Why the War On Terror Should Be The Issue

For those who missed Saturday’s teach-in, we reproduce a speech from the final session, originally delivered by Nick Frayn.

In this session I am going to suggest a possible standpoint from which we could oppose the further denigration of democracy.

So, first, I’d like to say, although the session is called ‘Why the War on Terror Should Be the Issue,’ I’m not calling for a single issue politics. When I say I’d like the war on terror to be the issue, I’m not suggesting that we pick a small discreet topic on which we believe we could bring about some kind of legislative change. This is not the marijuana reform party. And indeed, I think one could argue that the growth of these single-issue parties is actually representative of some of the political problems that we’ve been talking about today.

Nor do I want to be especially alarmist about the war on terror. Obviously I think the war on terror is a truly pernicious development—after all I do write for a blog called Against the War on Terror. But I’m not claiming that unless we end war on terror right now, we’ll be living in a fascist regime or that the next AWOT teach-in will have to be held in a secret location. I’m not going to argue that the war on terror has to be the issue because it is an atypical phenomenon.

In fact my argument is the opposite. I want to make opposition to the war on terror a key issue, because I think it is a typical phenomenon—that it is symptomatic of numerous contemporary trends, because I believe that opposition to the war on terror may actually be a way of opposing precisely the degradation of democracy that we have been discussing today.

This is because the war on terror has established a series of orthodoxies that we cannot question. And these orthodoxies have had the effect of stopping us from holding our leaders properly to account. This is the function of the war on terror—to suspend politics in favor of something that would be better described as governance.

How does it do this? These orthodoxies are a series of crutches that weak leaders can lean on as a means of shoring up their legitimacy. As BBC journalist Adam Curtis put it in his documentary ‘Power of Nightmares’ (which we showed in May): “But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to deliver us from nightmares.”

One of these orthodoxies is the war on terror’s illusion of immediate crisis. This is used in two ways. The first is that it justifies a very short–term activism on the part of government. Indeed, to be doing something is considered almost a virtue in itself, without reference to a clear means/ends rationale. Perhaps that activity for activity’s sake becomes most apparent when specific actions are criticized and the response thrown back at the critics is ‘well what are you suggesting; that we do nothing?’

The second and related point is that the crisis counsels us to suspend arguments for longer-term or more aspirational goals. It is an encouragement not to project into what seems like an uncertain future. This is not something that is consciously articulated, or devised by any group; nobody ever argues we can’t have universal health care because we haven’t caught Bin-Laden yet. But it is manifest in the logic of this politics of crisis which, even unarticulated, becomes a limitation placed on our thinking.

A second orthodoxy is the elevation of expert knowledge as a way of limiting political discussion of a given issue. The war on terror provides the ultimate rationale for establishing a monopoly over a given area of knowledge: intelligence. This is symptomatic of a broader technocratic tendency amongst political elites to cordon off certain discussions through the use of expert knowledge—for example in the celebration of economics (just look at the cult of Alan Greenspan). But this reaches new levels when it is not a just a question of expert knowledge but actually of secret knowledge.

So, for instance, the only argument the government makes in support of military commissions is that the government might have to reveal secret information if they held public trials. But government by intelligence cannot be questioned. How can we make a political judgment of an issue when we do not have access to all the information? And in addition to making it harder to question government, it also allows others to abdicate responsibility, a fact demonstrated in the support of Congress for the Iraq war.

I’m not arguing that these type of orthodoxies—these methods of establishing legitimacy for today’s discredited politicians—emerged simply in the 9/11 era. I think we could make an argument that a phenomenon like humanitarian intervention played a similar role for politicians during the 1990s. In both cases, the legitimacy of a politician’s actions comes from outside of his relationship with the electorate; in the case of humanitarian intervention from a higher moral logic; in the case of the war on terror from the immediacy of crisis.

So undermining these orthodoxies, these prohibitions on thinking certain ideas or arguing certain positions is necessary if we are to halt the degradation of democracy. Through a focus on the war on terror, we can use our opposition to pin our leaders down, box them into the corner, and force them to justify their position in a language that we can both speak. Our common language cannot rely on technical expertise and secret language, or higher moral logic that puts their actions beyond our questioning.