The United States has, of course, made its own, typically exceptional contribution to the twenty-first-century definitions of terror and terrorism. The “war on terror” that President George W. Bush declared to Congress shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks took what had previously been the state’s struggle against local armed resistance or anticolonial insurgents to a new, global domain. Formerly, per Said’s schema, governments had used “terrorist” to outlaw particular opponents that resorted to violence, groups such as the PFLP and the Basque ETA that claimed legitimacy on political or nationalist grounds (though sometimes conditioned by ethnic or religious minority status). In contrast, the US after September 11 arrogated to itself the right to use military force anywhere in the world, where alliances or client governments permitted, against non-state actors, who were thus a priori terrorist adversaries. (This “war” also created a pretext, which circumvented international law, for detaining and torturing “enemy combatants” captured, or kidnapped, by the US and its surrogates.)
Mostly, this has been accomplished under the rubric of fighting “radical Islamic [sic]” groups in whatever theater of operations they happen to be. Given that the US’s main weapon in this war has, in practice, become the drone-launched missile, for all intents and purposes there is little oversight or scrutiny—either through Congress or among the wider American public—of whom the US has targeted as terrorists by this means. Only on rare occasions, when, usually for other reasons, there is close media attention, is any light shone on whether lethal violence has been rained down on anyone even vaguely meeting the open-ended US designation. Such a case occurred on August 29, when a US drone attacked killed ten Afghan civilians mistakenly identified by the US military as members of ISIS-K. According tothe independent investigative and monitoring group Airwars, in the twenty years of the “war on terror,” at least 22,679 civilians (and possibly more than twice that number) have died as victims of US drone strikes.
It might seem reasonable to adapt and update Dugard’s words: although designed to combat terrorism, the USA Patriot Act and the Authorization for Use of Military Force have themselves become instruments of terror. That argument—attempting to put the Terror back in terror—was precisely what Noam Chomsky tried to accomplish with his essay in Said’s 1988 collection. Despite its rather lugubrious title, “Middle East Terrorism and the American Ideological System,” Chomsky’s was a decent effort but its relative lack of influence—compared with, say, Netanyahu’s—rather suggests that returning terror to its Robespierrean root is a quixotic venture. It has been easier, it turns out, to welcome former terrorists into government and make them state officials (albeit the word “former” has had to do a lot of work there).