Border Security White Papers
The War on Terrorism: Real or Metaphorical?
Overview When it was reported that a high-level trans-Atlantic group had just declared war on internet spam, everyone knew what was meant. As with the war on drugs and the war on poverty, nobody is expecting cruise missiles or helicopter gunships because we know the difference between a real war and a metaphorical war. What then can one make of the war on terrorism - real or metaphorical? Within hours of the September 11 attacks, George Bush II had described them as acts of war and, in response, declared his own war on terrorism. You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to recognise that these attacks were heaven-sent for the Bush administration. They enabled it to position the US as the innocent victim of a war, started by someone else, which required the attention of the entire world. Nobody expected that the ensuing war on Afghanistan would win the "war on terrorism" - even if the US had killed Osama bin Laden. But that war, like the drone attack in Yemen, helped the US to expand the kind of actions that could be carried out in the name of the war on terrorism.
| Publisher | University of Canterbury | File Format | HTML |
|---|---|---|---|
| Date Published | November 2004 | ||
| Format | White Papers | ||
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