Distinctions Between Terrorism, War and Crimes of War

A few years ago I read Dore Gold's book Hatred's Kingdom while reading up on terrorism and Al Qaida.

The book eventually lead me to the paper by Auther H. Garrison entitled Terrorism: The Nature of Its History (Criminal Justice Studies, 2003, Vol. 16(1), pp. 39-52).

It is a summary of the nature of terrorism, as well as the history of its causes, and its rise and spread until today. I am often confused by those who make a moral equivalence between terrorists and the soldiers fighting them. I am sorry, but it is just not true that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

Here is a (lengthy) quote from Garrison's paper that I found enlightening and thought I would share it:

Distinctions Between Terrorism, War and Crimes of War

Terrorism should not be confused with traditional warfare. In war, a target is selected because it has military value and will achieve a specific military objective. In modern warfare, a specific target is attacked or destreyed because the action serves a specific military necessity, achieves a specific result (utility) and leads to a specific goal (objective) while limiting colateral damage (proportional use of force) to the civilian population. In terrorism, the target is of little interest, per se. What is important is that the target will realize a certain reaction on the part of the greater society. The terrorist group that plants an altitude bomb on the plane does not target the 270 passengers on the flight. The intended effect on the world when that plane is destroyed over a populated area is what makes the act terrorism. Conversely, an Israeli jet dropping a bomb on an apartment building to assassinate a specific person, for example, a senior officer of Hamas, is not an act of terrorism. The specific goal of the attack was to assassinate the Hamas leader, not to cause fear in order to change behavior in Hamas, the Palestine Liberation Organization or the Palestinians. The other people killed were collateral casualties. Terrorism is not defined by the fact that life is lost in an act of violence or the amount of life that is lost. Terrorism is defined by the intended effect of the use ofviolence and the purpose of the terrorist act. There is a difference between the use of violence on a target because the target has an intrinsic and specific value, and the use of violence on a target that has no intrinsic or specific value, but is attacked in order to effect the larger audience watching the attack. The former is an act of war; the latter is terrorism.

Some researchers do not agree that there is a distinction between terrorism and war, and assert that terrorism is warfare against civilians, a tactic that has a long history (Carr, 2002). Carr, for example, asserts that terrorism is part of the development of war: Terrorism, in other words, is simply the contemporary name given to, and the modern permutation of, warfare deliberately waged against civilians with the purpose of destroying their will to support either leaders or policies that the agents of such violence find objectionable” (Carr,2002, p. 6).

This formulation makes no distinction between acts committed in war to cause an enemy to surrender and acts committed to intimidate and cause policy change. For example, there is a difference between General Sherman’s march through South Carolina (to cause the surrender of the Confederacy and divide the south in two, thus separating Lee’s army from supplies and aid) and Osama bin Laden sending 19 men to hijack four planes to crash them into the World Trade Center. The former was committed to bring an end to a war and prevent a city from aiding an enemy force; the latter was to cause death and destruction. The 266 passengers and crew on the four hijacked planes were not the targets of the attack, nor were the estimated 2500 people inside World Trade Center building. The goal was to cause massive loss of life and property, and to send a message to the United States and the world, to force policy change in the United States.

There is also a difference between terrorism and war crimes. An example of a war crime is an army invading a town to purge it of enemy forces, and while doing so intentionally killing unarmed civilians and non-combatants. Although this action is both immoral and criminal, it is not terrorism. In this example, people were killed because members of the army lost control of themselves, not to intimidate other towns or the society as a whole to achieve a political objective.