Contact us
[email protected] | |
3275638434 | |
Paper Publishing WeChat |
Useful Links
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Article
The Origins of the War on Terrorism Paradigm
Author(s)
Alex Hobson
Full-Text PDF XML 932 Views
DOI:10.17265/2328-2134/2020.03.005
Affiliation(s)
Northwestern University, Illinois, United States
ABSTRACT
It is now widely accepted
among scholars that a new national security paradigm emerged in the United
States after 9/11. This paradigm shift accompanied the George W. Bush
administration’s declaration of a “global war on terror” and consisted of new
interpretations of domestic and international law, new recognition of the
threats posed by non-state actors, and a stated determination to eradicate
threats everywhere before they emerged. Yet most scholarship has neglected
examination of this paradigm’s origins. It became dominant after 9/11, but it
did not originate then. Examination of these origins and the original context
shows that the war on terrorism paradigm was not created in response to a
catastrophic attack on the American “homeland”; rather it arose out of
anxieties about U.S. capacity exert its will in the Third World. Its
foundations were established long before its post-9/11 revival. This paper
places these origins within the context of U.S.-Middle East relations in the
1980s. It reads together the public discourses of Lebanese Hizbullah and of
U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz who, more than any other U.S.
official, promulgated the justifications for the war on terrorism, to show that
the notion of a jihad aimed at American power and of a war on terrorism had a
basis in anxieties about the capacity of American power in the Middle East. The
article uses the author’s original translation of the Hizbullah’s 1985 “Open
Letter to the Oppressed” alongside George Shultz’s public pronouncements between
the start of the U.S. intervention in Lebanon in 1982 and the climax of the
Iran-Contra scandal. It argues that provocations of the war on terrorism and
the war on terrorism itself emerged out of emotions connected to the efficacy
of American power in the Middle East.
KEYWORDS
terrorism, counterterrorism, war
Cite this paper
References