers what happens when war and metaphor become one, when militarized fantasies invade and occupy everyday life. Tom

When All the World’s a War... 
And All the Men and Women Merely Soldiers
By Rebecca Gordon

Since September 11, 2001, the United States has been fighting a “war on terror.” Real soldiers have been deployed to distant lands; real cluster bombs and white phosphorus have been used; real cruise missiles have been launched; the first MOAB, the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal, has been dropped; and real cities have been reduced to rubble. In revenge for the deaths of 2,977 civilians that day, real people -- in the millions -- have died and millions more have become refugees. But is the war on terror actually a war at all -- or is it only a metaphor?

In a real war, nations or organized non-state actors square off against each other. A metaphorical war is like a real war -- after all, that’s what a metaphor is, a way of saying that one thing is like something else -- but the enemy isn’t a country or even a single group of Islamic jihadists. It’s some other kind of threat: a disease, a social problem, or in the case of the war on terror, an emotion.

Cont.....