Globe Editorial (www.Boston.Com)

Globe Editorial (www.Boston.Com)

 

Time to retire a harmful term: 'global war on terror'

May 12, 2011

BEYOND JUSTICE or revenge, acrucial reason to applaud the demise of Osama bin Laden is that it may enable the United States to move beyond the harmful narrative of a global war on terror. The original idea of a worldwide holy war between Al Qaeda and the West was bin Laden's, and Washington never should have taken it up as a strategic paradigm on a par with the Cold War.

Now that bin Laden is dead and gone, the Obama administration needs to use the intelligence harvested from his hard drives to chase down as many of his lieutenants as possible. Once that is done, however, the terrorist challenge must be portrayed in its true dimensions — as a tactical threat to be met with aggressive policing, backed by an international consensus to share information about radical Islamists.

Even before bin Laden was killed, Al Qaeda had devolved from a virtual army with camps in Afghanistan where thousands of recruits could be trained to a source of propaganda and proselytizing that lent its name to franchises from Morocco to Yemen and from Somalia to Iraq. What set Al Qaeda apart from other, locally focused Islamist groups was bin Laden's edict to kill Americans wherever they are found. His assumption was that the United States would then lash out at the Muslim world, giving greater force to his call for a global Islamic revolution.

From now on, the less America is seen as the "far enemy'' propping up unjust regimes in the Muslim world, the sooner the Al Qaeda flame will flicker and die out. Al Qaeda franchises, like the one in Yemen, that target the US homeland will still require the kind of surveillance and pursuit that led to the discovery of bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan. And intelligence cooperation with other governments will remain indispensable for that purpose. But Islamist groups that do not share bin Laden's fixation on attacking America and only target their own governments should be left to those governments to deal with.

The democratic uprisings unfurling across the Arab world demonstrate how thoroughly Al Qaeda has lost the hearts and minds of most young Muslims. They are risking their lives in peaceful protests for representative government, freedom of expression, and economic opportunity. They are the best antidote to bin Laden's madness. The more America is identified with their rebellions, the safer Americans will be.