The Origins of the War on Terrorism Paradigm

• 作者: Alex Hobson
• 来源期刊: 国际关系与外交:英文版
• 学科: 政治法律
• 关键词: TERRORISM COUNTERTERRORISM WAR
• 年，卷（期）: 2020,（3）
• 页码范围: 120-125
• 页数: 6页
• 分类号: D81

摘要

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.