Treating terror as ordinary crime has always been the view of reasonable people.
The United States, after 9/11, could have used diplomacy, international treaties, legal procedures, and intelligence agencies to get justice.
What it got by invading Afghanistan was not justice, but vengeance, rather extreme vengeance in fact, killing tens of thousands needlessly.
My favorite analogy or thought experiment, made soon after 9/11 and near the invasion of Afghanistan, is crime in a big city ghetto. Having grown up on the South Side of Chicago, I was keenly aware of failing neighborhoods, gangs, and crime.
Just imagine, following a violent crime by some gang in an American ghetto, the police getting the cooperation of the local National Guard to send fighter jets over the offending neighborhood, dropping cluster bombs and firing Hellfire missiles.
They would of course kill many innocent people, injure many more, and bring further economic damage to areas already suffering. They may well not even have killed the perpetrators.
Such violent action would make no sense for justice or peace. It would only make sense as vengeance or as a way to intimidate those who would dare think of doing wrong.
But this is precisely what the United States has done in Afghanistan, just as it is precisely what Israel does regularly.
That is why the violent activities of these two states can fairly be characterized as state terror, a form of terror which has badly eroded the very meaning of what we traditionally mean by terror.
You simply cannot have justice and lawful society unless you are prepared to live by it yourself.
We live in a globalized world, and such lawless activity cannot be regarded as internal matters of the state inflicting it.
The point becomes even more acute when you consider matters such as Guantanamo and the CIA International Torture Gulag.
Here is the United States, mouthing words about freedom and rights incessantly and one having those things enshrined in its Constitution, yet it seems to regard it as perfectly fine to ignore every right and freedom one inch outside its border.
And it never stops pompously preaching to others, such as China, about rights and freedom. And just so Israel whose government never fails to mention its being the only democracy while holding ten thousand prisoners illegally and millions more in a form of bondage.
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The word "terror" has been deliberately worked and abused so that it has a special quality for the bulk of people.
There has been, effectively, a long and relentless advertising campaign to make people react to that word the way people in the sixteenth century reacted to "witches."
The situation reminds me very much of one of Stalin's most feared words, "wreckers."
Every time Stalin started talking about wreckers, it was the signal for a new round of arrests, murders, and horrors.
Crimes are crimes, and we are only civilized when we use our legal institutions properly to treat all crimes.
When the claim is made that there is a special class of criminals - called terrorists - it is a signal for far worse crimes to be committed by the very authorities uttering the claim.
PEOPLE SHUDDERED WHEN HE UTTERED THE WORD "WRECKERS"
