A Beef, If I May

I've noticed that lately it's become all chic and cool to use the phrase "War IS terrorism" as one of the favorite anti-war slogans currently circulating the left side of the aisle. It's everywhere - blogs, newspaper editorials, facebook profiles. College students such as myself, in their self-righteous naivete, are of course lapping it up like cats after milk.

"War" is a conflict between states or nations or people groups within a nation. Generally, "war" is waged by targeting the enemy's military capacities, the idea being to make it impossible for the enemy to continue fighting and thereby win the war. Terrorism, on the other hand, explicitly and exclusively targets civilians for the purpose of political coercion, to undermine a certain goverment's legitmacy, or to instill fear. Guerilla warfare is a sort of blend of the two, when soldiers square off against soldiers using unorthodox tactics a la Vietnam and the Viet Cong. But the key word there is, of course, "soldiers." Not "civilians."

Now, I know that we 20-something college students think we're geniuses and have the world figured out and all, but really, people, only an absolute idiot would embrace a stupid catchphrase like this. I hardly think we'd refer to past wars, such as World War I and II, as "terrorism" against Germany or any other enemy for that matter. There is a HUGE difference between 19 crazed Islamists crashing airliners full of innocent civilians into buildings and the American military engaging in street combat against armed - keyword, "armed" - insurgents or dropping bombs on insurgent hideouts.

The only thing anyone is proving by throwing around the phrase "War is terrorism" is that they have no ability to form a rational argument and absolutely no ability to think for themselves. That, and that they have absolutely no respect for our men and women in uniform. By asserting that war is terror, you label our soldiers terrorists.

I'm not going to try and make some case for why we should be over in Iraq or why the War on Terror is the best thing since sliced bread, because I honestly don't know whether I'm for or against the war in Iraq anymore. But what I am tired of, what I am definitely sick of and definitely against are the lemmings who mindlessly and without any thought whatsoever jump on the popular bandwagon shrieking "Bush lied, kids died;" "War is terrorism;" and compare Bush to Adolf Hitler. There are absolutely NO grounds for such an outlandish comparison, and those people know it.

Be anti-war if that's your kick. More power to you. Be pro-war if that's your kick. But whatever your position, show some maturity, some rational thought, and bring a well-reasoned argument to the table - not a slogan.