http://www.georgesoros.com/excerpt-waronterror

George Soros on the War on Terror:

The 9/11 terrorist attack required a strong response; but the response chosen by the Bush administration carried the United States into a fantasy land created by a misrepresentation of reality. What is worse, people still do not recognize the phantasmagoric element in the War on Terror.

In my interpretation, the War on Terror is a false metaphor. It has been used by the Bush administration to further its own objectives, but those objectives are opposed to the principles of open society and harmful to the national interest.

In reality, terrorists are best dealt with by methods other than waging war. War, by its very nature, claims innocent victims. When it is waged against terrorists who keep themselves hidden, the chances of creating innocent victims are even greater. We find terrorism abhorrent because it kills or maims innocent people to further a political cause. The war on terror evokes a similar response from those who are its victims as the terrorist attacks on 9/11 evoked in us. As a consequence, there are many more people willing to risk their lives to attack Americans today than there were on September 11, 2001.

The fact that waging war on terror sounds so obvious and natural makes it all the more dangerous.

What makes the war on terror a false metaphor is that it is taken literally. Terror is an abstraction. One cannot wage war on an abstraction. We have the means to destroy any target as long as we can identify it, but terrorists rarely provide an identifiable target. When we declare war, we must find a target; but the target we choose is unlikely to be the right one.

We have killed more innocent civilians in Iraq than the terrorists killed on 9/11. In addition to killing, we have also humiliated and tortured many Iraqis. By creating innocent victims, we have advanced the terrorists’ cause. They can now depict us as the terrorists and enlist the support of their countrymen, just as President Bush has enlisted ours. We find this difficult to understand because we cannot envision ourselves as terrorists.

Yet, that is exactly how we appear to many Iraqis.

The Bush administration and its imitators—many foreign governments have been eager to follow its lead—insist that a state cannot commit acts of terror. That contention must be challenged.