Excerpt:
The United States is well on its way to winning the war against terrorism because the United States, under President Bush, has espoused three clear principles.
The first principle is moral clarity. President Bush said in his remarkable speech right after September 11 that there are no good terrorists, only bad terrorists -- that terrorism is always evil. In saying this, he was saying that nothing justifies terrorism. It is important to state this point clearly and to elaborate on it, because the main weapon that terrorists use against the West is not bombs or guns, but moral obfuscation: "You're terrorists, because you kill civilians, too. America, Britain, Israel -- all are terrorist states." We must harden ourselves against this amoral and debilitating charge.
Terrorism is not defined by the identity of its perpetrator. Nor is it defined by the cause, real or imagined, that its perpetrators espouse. Terrorism is defined by one thing and one thing alone. It is defined by the nature of the act. Terrorists systematically and deliberately attack the innocent. That is a very different thing from the unintentional civilian casualties that often accompany legitimate acts of war.
For example, in 1944 the British Air Force set out to bomb the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen. The British pilots missed, and instead of hitting the Gestapo they hit a hospital and killed 83 children and four nuns. That was not terrorism. That did not make Britain a terrorist state. That was a terrible but unintentional accident of the kind that accompanies every war. But terrorists don't accidentally kill civilians. The deaths of innocents are not an unintentional byproduct of their strategy. Terrorists deliberately target the innocent. They intentionally cross the lines that define the conventions of war that have been developed, in accordance with basic morality, to try to limit and regulate conflict. They willfully try to kill as many innocent civilians as they can. And this is never justified, regardless of the cause.
Going back to World War II, consider this hypothetical: You're an American officer. You're fighting for the most just cause in history. But you come into a German village -- maybe even a village next to a concentration camp -- and you line up the women and children in that village and kill them with a machine gun. You have committed an act of terrorism. You have committed a war crime and you will be judged guilty and executed, and properly so. Not even the most just cause can justify terrorism. It is always illegitimate, always criminal.
Allow me to add one other observation -- I think an important one -- on this point. It is not merely that the goals of terrorists do not justify their means. In addition, the means that terrorists use tell us something about their real goals. We can see this very simply by looking at what happens when terrorists come to power. They don't establish free societies. They don't establish governments that respect human rights. They establish dictatorships that trample human rights. It's the same whether we look at Cuba or at Iran or at Libya or at Afghanistan under the Taliban. Terrorist movements may talk about fighting for democracy and freedom, but if they're in the business of terror, you can bet they plan, when they come to power, to grind human rights into the dust.
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