The U.S. Response as Armed Struggle

The Honolulu Advertiser’s September 16 headline read: “Prayers and War Plans”, while two other front-page stories announced “Conspirators in Attack Kept Low Profile” and “Fight Against Terror Won’t Be Easy”. Alongside these stories was a mug shot of Osama bin Laden with a caption “World’s Most Wanted.” These visions of conventional war, new war, and crime are mixed visions, mixed metaphors for viewing the September 11 attack and its aftermath. Months later, these visions continue to coexist. Sometimes they compete, other times they reinforce one another. No single metaphor dominates entirely, as even the most hawkish cabinet members realize the risks of comparing this to conventional warfare. Yet newspapers have utilized familiar war graphics to represent the Afghan war, using maps, charts and arrows to portray front lines, troop movements, and territorial gains and losses; such visual props evoke the known quantity of a conventional war, even while President Bush insists that the nation has embarked on a different kind of fight. When CNN and the Honolulu Advertiser proclaim that this is “America’s new war,” some equivocation remains as to whether “new” means “our most recent war” or “war of an hitherto unknown kind.”

A different strategy for describing, understanding and perhaps unraveling the violence is one portraying the U.S. response as “armed struggle.” Like revolutionary groups’ armed struggle strategies, the early U.S. response emphasizes the need to be in it for the long haul. But this is not the long haul of conventional warfare so much as it is the uncertain, peaks-and-valleys time frame of a guerilla movement. Like armed struggle, the emerging articulation of the U.S. response emphasizes sudden, quick battles rather than drawn-out conventional fighting. These are wars without borders. Those involved are never secure. They can never be certain that they are sufficiently hidden, or that “their” territory is really their territory. The enemy is all over the place. It can appear any time anywhere, just as the guerillas can.

For a society committed to armed struggle, there is little distinction between military and civilian life. “The cause” becomes everything, justifying extraordinary measures, demanding larger-than-life sacrifices. Ordinary life is recruited into the ruthless binary that frames the struggle: comrades who fall are heroes; those who hesitate are traitors. There is no room for a loyal opposition; to question is to betray. That kind of insecurity and surveillance is very much a part of the U.S. response, as U.S. struggles to act with the same protective vigilance as guerilla movements do. The attackers were, in the words of the Washington Post, a “soft, subtle presence in this country for many months.” It’s not hard to picture leaders of a national liberation movement saying to their supporters just what U.S. leaders are saying: our enemy is not safe anywhere, and neither are we.

Armed struggle merges violent with charitable responses. The carrot and stick work hand in hand as the advocates of armed struggle attempt to gain new supporters. If, as President Bush declared, “Those who are not with us are against us,” then supporters become comrades, eligible to have other sins forgiven so long as they are “with us,” while opponents become enemies, no matter what their other virtues, if they are “against us.”

Of course many elements within U.S. politics and society pull against the mobilization of tropes of armed struggle. For example, the Pearl Harbor analogies that were so popular after the initial September 11 attack pull our mental maps toward the reassuring promise of a clear enemy, a workable military solution, and, best of all, a total victory. The Bush administration’s unwillingness to negotiate, to accept anything less than total victory, suggests that the World War II model of universal triumph vs. complete surrender still operates in U.S. policy. Yet events may propel policy makers away from the relatively well-defined arena of “war” and into the murky and boundary-less arena of armed struggle. Thinking about the national response in these terms helps to highlight...