I will concentrate on two aspects of the same problem: the threat of terror and the danger of the War on Terror. I speak as a Quaker pacifist and as an American citizen, fully recognizing that terror has been a condition in which many of you have lived your lives and done your work for peace and justice. I must therefore speak carefully and with humility. For the most part, I have known terror only as I have known thunder and lightning-most of the time as a distant rumble, occasionally a near flash which spared me direct injury. I have traveled in countries whose people feared many forms of government repression, from loss of livelihood, to the late night knock on the door, arrest and disappearance. I have lived periods of time in England and Ireland during IRA bombing campaigns, but that only meant an added awareness of security, and trips postponed because of bomb threats on the train line. In spring, 1974 in Santiago, Chile, I listened to victims of the Pinochet government, who lapsed into temporary silence when the maid repeatedly came back into my hotel room to bring fresh towels or do some other unnecessary task. They who were bearing witness, and who gave me documents to carry home with me, knew about terror. At best, I was learning about it secondhand.

When we Americans had our most devastating direct experience of terror, governments and peoples around the world sent us messages of sympathy, support and encouragement. Many of our well-wishers added, "now you know what we have been living through." People from around the world asked Americans to remember their suffering, too-sometimes out of self-interest but more generally, I think, out of fellow-feeling and the longing that September 11, 2001 would mark a turning-point, a new beginning which could ultimately defeat terrorism as a tactic in political, religious, social and economic strife within nations and between nations.
Let it be clear. Terrorists and terrorism are real. Millions of people ready to make peace are held hostage by the suicidal fanaticism of hundreds. The historian Albert Hourani tells us: "Defeat goes deeper into the human soul than victory. To be in someone else's power is a conscious experience which induces doubts about the ordering of the universe...." (A History of the Arab Peoples, p 300) Such a sense of defeat and doubt fuels many terror movements. But terror is not only the weapon of defeated peoples or irrational fanatics, criminals and psychopaths. Assassinations, bombings, suicide attacks, ruthless military retaliation: terror is a tactic widely used by governments as well as by dissident "extremist" groups. The tactic deliberately practices unpredictable, devastating, indiscriminate, wholesale violence on helpless civilians, noncombatants, "soft targets," as readily as on military targets. Its aim is to undermine everyone's sense of personal safety, to create disorder and put all civil order under threat. It is a profoundly inhumane tactic invariably justified by its practitioners as a necessary means to the noblest of ends. It is an inevitable consequence of prolonged and unresolvable violent conflict. Since terror arises from many causes, it must be analyzed and answered appropriately, as crime, as act of war, as expression of hatred, of desperation and defeat.
The other dangerous threat to the world today, I believe, is how we understand and prosecute the War on Terror. The dangers begin with that very phrase. Is the "War on Terror" equivalent to the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan? No, it seems far more abstract and imprecise than that. "War on Terror" is being used as a political rallying-cry to generate uncritical support-"Don't you realize we are at war?!"-; as an advertising slogan to justify extreme measures-"At times like these we must all be prepared to give up some of our rights!"; and as a catch-all metaphor to focus people's fears onto particular scapegoat populations. In the War on Terror, we hide behind the euphemism "collateral damage" to describe thousands of helpless civilians, women, children, old people, non-combatants, injured and killed in real battles.
And, as we have also been discovering in the United States, when "War on Terror" is invoked, a vast militarization of all aspects of society follows, and inevitably individual human and constitutional rights are threatened or restricted. Urgent proponents of The US Patriot Act told us that, in a War on Terror, we all must be prepared to give up some of our rights. Civil libertarians, and those who knew themselves most at risk, pointed out that the people who speak easily of having to give up some rights are almost never the people who do so.
A year ago, with an American Friends Service Committee delegation, I went to Colombia, which, for nearly half a century has been a killing ground for the military, their right-wing paramilitary allies, left-wing guerrillas, and drug traffickers, collectively called the "armed actors." In Colombia, the War on Drugs-equally imprecise in its outline-has become conjoined with the War on Terror, and as a consequence every aspect of Colombia life is more and more militarized, and constitutional civil rights guaranteed to Afro-Colombian and Indigenous people are increasingly under threat. Taking their lands, violating their constitutional rights, threatening them with violence, are all justified as necessary to the War on Terror.
When we traveled in dangerous areas, where mayors were being assassinated and tourists kidnapped, we were accompanied by "indigenous guards," teenagers, young men and women, elderly men and women, pledged to unarmed, nonviolent resistance. For their nonviolent resistance to terror and oppression, they are called "terrorists" by their own government. There might be several names for people who practice "peaceful resistance," but "terrorist" is not one of them. But when "War on Terror" becomes an abstraction, a catch-all excuse to justify any tactics, "terrorist" becomes the catch-all epithet to denigrate one's opponents. How else explain why the U.S. Secretary of Education used it to describe a teacher's union he doesn't like? This is what the great philosopher Martin Buber called "annihilation by label." The War on Terror is also a War on Language.
If "War on Terror" is simply a synonym for "War on Evil", by definition any means can be used to prosecute it. Politicians and even political scientists, philosophers and ethicists reject calls to understand any other causes of terrorism, for fear that would lead to excusing or justifying terrorism the tactic, and glossing over its horrors. "They hate us because we are free," some western leaders insist, so any means to preserve our freedom are valid. And because "War on Terror" is that vague catch-all phrase, we cannot imagine what a victory would look like. It will last generations, some tell us, it is the final Armageddon-like culture-war. How then do the Geneva Accords constrain such a war? How do we determine who is an enemy combatant? What protections can be given prisoners of war? The stakes of victory or defeat rise ever-higher, the pressure increases to use more and more brutal means to achieve a "knockout blow," the desire for vengeance against the enemy becomes unslakeable. Once-unspeakable horrors become familiar, explained away, domesticated, exculpated. What we fear most about how Osama Bin Laden thinks, drives us to think the same way.
We cannot defeat terrorism unless we know why it is being employed. That is not to excuse any form of it, but to insist that we must identify the specific causes of particular terrorism and apply appropriate and proportionate means to address them. Hopeless people need to see grounds for hope. Dispossessed people need to find safe homelands. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, irrational xenophobia must be stopped by international intervention, by trial before international courts.
The violence of terrorism, counter-terrorism, and retaliation will continue on its own momentum and trajectory-that is simply a tragic fact. But while terrorism rises and falls, plays out its particular cycles, the "War on Terror" must become something other than abstraction, advertising slogan, an excuse for every excess. A century ago, the philosopher William James urged us to find ways to concentrate our energies, deepen our loyalties to one another, practice courage and self-sacrifice in a different form of struggle. He called it the "moral equivalent of war." Its means would be different, and it would address root causes of problems. When we declare war on cancer or malaria or AIDS, we are speaking of such a war, a peaceful, concentrated effort to rescue and heal the victims of disease. When the United States declared a war on poverty, it was not to be a war on the poor, but a great, tragically failed, campaign to eliminate poverty itself. That is the form our future War on Terror must take, a concentrated, steady, world-wide and nonviolent struggle on behalf of the victims of terror, a campaign to control terror itself.