This is in response to Tuesday’s guest column, “Trials give terrorists better treatment than they deserve.” While most of Warren Rhea’s opinion was intelligently argued, the final paragraph certainly gave me pause. Speaking about the Bush administration’s war on terror, he wrote, “It’s a war, let’s start treating it like one.” I disagree with this.
Under the Obama administration, the use of the phrase “war on terror” has come to an end. Calling the global effort to eliminate terrorists a war only legitimizes terrorists actions. It allows groups like al-Qaida to justify attacks on Americans because they are, by our own definition, combatants in a war. If we are not fighting a war on terror, however, we remove terrorists’ ability to claim that their actions are justified parts of war and force them to recognize their targets not as soldiers, but as people.
