Where is he going with this "legitimate governing authority" thing?
Toward a Taxonomy of Violence
When civilians are killed by fighters, gunmen, or guerillas, much of the commentary asserts that any assault on civilians is terror and any perpetrator, therefore, must be a terrorist. I find myself feeling very uncomfortable with such blanket statements, feeling as though many justifiable acts of war can be tarred by the same brush.
Indeed, it is upon this very lack of distinction between terror and war that many doves and hawks cleave from one another--all the while agreeing on a basic principle, that violence against civilians is wrong. The doves cry "Hiroshima and Dresden, Melos and Atlanta" and they are not wrong. Civilians were terrorized and did die, many more than in most terror attacks. The hawks scream in frustration, "those examples are different from terror; those are legitimate uses of force; blowing up a bus is illegitimate". And they are not wrong either. There is a type of violence which seems to cross beyond the pale. Terror can be--and must be--differentiated from war and it must be condemned.
Forgive the doves and the hawks, the ones who follow the logic of violence to a relativizing conclusion and the ones who know that some things are more wrong than others in ways that cannot be reduced to sums of bodies. They are not wrong, neither of them.
Another problem also arises, a contention guaranteed to increase heat without light and to confirm the worst prejudices of left and right considering liberty. Every argument about terrorism eventually descends into a disagreement about grievance, liberation, and, finally, revolution. The phrase that typically ends forward progress in all such discussions is "One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter". Cultures are indeed different. So are standards as they are applied. If liberty is a cause worth fighting and dying for, and it is, who decides how best to wage that struggle?
Forgive the left and the right, for, despite their differences on justice economic and political, despite their differences on responsibility state and individual, despite their differences on strategy moral and pragmatic, they share a common regard for liberty. They are not wrong, not about liberty, neither of them.
[Forgive your author for painting four portraits so quickly with such broad strokes, enlisting four common terms to stand for positions far more nuanced in the flesh.]
These two acrimonious issues, outlined briefly above, are, I find, at the root of much contemporary disagreement between honorable people of all political stripes.
There is a difference between terror and war, and there is a difference between fighting for terror and for freedom. But the test must be stronger than "I know it when I see it".
These questions have bothered me for several months. How do we define terror in such a way as to preserve reasonable strategies for just war? How do we maintain a moral position where genuine grievances can be fought? How do we separate legitimate uses of force from illegitimate?
A few weeks ago, running a training session for a Swedish government agency, I was struck as though by thunder. A question I always ask when analyzing the context of a conflict is "what are people doing?" One can go a long way by remembering that there is no action without an actor. There is no legitimate force without a legitimate authority to apply it.
The question then is "how do you know what is a legitimate authority?" Once you have that answer, you know who the terrorists are.
Inviting discussion on that question, and given an underlying accord on crucial points, I think some agreement between different positions can be reached, way back at first principles. Perhaps agreement will not extend to policy, nor do I expect such a prodigy, but agreeing upon some terms and their derivation may offer us some solutions to arguments currently too deep to bridge.